Obama And The Really Bad News Day

It’s been a really, really bad news day. A Grand Rapids firm just recalled all its chocolate covered peanuts. My local grocery store refuses to let me buy Dutch licorice because it’s been recalled. The papers tell me Madoff never bought a single stock in the last ten years.
Illinois Governor Quinn is asking the spanking new Senator Burris (that he just appointed) to resign already. The Stanford scam leaves highly paid New York Yankees unable to charge a meal or a room. Stocks go down as the Stimulus bill passes.
They’re talking about nationalizing our banks, and our new Attorney General calls us a nation of chickens. Just after former President Clinton assures us things would be much better if only he’d been in office the past eight years, his pet, the former first cat, dies.
Obama’s approval rating is still slipping. (Newsweek suggests that people expected him to ring in “the kingdom of God.”) It seems as if the only thing that could be much worse is if all the animals in the National Zoo developed diarrhea.
I’m not sure this is the way all of my liberal friends who were so excited about Obama’s candidacy last summer expected his first month to go. Not surprisingly, I guess, Congressional Democrats have suggested a solution to all of our problems: take Rush Limbaugh off the air.
I’m no fan of Limbaugh—haven’t listened to him in more than fifteen years. But somehow I doubt that the stock market will rise or banks begin lending if the airways are purged of all right wing commentary.
The problem goes just a bit deeper than that. It also greatly predates the past eight years. After all, Bush came into office at the peak of the Tech bust—and only eight months later the World Trade Center attack gave the economy another negative jolt.
Somehow, after these disasters—whose inception dated back at least a decade before Bush—he managed to bring the economy back to a decent performance level. If you can blame him for not foreseeing the housing bust, blame Clinton for not foreseeing the Tech bust.
There’s nothing in Clinton’s record to suggest his economic policies (the ones that finally collapsed last year) or his foreign policy (the one that led straight as an arrow to the 9/11 catastrophe) would have left us a whit better off than Bush’s. Clinton was just luckier than Bush while he was in office.
Disaster waited until just after Clinton was out of office. Bush was unfortunate enough to win a second term. Both men should have had more foresight. Both should have shown more political guts as well as insight into what was really happening in the economy and the world.
But they didn’t. Neither did their predecessors. George H.W. Bush told the world he just didn’t get “the vision thing” after the Soviet Union threw in its hand and dissolved. We really haven’t had a “vision thing” ever since Truman and Acheson defined our Cold War goals.
We held it together for over forty years (bi-partisan foreign policy—remember?) following one basically consistent aim, with one clear enemy to face. Our compass always faced in the same direction. Then, all of a sudden one day in November, 1989, that all went away.
Bipartisan foreign policy vanished. We were aimless. Economic policies that worked to bring down the Soviet Union now showed their weak points—that were threatening us as much as our enemies. Just who was our enemy now? What were our vital interests?
In a fractured world, all the familiar boundaries were gone. This was the confusing world that Clinton and Bush—and now Obama—inherited. No one—Republican or Democrat—has articulated any kind of a clear vision or mission for us to follow.
Along the way we’ve lost our Christian verities, we’ve given up our historic moral principles. We’ve replaced both the good and the bad in our old practices and principles with: none at all. The old ways have passed—and all we seem to have left are bad news days like today.
Trivial matters; serious matters. But none of it pulls us together or suggests a policy to follow. Maybe before we concentrate on getting the banks lending again or how to draw down our troops in Iraq, we should take some important moments and figure out where we want to go.
Maybe, more than a bailout, we need a Truman, an Acheson, even a Senator Vandenberg. Perhaps it would help if we sat down and figured out who or what was the real enemy—it would make it easier to define a policy for defending ourselves.
Now, all we can do is read the headlines—make do without chocolate covered peanuts—and hope someone will find our bearings for us, someone will give us an anchor that holds.