Stimulus--The Die Is Cast

It looks as if Obama has his stimulus package pretty much the way he wants it. Fair enough—he did win the election and he should be given the chance to bail us all out the way he wants. If it works, he gets all the praise. If it fails, he takes the blame. It’s his ball; he defines the play.
WNBC reported yesterday that, in one of his speeches about the stimulus package, Obama came very close to saying that if it didn’t work within a year or so he might “be out of here”. The commentators speculated as to whether he really meant he’d resign if it failed. Everyone doubted it.
The head of our combined security forces agency is supposed to have remarked that the present banking crisis is the biggest threat to our national security today. More than Osama bin Laden, more than Iraq or Afghanistan or anything else.
He was fretting about us not being able to meet our commitments to allies in the War on Terror because of the collapsing economic infrastructure. That’s not surprising. It was obvious throughout the Cold War that the weapon the Soviets feared almost more than our thermonuclear weapons or our carriers was our dollar.
After all, they didn’t call us the “atomic bomb imperialists” or the “aircraft carrier imperialists”, they called us the “Wall Street Imperialists”. When my junior high texts referred, however obliquely, to our imperialism in Latin America, they called it “Dollar Diplomacy.”
It can even be said we won World War II with dollars, not guns. (Some of our weapons weren’t all that good.) We paid to keep Russian troops holding down over half of Hitler’s forces. We paid England to maintain armies bigger than ours in the field right through D-Day. We were only half the force that day. By and large, we spent money rather than blood.
(To give an idea of how much money we used, Churchill reports that a single Atlantic storm in 1944 wiped out so much American equipment that “had any other nation in the war lost so much material at one time, they would have been forced to sue for peace.” He reports we didn’t miss a step.)
We held on to Western Europe in the face of Communist ideology and Russian pressure by spreading dollars all over the place. The dollar has been our shield, our sword; it has bought us allies and fended off enemies for so long that we have forgotten how crucial it is to our security.
So that, too, is hanging on the stimulus package. Not just will J.C.Penney and Target survive, but will our entire society be left naked in a very cold wind? We are facing the question a lot of graying studs find themselves asking: Who will be my friend if my money is gone?
One reason I can imagine wanting to resign if this stimulus fails to do its job is that it won’t be very much fun to be president any more if everything goes to smash. For my entire life, an American President could move the entire planet with a single word.
What if our president should find himself in a situation in which he merits little more respect than is given to the leaders of Portugal, Turkey or other fallen great powers? That will be a day of truly drastic change in our lifestyle.
Let’s hope it works. He wrote the draft. If it sells he deserves the credit and the political royalties. If it doesn’t, … well, let’s not even think about that.