The Hundred Days Have Passed

Talk about a slow news day. A seaman named Hicks is suing his ship’s owners because they refused to take any protective measures (hiring security, arming the crew) when sailing in pirate infested waters. They got hijacked. Three navy snipers finally freed their captain.
Chrysler, says CBS News, is headed for bankruptcy. The DOW is currently up by one hundred points. General Motors is sloughing off over a thousand dealers. Here in Michigan, 70mph winds blew a Chihuahua away (it was later found). Arlen Specter became a Democrat—after polls showed he had no chance to win a Republican primary in 2010.
WHO warns of a swine flu pandemic, the people at Moody warn that as many as one sixth of all mortgage holders will be foreclosed, new jobless claims dropped a few thousands, car bombs are going off in Iraq again. Pakistan is teetering.
President Obama holds a news conference to celebrate his hundredth day. (Do we have to remind pundits and historians that the term “hundred days” originally referred to Napoleon’s return to power in France—and ended starkly enough at Waterloo?)
Roosevelt’s “hundred days” got a lot of bills passed. Many of them did not survive court scrutiny, and none of them fixed or ended the Depression. Obama says he’s proud but not content. Former Clinton Secretary of Labor Reich opines that we will need another stimulus package next fall.
Banks that took billions in federal bailout funds go right on refusing to ameliorate mortgage rates for the same taxpayers that are keeping them in business. A prominent senator grouses that the banks “own the Senate”.
Could it be that Coolidge was on to something when he sat, did nothing, took naps, and let the nation totter on without governmental harassment? Of course, he did have the wit to refuse to run again only a year before it all went bust. How much better would things have been in October, 1929, if “Silent Cal” had been an activist president? Any?
There’s an old saying, “Man proposes; God disposes”. That’s as true for presidents as it is for anyone else. Could G. W. Bush have ever guessed that someone would crash the World Trade Center and the Pentagon all in one morning? Certainly altered his presidency.
If there is a major pandemic (that’s still an “if”), could Obama (or McCain) have guessed six months ago? Certainly had an impact on the issues brought up in last night’s press conference.
When Wilson took office and launched his reforms, could he have imagined that within eighteen months, the thousand year old structure of central Europe would be swept away and the great colonial powers we had known throughout our history would be left dead men walking?
You can’t know. All of the major headlines of today were unknown and even unthinkable when Senator Barack Obama announced he was running for president. You can look at almost any part of the globe and spot the possibility of something program shattering occurring.
What will happen when we are confronted with the reality of a Social Security Program that cannot meet its obligations? How will we pay for a desperately needed national health program—especially if political exigencies force us to keep the private insurers in play too?
I can’t see anything much changing in that case. For it to work, there has to be a single payer that can force lower costs. That’s off the table now as every health spokesman cow tows to the insurance industry in the most slavish tones. (Pity elections cost so much, isn’t it?)
I remember how enthusiastic I was in the mid-1960s when Lyndon Johnson was passing all of his Great Society legislation. I felt that government had all the answers—and the means to arrive at those answers.
We passed the laws, put vast new programs in place—and we still have millions dropping into poverty or left without health insurance of any kind. Something didn’t work. There’s a racial divide that still splits this nation from side to side.
It would be nice to be able to be optimistic about President Obama’s plans and proposals. He certainly means well, he plays the hope message well, and he comes across as thoughtful and likeable. (If you like cute and cuddly, he has great taste in dogs.)
Something doesn’t feel right. I keep remembering Wellington’s words at Waterloo (he won, incidentally): “The battle is joined; the event is in the hands of God.”
That cloud of dust Wellington spent the day anxiously watching—is that our reinforcements coming up, or is it the other guys?
That’s just one of the questions we cannot answer. Not after one hundred days. Let’s just hope that Obama realizes this too. We’re going to have a lot more “slow” news days until we can be sure.