Obama’s Problems—and Ours
We inherited the worst situation since the Great Depression.
That is the reflexive response of President Obama to the troubles from which he has been unable to extract his country.
Even before the inauguration, he says, there were projections of a $1.2 trillion deficit for 2009. That deficit is not my deficit.
Presidents are usually blamed for deficits run while they are in office. But, in fact, presidents do not write budgets. Congress does. Presidents sign them. And the mammoth deficits of 2008 and 2009 came from budgets approved by a Congress run by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Did Sen. Barack Obama vote against those budgets?
As for the troubles he inherited, the president has a point. From day one, he has had to deal with two wars, a financial crisis and an economy careening into recession.
But Harry Truman inherited two great wars, an atom bomb and an ally, Joseph Stalin, about to dishonor his commitments and enslave half of Europe.
Richard Nixon came to office a minority president in the year of Tet, urban riots, campus uprisings, and the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy. He inherited a war in which 500,000 Americans were fighting, and came to a capital city dominated by a media that detested him and a Congress where, for the first time since Zachary Taylor, the opposition controlled both houses.
Ronald Reagan, too, inherited the worst recession since the Depression, a hollowed-out Army, a Soviet Empire that had overrun Vietnam and Southeast Asia and seized Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Grenada and Nicaragua, and a NATO shot through with Eurocommunism and pacifism.
Undaunted, Truman went on to a historic victory in 1948, and Nixon and Reagan went on to 49-state landslides. Presidents have a way of coming back, and America has legendary recuperative powers.
So no one should write this president or country off. But neither should anyone minimize the problems confronting us.
First is the debt crisis. Federal revenues are running at 16 percent of gross domestic product, spending at 27 percent. Wednesday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warned that a Greece-like situation, where creditors refuse to buy U.S. debt unless we raise interest rates to cover the rising risks of a U.S. default, cannot be ruled out.
Yet there is no credible plan to get these deficits under control when the economy starts to recover. And this week came news that consumer confidence has plunged to a 25-year low and housing starts have plummeted to the lowest level in 50 years.
Economists at the International Monetary Fund have suggested the United States raise the inflation rate to 4 percent or 6 percent to float out of the debt crisis. This is another way of saying the government should clandestinely steal the wealth of the American people to pay off its debts. Bernanke says that will not happen.
Second is the war situation. Where Gen. Tommy Franks' Army occupied Iraq in three weeks, Gen. Stanley McChrystal's will require a month to pacify Marjah, a town of 80,000 in a nation of 28 million.
U.S. casualties are rising in Afghanistan even as Iraq's elections, which are to lead to a U.S. withdrawal, appear to be moving that country back toward a Sunni-Shia and Arab-Kurd sectarian and civil war.
Meanwhile, pressure on the president is mounting for "crippling" sanctions on Iran that could lead to a third U.S. war against a nation with a population larger than Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
A third crisis is political: the perception that President Obama is a weak leader who cannot even impose his will on a Congress where Democrats had, until January, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a near 80-vote margin in the House.
Abroad, America is being defied by Japan on bases, by Israel on settlements, by China and Russia on U.N. sanctions, and by Venezuela and its compadres on everything. Dictatorships and democracies alike seem to be dismissive of American leadership.
While Democrats are despondent, facing almost certain defeat in the fall, Republicans seem united only on what they are against: Obama and Obamacare, cap-and-trade, civil trials for terrorists, socialism.
Perhaps that is enough for November.
But in 2012, the party of Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul will have to tell the country how it proposes to end these wars without losing them, how to bring manufacturing back and how to cut spending by $1 trillion a year, if taxes are off the table.
That Republicans failed under George W. Bush few Republicans today deny. That Obama and his White House are failing today few Democrats will privately deny.
The question raised by the successive failures is whether either party has a cure for the maladies that afflict America. Or are those maladies beyond the power of politics to heal?
Have we become a people incapable of accepting the sacrifices previous generations made, and of producing leaders with the vision and strength of character that our leaders of old possessed?
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"Have we become a people incapable of accepting the sacrifices previous generations made, and of producing leaders with the vision and strength of character that our leaders of old possessed?"
This is a question that may viewed from different perspectives.
Should middle class Americans sacrifice so that imperial wars and occupation bases be maintained? So that criminal investment bank bailouts can remain financially whole? So that countless dollars can be squandered on endless inane projects in education and environment? So that the biggest security apparatus the world has ever known can continue to not maintain order on the national borders? So that individual privacy can continue to be violated?
What exactly should ordinary Americans be sacrificing for? It seems to me that ordinary people could come up with a list of things to cut and end that would immediately end deficit spending and put the budget in order...without touching Social Security, Medicare, or Welfare.
Yes, we are "incapable of accepting the sacrifices previous generations made" because we have become a nation of selfish people. Our government and politicians just mirror what we are. We don't even want to sacrifice for our spouses, childern, and family. Community and country are not even on the horizon of our priorities. We only care for personal benefits and not what is good for the country. We have become so narcissistic we don't even know what is good for us. Yes, we are too stupid to know we are stupid.
In his last two columns PB has attacked both sides of the welfare/warfare state. With some reservations it could just as well be equated with the democratic/republican state. Hence, either side has much to lose with any kind of change. Is anyone prepared to bite the bullet and pay for decades of greed and incompetence? Or is it easier to pretend everything is okay and continue on with business as usual? Neither the entitlement recipients nor the benefactors of the military/industrial complex are willing to give up a dime. To cut either would generate so much anger within certain segments of society as to render the party responsible without future power. Yet the time approaches when reality will rear its ugly head. I hear it often repeated that this is the worst financial collapse since the great depression. What is not mentioned is that during the great depression the government wasn’t bankrupt and the country still had a manufacturing base. What a mess!
I think this may be less of an issue of the "democratic/republican" state than one of a "bourgeois/proletarian" state. There is a great and serious lack of willingness to acknowledge the need for production and future-orientation as prerequisite for consumption in order to begin balancing the social/economic equation, so to speak.
The last 90 years or so (since, roughly, the emergence of a widespread industrial economy and media-centered mass market in the USA) have seen an extreme shift in mental and emotional orientation on the part of most of the population, from developing resources and preserving them with an eye towards the future (through saving, investment and family authority) to immediate gratification and near-term individualism (with accompanying debt-buildup, "consumerism" and a near-solipsistic self-centeredness).
What is commonly referred to as "the middle class" in the USA is not a group of financially-independent intact families controlling their own resources; rather, it is increasingly a mass of dependent quasi-family groupings without resources of their own, heavily indebted economically, relying on advertising and television for their moral and emotional guidance (and neglecting their rational faculties almost entirely), and utterly in thrall to the political classes for many of the basics of life, even to the point of resources to teach their children or support their elderly. A "well-upholstered proletariat" might be the most accurate description.
That imbalance between the producing/bourgeois classes ("Makers") and the dependent/facilitator ("Takers" and "Fakers") is, in my opinion, the primary problem this society faces, and how it is resolved will do much to determine whether this culture we are marinated in survives.
As to that survival: I've seen odds I've liked better.
Great article from Pat Buchannan as usual, and very perceptive comments above by Mark, particularly describing the middle class in America as a "well-upholstered proletariat," mindlessly imagining they think for themselves, fatally subservient to comfort, and not even deserving to be called bourgeois.
Mark @ 4: The situation you describe as "[t]hat imbalance between the producing/bourgeois classes ('Makers') and the dependent/facilitator ('Takers' and 'Fakers')" is certainly rife with a tension that threatens the health of our body politic. Georgia's late Senator Herman Talmadge diagnosed it thusly about thirty-five years ago, "We have got more people actually riding the wagon now than we have pulling it. We have got more people receiving the benefits and largess of the Treasury than we have taxpayers in the country." Indeed, and it has only gotten worse. But what else can we expect from a system in which the leaders are chosen by their ability to appeal to bare majority of a group whose members need only have reached a certain chronological age and avoided a felony conviction (and that last part will change if the Democrats get their way)?
Mr. Allen at 6
Perhaps another way of stating it is that we are divided into those who postpone gratification and those who do not. The more civilized one become, the better one is able through the virtues one has acquired to postpone gratification. The less civilized one is as in "being a barbarian," the less one is capable in postponing gratification. Culture retrains the compulsions of the individual; the anti-culture celebrates and unleashes the compulsions of the individual.
Another way of putting it is that the vices and sins of envy and greed have been made into virtues. The institutionalized face of envy is the Democratic Party, transferring wealth based by leveraging the sin of envy, all under the color of law. The institutionalized face of greed is the Republican Party, transferring wealth to the corporations, which are themselves, spawns of the state animated by men greedy for wealth, acquired primarily by the manipulation of paper in various forms: fiat currency, bonds and stocks as well a government contracts, grants, loans and "insurances."
"Have we become a people incapable of accepting the sacrifices previous generations made, and of producing leaders with the vision and strength of character that our leaders of old possessed?"
Pat's too modest. America produced "leaders with the vision and strength of character that our leaders of old possessed" -- himself in 1992, 1996, and 2000; and Ron Paul in 1988 and 2008. That instead we got the Clintons, the Bushes, Dole, McCain and Obama is our shame and our nightmare.
Mr. Peters @ 7: I think we are dancing on the head of the same pin, which is to say I believe we are in substantial agreement about the general state of things. As a fallen sinner myself, though, I am loath to deride too harshly those who succumb to the undeniable appeal of "instant gratification." I've certainly been guilty of the occasional impulse buy. But I think we can rightly criticize those who cannot see beyond their appetites and are thus ruled by them. It puts me in mind of the multitude who was privileged to receive the bread and fish from Christ's beneficent hand after a whole day of his instruction in the ways of the kingdom and who sought him the next day, not for more instruction, but for more bread and fish. See John 6:25-26 (KJV). "And when they had found him on the other side of the sea, they said unto him, Rabbi, when camest thou hither? Jesus answered them and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled." To borrow from the insights of Monty Python's "Dennis," that is no basis for a system of government.
The problems Pat enumerates did not come overnight. They will not be solved overnight. We have suffered at least a generation of self-indulgent citizens (not all but a majority). It will take another generation of citizens who are willing to practice self-sacrifice and restraint to put things in order. That means electing candidates who will run on a platform that appeals to mature, responsible adults instead a platform that promises handouts, appeals to our childish impulses, and makes dependents of citizens. Without that, the country faces catastrophe.
#10. Mr. Smith, I agree entirely, but where is that governing majority of "mature, responsible adults"? When, as has been said on this site before, the Takers and Fakers outnumber the Makers.
I think the singular act of destroying every public high school in the United States would have major salutary effects.
@4 and 5: Except the historical bourgeoisie is just as ridiculous as the proletariat.
Long live the peasant and the aristocrat.
"The question raised by the successive failures is whether either party has a cure for the maladies that afflict America. Or are those maladies beyond the power of politics to heal?"
The maladies are beyond the power of politics, as we know it, to heal. The late Brent Bozell, after a lifetime of political commentary, concluded rightly that politics is more important than economics, that culture is more important than politics, and that a people's culture rests upon its theology. We have no faith, only a scattered remnant of a culture, a political cluster of demagogues hovering around the National Capitol, and an economic system based on a demographic flood of foreigners. Sad to say, but "Republicans seemingly united only on what they are against" has been the reality for as long as anyone reading this can remember.