“Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.”
That adage holds true for Barack Obama and likely for many presidents before him. Is it going to hold true for the American public in a couple of years?
We’ve had it with Republicans. They overreached, became increasingly unyielding and evermore narrow in terms of the interests to which they appealed, and they drove both our foreign and economic policies into the ditch in a stunning double display of ineptitude.
The utter irony of it all happens to be that the Republican candidate who had to go down with the ship was the only Republican on the national scene who for years decried the excesses of the right. Bush screwed McCain – and the nation – in 2000, and he screwed him again in 2008 by letting McCain take the fall for Bush’s incompetence.
The media cannot wait to gush about Obama. And the guy likely deserves it, as it is a feel-good story on many levels, and he does have very uplifting oratory.
It remains to be seen how the electoral college will shake out, but Obama should come in somewhere north of 340 of the 538 electoral votes out there in the arcane presidential electoral process. Likewise, he should enjoy a filibuster-proof senate majority while picking up another 20 to 30 congressional seats.
The nation, in short, is throwing the Democrats the car keys saying, “Here you go. Don’t screw it up.”
And that is the problem for the Democrats.
Expectations are incredibly high right now. Obama has been short on specifics, such that each interest group can project back onto him what it is they want to see accomplished. Anti-war folks have us out of the war quickly. Domestic mavens have a nationalized healthcare plan within a year. Shell-shocked 401K holders have the economy and their asset values coming back in a year to eighteen months, and homeowners owing more than their homes are worth have that resolved in about the same amount of time.
And it will not happen. The budget deficits will hamstring bold initiatives.
Only fools increase total tax intakes during a recession, so the breadth and depth of the tax retooling will be watered down, just as they were under Clinton. The idealist in this columnist has faith in the American public and its industrial resolve and remains confident the worst about the economy is past us. Yet the realist in me understands the credit markets are in a shambles, and it is going to take years for that to shake out and for confidence to be restored.
This will be Obama’s huge challenge. The problems this country faces right now run so deep that it is highly unlikely they can work themselves out in four years.
That is why Democrats should be careful what they wish for. The nation’s impatience will not understand or tolerate a prolonged continuation of these fundamental foreign policy and economic travails.
Likewise, if Obama undertakes some bold initiatives by deluding himself into thinking the gain in Democrat seats was an endorsement of his policies rather than a repudiation of the past, he could run the same risk Clinton did in 1992, which spawned the huge Republican house gains of 1994.
This nation likes divided government. The parties today have so narrowed that neither one accurately reflects the national sentiment.
As such we see a rise in registered independents, and a drop in party registrations. If Obama and company push too hard and have a few screw-ups akin to the Clinton healthcare plan, the honeymoon will quickly turn into an acrimonious divorce.
But move too cautiously, and the nation can also turn by wondering what difference it made by handing the keys over to the Democrats.
With high risk comes high reward. This could very well turn out to be a defining election in American History.
We turned to FDR in 1932 and moved the country leftward, and for years after we talked of “FDR Democrats.” We turned the country rightward under Reagan, and talked of “Reagan Republicans.”
Who will Obama be? Will he be the start of a new era, like Reagan and FDR, or will he be that final straw, presiding over a mess while great minds sit on the sidelines, developing policy initiatives that will become the next president’s ideas in 2012?
For the sake of my country, I hope Obama becomes the game changing president like FDR or Reagan as that will mean we managed to extricate ourselves from this hydra-headed horror show rather quickly.
Unfortunately the breadth and depth of our problems means that it is unlikely they will be resolved en masse in four years. This will increase the likelihood of Obama becoming a transitional president, with the next man or woman being the one we put up there with the FDRs and the Reagans.
Logically, we can point to FDR and argue that the economy was still a mess in 1936, when Democrats amassed greater majorities.
A marked difference between then and now, however, is in the velocity of commerce. We have acted far quicker to address this implosion and, consequentially, the nation does not have the same level of patience as it might have had back then. Likewise, the severity of this recession will likely (hopefully?) not come anywhere near that one.
Barack Obama: Here’s hoping he’s an FDR, but don’t be surprised if he’s something else entirely.
The forces at work are going to be more in control of him than he is going to be in control of them.
God help him.
As an outsider it’s interesting that for once America is ten years behind Great Britain in something. New Labour became Conservative in order to get elected after the public had grown sick of the Tories: you guys are experiencing the same thing. The same is true of Obama. Young, fresh, and messiah like; he could be your Blair…
If Obama is elected the most intriguing question is this: who will America vote for after his term(s) in office? Then you will see how far America has really come.
I would argue the dynamic you talk about is what happened with Bill Clinton in 1992. He has been derided by the far left as having been a republican, given he pushed through such things as Welfare Reform.
His guru at the time was Dick Morris who talked of “triangulation” which was to essentially seek to co-opt the center. It is not a new strategy. Nixon talked all the time of the Silent Majority, which happened to be folks that were not activists, not necessarily far left or right, and to whom one has to appeal in order to win.
You were ahead of us in that Thatcher came before Reagan and they were very compatible. In the states we compared Clinton and Blair.