Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You…

It concerns me every time I hear someone talk about “President Obama getting us out of this economic mess,” as if any one human being can get an entire country out of anything, or even wrap his/her head around the entirety of what the economic mess really is in its entirety, frankly. Understanding though I do that the calls for the necessity of government acting to avoid a complete bottoming out of the country’s economy, it is in this regard that I’m most worried about the behemoths that both Obama’s stimulus package and  budget wound up being. It’s not just that they increase dependence on government as the means by which people prosper, my treatment of David Brooks and moderatism yesterday should indicate that like him I’m a fan of the idea of  limited but energetic government — which is to say that I agree that government has some role, and not insignificant, to play in plugging the holes to this ever cracking dam. It’s more that government becomes housed in the trusted visage of Barack Obama and the cult of the presidency hits new soaring heights of misplaced hero worship.

There are a lot of problems with said cult in and of itself, but the one that worries me the most is that in this instance in particular it won’t work. The enormity of this economic crash is such that no president with any cadre of expert advisors really knows what’s going on down to the last detail and therefore doesn’t really what measures to apply. Efforts by Obama et al are educated shots in the dark and they have the best chances of succeeding if average-everyday Americans are convinced to see the problems as something they have a role in addressing. It will be some unknown combination of elements that are likely to turn things around; the work in which some motley crew of unnamed Americans engages that will couple with the work in which some motley crew of unnamed Chinese/Germans/Brits/whatever engages and that patchwork of different, not wholly understood activities will be what really pulls the global economy out of its hurtling nosedive. But as it stands right now, every is poised watching Obama and everything he does seems to have the exact opposite effect on the markets because it’s not the confidence of the President that really matters, it’s the confidence of average-everyday folks. Right now, they have no confidence because they feel helpless, and there’s no wondering why.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I get where people are at right now, losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month is terrifying stuff. I’m not suggesting some kind of cold-hearted bootstrapping theory here. But part of what truly made Obama a shade of cross-over candidate was not so much his tone and tenor, in my mind, but that in every speech he made, despite the hero worship he faced, he consistently placed an equal proportion of the onus back on the people who adored him.

“We are the change we’ve been waiting for!” Remember that line? It was true in the sense that a renewed sense of responsibility and engagement amongst American citizens themselves was the only thing that was ever going to fundamentally change the tenor of the country. But you don’t hear those lines anymore. Obama seems to be staring back at that desperate collective gaze and responding, “Everyone chill the fuck out, I got this!”

But he doesn’t, not even close.

I suppose on some level it’s understandable, the pressures of this White House must be utterly overwhelming. It makes a certain amount of sense that instilling confidence in the American people involves demonstrating to them that you’re a competent administration, something they’ve lacked over the past eight years. But what Americans have also lacked over the past eight years is the sense that they have anything at all to do with the functioning of their government or the direction of their country. In that regard, though it is still very early in its term, things haven’t changed all that much between Obama and W.

It’s gotten so bad that the current lead line to CNN’s politics page is, “Democrats to Obama: Hurry Up and Fix the Economy”. Oy vey, can we really blame the average American when their own elected representatives are striking the same pose? It’s not fair to say, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” but the pervasive willingness to couch confidence in passivity is bringe inducing. Did the country learn nothing over the past eight years?

So I shiver everytime I hear someone pin their hopes for the future on Obama and wonder, “What happens when that doesn’t work?”

Tagged as: citizenship, cult of presidency, engagement, fixing the economy, obama, passivity