For the benefit of all the (two or three) people who may be wondering where I’ve been (or hoping that I’d stay away): After dealing with a few retirement-related matters, I spent the past few days a third of the way up Mount Rainier, one of the few places in the continental U.S. to which the radio, television and the Internet do not reach. At Paradise Inn, I’m pleased to say, there were few signs of economic malaise (more guests than I’ve seen on opening weekend since before 9/11) and none of Global Warming. Heavy snow fell for a couple of days before the Inn’s opening last Friday. Then came a nice, sunny weekend, a somewhat less sunny Monday (rain in the evening – boo!), and snow again on Tuesday (huzzah!). All in all, both the snowpack and the weather were ideal for my kind of leisurely hiking (which more athletic types might describe as strolling in snowshoes).
The only newspaper available – and therefore the only source of news of the outside world – is the Tacoma News-Tribune, whose idea of a scoop is, to borrow a line once applied to another provincial publication, “Pierce County dog chases Pierce County cat over Pierce County fence.” Hence, I spent several happy days without being reminded of our country’s ongoing transformation from federal republic to banana democracy.
I did devote a few moments’ reflection to the fact that John Edwards was inadvertently right: There are two Americas, if not quite in the sense that he meant.
What convinces me of the reality of the national bifurcation is the commentary on Barack Obama’s first few months in office (just short of four de jure, about six de facto, since the outgoing Administration, in contrast to its predecessor, made no trouble for the incoming one). In one America are those who think that the new President has already achieved greatness, that he has inspired Americans to undertake a vast, beneficent transformation of our way of life. The praise that emanated from the media when his term of office reached its one hundredth day surpassed anything ever said about any other President at so early a point and was notably devoid of restraint and reserve.
In the other America, Barack Obama is little more than a buffoon, noteworthy for blunders large (the inept and still largely incomplete filling of executive positions) and small (Gordon Brown’s unplayable DVD’s, “Scare Force One”, the bow to a minor Arab despot). As for actual accomplishments, American interests have suffered almost unbroken reverses abroad: Pakistan is in parlous condition; the Afghan campaign is making no visible progress (as shown by the abrupt decision to “fire the manager”); Russia, ignoring its pledges, has continued and expanded its partial occupation of Georgia; it is also displacing American influence in central Asia; Iran and North Korea are more truculent than ever and have imprisoned U.S. citizens; the President’s allies in Congress have sparked a trade war with Mexico; Venezuela’s dictator has seized American property without compensation. Our biggest foreign policy success since January 20th is the defeat of four Somali pirates.
At home, no one doubts that the President inherited a dire economic situation. To date he has made it more dire. This year’s federal budget deficit will exceed the total deficit of all the years of the Bush Administration during which “spendthrift” Republicans controlled Congress. In return, we have an unemployment rate as high as what Obamaconomists said it would be if Congress did not adopt their policies. Has ARRA (pronounced “error”) created or saved even one nongovernment job? The evidence in its favor is pretty thin.
According to polls, about a third of the electorate strongly approves of President Obama’s performance, and a third strongly disapproves. Among the rest, mild approval outnumbers mild disapproval. The views of two of these thirds make sense: the strong disapprovers, because the Administration’s record so far is dismal, the middle group, because it’s very early to form definitive judgments.
The remaining third, the most heavily represented among mainstream columnists and commentators, obviously evaluates performance on a different basis from the rest of us. The President can satisfy it merely by Being Barack Obama. He is like a rock star whose fans scream jubilantly as soon as he appears on stage and keep up such a racket that no one can hear his music.
How long will this infatuation last? Particularly if the next several months are as full of setbacks as the first few? Some of the media have noticed that the President is prone to homeopathic gestures (proposing “cuts” – most just shifts from one line item to another – of half a percent from a federal budget nearly twice as large as last year’s), ill-planned gestures (announcing the shutdown of the Guantanamo Bay prison without any idea of what to do with the terrorists held there), broken campaign promises, subservience to labor union interests, sloppy personnel decisions (Tim Geithner through Charles Freeman and a host in between), threats against the private sector, and mean-spiritedness toward his political opponents. Those characteristics are not harbingers of a successful Presidency. I wouldn’t have thought them compatible with a popular one either. It may be, though, that I don’t understand the Other America.
Now that I’m back in touch with events, I see that things didn’t go too badly in my absence. The first news items that I noticed were the slaughter of the California tax-hike referenda (even Nancy Pelosi’s district voted “no”), the Senate’s refusal to approve funds for closing Gitmo, and the Indiana’s treasurer’s decision to refrain from future purchases of the bonds of banks and auto makers that have taken TARP money (the Obama Administration’s strong-arming of Chrysler’s creditors having cost the state nearly $6 million).
Not every event was so heartening. There was, for instance, the President’s decision to destroy the domestic automobile industry through preposterous CAFE standards. I’ll be sorry to see American cars go the way of the Yugo, though their demise will be a great boon to our friends in Canada and Mexico. I foresee lots of dealerships springing up in Vancouver, Windsor, Mexicali, Matamoros, etc. College students will earn spending money driving cars from the sellers’ lots to American buyers’ homes. Who knows? Perhaps this is what Mexico needs to displace the drug trade from its economic niche.