The coverage of the Tax Day Protests of 2009 proved depressingly emotional and self-serving, either inappropriately supportive or embarrassingly contemptuous. The conservative media unabashedly cheered and shilled for the "Tea Parties," while, on the other end of the ideological spectrum, the mainstream media lambasted the grassroots restlessness with unrestrained glee. Far too much of the coverage from both camps was silly, exaggerated, disingenuous, hostile, puerile, and juvenile.

On days like Wednesday, reasonable people say a prayer of thanksgiving for C-SPAN.

Ignore when possible; lampoon when not.

The loudest voices in opposition to the so-called Tea Party protests bristled at the suggestion that real Americans were driving the movement. Skeptics asserted that the protesters were dupes of the Republican Party, corporate interests, and crazy right-wing fat cats like Richard Mellon Scaife.

Reacting to the potential interpretation that the numerous rallies across the country reflected "grassroots" unhappiness, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi cleverly characterized the protests as merely an "Astroturf" movement. The Speaker suggested that the wealthiest people in America had financed a synthetic spectacle designed to preserve tax cuts for the rich rather than tax fairness for the great middle class.

If these were real people out in the streets, they hailed from lower intellectual orders. "This is the Ron Paul crowd," Howard Fineman said. "This is about racism straight-up," said Janeane Garofalo, cable news analyst; this is all about rednecks wanting to hang a black president. She went on to explain that conservatives have different brain structures incapable of processing reasoned argument.

"The numbers were disappointing." If artfully compared with the anti-war protests of 2002-03, some of April 15th numbers seemed insignificant. Talking heads reminded us regularly that hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of New York, San Francisco, and Seattle in opposition to the "war for oil." For obvious reasons, metropolitan areas like NYC proved much more capable of producing bigger waves of humanity in aid of left-wing political activity. On the other hand, I can offer anecdotal evidence that crowds in a place like my hometown, Waco, Texas, proved much more impressive last week than they were during the anemic protests running up to the war in Iraq.

Notwithstanding, those two similar frustrated cries of collective helplessness provide a constructive comparison. In both cases, protesters emphasized deep displeasure and emotional sloganeering over reasoned and systematic critiques of a crossroads moment.

True Weakness of the Tea Party Movement.

The most reasonable and trenchant criticism of the Tax Day Protests of 2009 concentrated on the sprawling uncertainty and disunity of the message. Even from the point of view of a small-government conservative sympathetic to the American tradition of patriotic resistance, I could never quite absorb the true purpose of the protest. Was it taxes? And was that too much taxation or too little? Government spending? the Leviathan? the loss of individual liberty?

They were mad as hell--but could not quite put their finger on why. Or who to blame. George Bush? Barack Obama? Nancy Pelosi? Barney Frank and Chris Dodd? Wall Street? the rich? the elite? the Fed?

I am NOT one who doubts that the sentiments were genuine or grassroots. The protesters were sincere, but mostly they were dazed and confused. The lack of direction and coherency proved frustrating and hard to follow. The unhappy demonstrators did not know what to do, but this was something. If the protests had been more like they were initially described in the mainstream media (the product of a vast right-wing conspiracy), the demonstrations might have been more satisfying. The unruly events needed some genius behind the scenes to orchestrate a unifying theme.

For that reason, the self-titled Tea Party analogy misses the mark historically.

The historic Boston Tea Party (Dec. 1773) occurred at a point much closer to the culmination of the Imperial Crisis, which was already eight years in the making. The Patriot cause in 1773 was actually quite mature and ready to break across the "national" scene as a sophisticated colony-wide movement. The illegal attack on private property in Boston Harbor provoked the British government into the Intolerable Acts and led to the First Continental Congress and the short ascent to full-blown Revolution.

If anything, this modern Tea Party movement is more like the spontaneous, unfocused, and out-of-control reaction in Boston (and other places) to the Stamp Act, which proved the first act in the three-part, decade-long Imperial Crisis. The uncontrolled mayhem in 1765 gave rise to the Sons of Liberty and leaders like Sam Adams and John Hancock to guide and regulate the unrestrained and unnerving expression of popular anger (and violence).

Our current headless massive unease needs a Sam Adams to bring some order and clarity to all this emotion. More importantly, the protest needs a John Adams and a Thomas Jefferson with the skills to catalog and articulate the problems, outline a set of principles, and propose a plan going forward.

What Next?

It is entirely possible that the Tax Day Protests of 2009 will fade away quickly into the recesses of our collective memory--never to be heard from again in a serious way. On the other hand, and here is where the opponents underestimate the potential of this angst, there are very serious elements of concern. The problem of sustainability is not going away. Five and ten years from now the problems of debt and savings and unmanageable liabilities will likely be more dire than today.

If the Tea Party is indeed a significant movement, it is currently in an inchoate stage. We are very early in the game. If our colonial history is a guide, it is UNlikely that our current president will even be around when the full brunt of the frustration finally boils over into a politically employable form.

But that is NOT to say such an eventuality falls beyond the realm of possibility.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers.

UPDATE2: reading these thoughtful and insightful comments (the best set I have ever read on one of my posts) gives me hope about the future of this movement. I heartily recommend the comment thread to all readers.
A few weeks ago I had my history class read Federalist No. 57 by Publius (James Madison, February 19, 1788). In this essay Madison defends the proposed Constitution on the point of the House of Representatives. Specifically, he asserts that the House cannot become tyrannical for the following reasons:

The House members will be

(1) elected by the voters; (2) chosen by fellow-citizens and so can be presumed to be good men; (3) grateful to the voters; (4) wanting to keep the favor of the voters; (5) subject to frequent election; (6) affected themselves by all laws passed; and (7) this system for a House of Representatives is similar to that already in effect in various states.

Since Senators now are elected directly by the voters, I think his argument also may be applied to the Senate.

It seems to me that Madison is assuming first, clear-eyed informed voters, and second, elections with a meaningful possibility of turning out incumbants. I fear that neither assumption remains valid.

First, putting aside the expansion of suffrage in the subsequent history of our nation, it seems to me self-evident that most voters are neither clear-eyed nor informed. Many voters cannot name their Federal Represenative or Senators, and most have only a hazy notion of the voting record of their Congressional delegation. And it is a sad fact that many voters cannot penetrate the cloud of manipulative rhetoric and images put forth at election-time.

It could be argued that the above facts are evidence only of the need for better education of citizens, not of a need to make a structural change through Constitutional Amendment. I concur that a better educated citizenry is needed. And I also concur with the Founders that Liberty is protected not only by the virtue of the citizenry, but also by structures designed to prevent tyranny. It seems to me that we need not only better education, but also a structural change to limit the terms served by members of Congress.

Second, elections today are rarely a serious contest if the incumbant seeks reelecton. Madison did nor forsee the growth in the power of incumbancy. A nation in which Representative Murtha wins reelection needs to reexamine its governing structure. Elections occur every two years for the House members, and every six years for members of the Senate, but elections have ceased to be fearful encounters with the will of the people for incumbants. The advantages of money, support from interest groups, name recognition, and seniority advantages in both chambers, mean that there usually is a small chance an incumbant will be turned out.

A permanant governing class is created by our present system. The Founders had a name for a permanent governing class--aristocrats. And aristocracy is what a republic was created to avoid.

Term limits. The structural answer to our current aristocracy.

I suggest 12 years for Representatives, and 24 for Senators, but I am open to suggestions.
In the quiet morning; there was much despair.
And in the hours that followed no one could repair:
That poor girl...rolled in on a sea of disaster;
rolled out on a mainline rail


The reign of John Maynard Keynes began with a titanic financial crash. Will the Keynesian Era conclude with another cataclysmic collision? Are we right now in the excruciatingly painful throes of passing from one economic epoch to the next?

A More Conventional History of the New Deal and the Great Depression.

From the very first moment I heard Amity Shlaes's provocative Forgotten Man thesis, I reacted to her revisionist assertion with skepticism and trepidation. I compliment her for ingeniously seizing upon an incontrovertible fact of American history: the New Deal failed to generate prosperity and, for eight long years, proved altogether incapable of lifting the United States out of the Great Depression. From that irrefutable, under-appreciated, and timely assertion, however, I fear that Shlaes went on to build a bridge too far, arguing that the New Deal actually exacerbated the Great Depression.

Not surprisingly, The Forgotten Man has set off a firestorm of accusations and recriminations between politicians, talking heads, and pundits. Perhaps most problematic, too much of the chatter seems ignorant of the conventional narrative of the New Deal. Submitted below is an ultra concise, straightforward, and hopefully noncontroversial summary of the events in question, followed by a few terse conclusions, several nagging questions, and a rant.

The Three Phases of the New Deal.

Franklin Roosevelt took office in March of 1933 in the midst of a horrific international financial crisis, which had been gaining steam since the fall of 1929. Although the national economy had showed intermittent signs of hope along the way, the winter of 1932-33 brought a culmination and fateful crossroads to the long downturn: an impending collapse of the banking system.

THE FIRST NEW DEAL. In the face of looming chaos and the potential unraveling of American society, Roosevelt and his "brain trust" acted with jarring alacrity and authority to seize control of the banking, industrial, and agricultural sectors of the American economy. Increasingly certain that the notion of the competitive marketplace had outlived its utility (and was, in fact, the cause of the massive crisis), the Roosevelt administration empowered the government to plan and coordinate the national economy.

During the storied first "Hundred Days" of the Roosevelt presidency, a special session of Congress gleefully agreed to a long list of administration proposals, beginning with emergency banking legislation. As an afterthought, they then added the Glass-Steagall Act, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the SEC. Along with the rescue and reform of the financial sector, the President urged Congress to establish myriad "alphabet soup" agencies (NRA, PWA, FERA, AAA, TVA, etc.)--granting the New Dealers unprecedented authority to reshape the traditional relationship between government and business.

How utterly epochal was this moment? One commentator observed that this brief period read like the first chapter of Genesis ("and FDR created"), allowing us to imagine the new president moving across the great void and virtually speaking modern government into existence.

How well did it work?

Undeniably, Roosevelt's swift action after the bleak winter of chaos and confusion saved the banking system and staved off national ruin. Moreover, the regulatory regime constructed to manage the financial sector paid off handsomely over the next seventy-odd years--and continues to insulate us in important ways, even today, from a catastrophe strictly analogous to the 1930s.

On the other hand, the administration's expressed goals of dictating national standards for industrial output, prices, and working conditions proved less effective than originally advertised in terms of revitalizing the devastated economy. The initiative to impose production quotas on the agricultural sector raised commodity prices, but it also established the precedent of paying farmers not to farm, displaced legions of tenant families, and oversaw the intentional destruction of millions of edible farm animals during a moment of widespread hunger. And while the public works projects temporarily employed millions of workers, unemployment after two years of the Roosevelt administration remained astronomically high: just over 20 percent.

THE SECOND NEW DEAL. Although disappointed with his initial failure to hoist the economy from the depths of the Depression, FDR could console himself with his unparalleled popularity evidenced by the unprecedented reaffirmation of his party in the midterm elections of 1934. However, even in the midst of that electoral triumph, continuing hardship and charismatic potential rivals forced him to keep a wary eye to his political left.

What we now call the "Second New Deal" commenced in 1935, shifting administration priorities away from the frustratingly intractable business side of the recovery to a new emphasis on so-called economic security for American workers. Influenced by a diverse collection of voices (Keynes among them) acting independently but coalescing around a new economic spirit of the age, the Roosevelt administration shifted focus to the demand side of the economy. The new imperative: produce purchasing power among consumers by redistributing wealth and raising real wages.

Once again, compliant Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill proved happily responsive to the agenda of the president whom they now called the "Champ." Propitiating the populist vexation with the class of wealthy Americans FDR would soon be calling "economic royalists," the 74th Congress levied a confiscatory tax on large fortunes and corporate profits (the Revenue Act of 1935). The New Dealers also created the Rural Electrification Agency to bring electric power to isolated farm families, struck a decisive blow for unionization, collective bargaining, and higher wages with the Wagner Act, and finally found the right recipe for sustainable work relief (the Works Progress Administration).

Of course, the centerpiece of the Second New Deal, and the most concrete element of the Roosevelt legacy, was the Social Security Act of 1935, which created a massive national safety net for ordinary citizens and marked the beginning of the so-called American welfare state.

How successful was the Second New Deal?

In terms of solving the Great Depression, the new emphasis achieved modest success in temporarily blunting unemployment. The jobless rate dipped to 14 percent in 1936. However, as Roosevelt attempted to reduce the federal deficit by spending less on farm subsidies and work relief, just as the Social Security program introduced a payroll tax on most workers, the economy slowed dramatically and unemployment jumped back up to 20 percent by the end of 1937.

Significant to this narrative, the 1936 publication of John Maynard Keynes's revolutionary monograph challenged a basic economic principle of the day and influenced the New Dealers. Keynes postulated that government should intercept a downturn in the business cycle by injecting money into the economy and igniting and multiplying a "natural" recovery. The emerging theory encouraged the Roosevelt administration to push for more spending to combat the "slump of 1937," allocating billions to new work projects and renewed farm relief. After the intervention, the economy recovered relatively in 1938 to its 1936 levels.

"Keynesian economics" was not a revelation to Roosevelt in 1937; the British scholar had been a long-distance confidant of the administration almost from the beginning. Nevertheless, after two failed attempts at restructuring the economy, combined with Keynes's timely assertion of a systematic economic theology in 1936, the events of 1937 marked a dramatic tipping point for the administration. The slump and recovery hammered home an important lesson for Roosevelt and his advisers: in times of great distress, massive appropriation of federal dollars would stimulate the economy. After years of pragmatic experimentation with all manner of solutions, 1938 marks the moment when we can confidently characterize Roosevelt as "Keynesian."

On a deeper level, the Second New Deal also transformed American political culture. Our view of fair working conditions changed dramatically during the mid-1930s. Modern rules regarding child labor, the necessity of a minimum wage, and the forty-hour workweek are all products of the Roosevelt approach. More broadly, and perhaps most significantly, the Social Security Act institutionalized the notion that the government maintains ultimate responsibility for the welfare and economic security of individual citizens.

THE unofficial THIRD ACT OF THE NEW DEAL.

After four years of nearly unchecked executive power and his triumphant reelection in 1936, the "Champ" absorbed several debilitating blows during his second term. In addition to the inconvenient economic downturn in 1937, FDR audaciously challenged the Supreme Court. He came away with a split decision, losing the notorious "court-packing" fight in Congress--but succeeding in as much as he intimidated the surviving jurists just enough to save his Second New Deal from judicial nullification. More detrimental politically, FDR waged an unsuccessful campaign to cleanse his own ranks of non-believers. Frustrated with a less responsive 75th Congress, the President publicly entreated loyal Democrats to root out conservative obstructionists within the party, most of whom hailed from the South, and replace them with solution-oriented liberals. The midterm elections of 1938 failed to "purge" the renegade Democrats. The era of Roosevelt invincibility was over, and a long-running "post-1938" political impasse commenced.

With a loose coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans in Congress now thwarting the domestic initiatives of the White House, and the President increasingly intent on preparing the nation for the impending world war, the New Deal receded gradually from center stage. During the 1930s, the administration had happily exploited popular revulsion with the business community. During this third phase of the Roosevelt presidency, the "class warfare" rhetoric and other radical elements of the intoxicating early days of New Dealism gave way to a more mature relationship with the private sector. In essence, the war years necessitated a rapprochement between the federal government and big business.

Rehabilitated, chastened, and unleashed, American business thrilled a newly fascinated and supportive nation with stunning achievements in wartime manufacturing, full employment, and a skyrocketing GDP. Massive expenditures of federal funds resurrected traditional working sectors and created entirely new industrial communities built around war production. At the stubborn insistence of the administration, business finally submitted to the notion of unionization as a fait accompli and reluctantly accepted organized labor as a third partner in the retooled economy. Magically, business, labor, and government all prospered in this symbiotic commensalism as the nation came together to gird itself for a righteous war for freedom.

The government became a monster--albeit a generally benevolent one. The budget more than quintupled between 1940 and 1943 and continued to rise through 1945. Meanwhile, business and labor also emerged as popularly beloved institutions of American capitalism, as GDP more than doubled during the war and stood poised to ascend at an ever more astounding rate once the conflagration ceased. As the fight overseas raged on, even in the midst of rationing and scarcity, American workers and families enjoyed a level of prosperity unknown for more than a decade. Somewhere in the midst of the fog of war, the Great Depression evaporated into the atmosphere never to be heard from again.

What happened? What can we deduce from this set of facts?

As an experiment in Keynesian economics, it is currently popular to assert that the War experience proved that massive government spending defeated the Great Depression. While true on its face, that facile conclusion, especially when applied to our present situation, merely leads to more difficult questions.

How colossal would the massive stimulus actually need to be to redirect our failing economy? Crafting a current measure proportional to our wartime spending might require as much as five trillion dollars in stimulative appropriations ($5,000,000,000,000)--or one-third of our current GDP. Based on this calculation, many intellectuals castigate the most recent 800-billion-dollar stimulus as annoyingly insignificant.

Are you ready for a second stimulus? And a third? How about a fourth?

What brand of national emergency would precipitate such extraordinarily gargantuan intervention?

And, by the way, what role should defense spending play in this "inducement to investment"?

Even more troublesome, the contemporary full-blown Keynesian prescription also assumes that current conditions are relatively similar to the 1940s. That is, once we run up massive deficits to leverage our way into a spending-driven cycle of prosperity, we are well-positioned to expand ourselves back into the black (or close to it) as we did during the post-war decades. That is no modest assumption.

To be fair, our simplistic popular association that imagines Keynesian principles as a license to achieve permanent prosperity through perpetual government stimulus and massive public debts and deficits breaks faith with Keynes's General Theory. Keynes, who died in 1946, never posited that government could guarantee unlimited abundance. However, the fundamental flaw with the New Deal-slash-Keynesian hybrid lies with the misleading assurance that government can ensure life without misfortune. Keynes himself made no such promise.

Perpetual deficits and an out-sized national debt strikes me as an unsustainable proposition. Doesn't our profligate spending and inability to balance our budgets become an intractable problem at some juncture? Doesn't Mr. Keynes's magic carpet ride actually have to end someday?

Where are we now? The Rant:

Part of me wonders whether a Great Crash and a Second Great Depression is not, perversely, the only ultimate solution to our massive addiction to seventy years of unrestrained government intervention in the economy. I worry that our seventy-year Keynesian interlude must come to a close at some point in the near future regardless of what we do here.

For me, the question is hard crash or soft crash. My most sanguine hope is for a soft crash-landing in which we walk away chastened and repentant. Of course, that scenario stretches the limits of human nature. A more likely outcome is that we buy ourselves some extra time to further ignore our new reality and blithely go on with business as usual until we come to the next emergency. Why? We are addicted to stimulus. As a body politic, we have no tolerance for anything less than perennial expansion.

I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson's portentous observation regarding slavery during the Missouri Crisis of 1820:

"We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."

Will it take a cataclysm on the scale of our enormously destructive Civil War to break our economic addiction?

The Keynesian episode reads alarmingly like a classic fable. Man is presented with a miraculous tool for good, if used in moderation. Instead of using the great gift sparingly, man happily abuses the new device until it is exhausted. If the fable has a happy ending, some benevolent force comes and puts the mechanism back in the box and instructs man that he will need to persevere without the gift. If the fable has a harder less therapeutic conclusion, then the largesse becomes the primary implement for destruction of man at his own hands.

End of Rant.

One last thought (just in case the world doesn't end):

As for the assertion that we are all socialists now, the history of the New Deal offers us important lessons in our current time of troubles. New Deal regulation arrived as a needed corrective to the barely regulated 1920s. Large elements of the regulatory apparatus proved constructive, and remnants of that regime survive as a lasting and positive legacy in the modern era. Moreover, this model for reform will prove instructive as we emerge from an extended period of deregulation.

On the other hand, the general attempts at central planning during the New Deal failed. While we make a huge mistake imbuing market forces with mystical omnipotence to solve all our human problems, we also err when we delude ourselves into believing the market is optional. The reality of the marketplace is relentless, omnipresent, and presents us with myriad contingencies impossible to anticipate.

Finally, it is worth noting that a more mature, less invasive, more business-friendly version of the New Deal proved better equipped at achieving a return to prosperity. In terms of recovery, Roosevelt accomplished more after he lost his ability to dictate policy to Congress and found himself forced to compromise the most radical tenets of the early Popular Front ethos. Class warfare and the tendency to demonize business proved politically expedient early on, but ultimate success on the macro level necessitated a more focused and less revolutionary approach.

Our current president might do well to note that oftentimes less is more.
Yesterday's word in my "Calendar of Forgotten English" was Houstonize, defined in an older dictionary as To beat up a Congressman. In allusion to a beating administered by Sam Houston to Representative William Stanberry April 13, 1832. Ahhh, the good old days.

I am not advocating physical violence on members of Congress, but I do think many of them need to take an electoral beating. We need to put the fear of the people into them. And nothing scares a politician more than the thought that he or she might be forced to make an honest living in the private sector.

Standing sqare in the middle of the current financial mess, and responsible in large part for it, are Representative Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd. If your retirement account has been going down and down and down, they are in large part responsible. They helped create the mortage mess by pressuring lenders to extend loans to folks who did not qualify, and, they blocked efforts to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The founders assumed that the House of Representatives would be responsive to the judgment of the voters, having to face them every two years. While senators were originally selected by the states, the Founders assumed that the States would not return to office those who had hurt the state interests. What the writers of the Constitution did not foresee was the power of incumbancy as it would develop.

Today, incumbants have huge advantages which keep them from being punished at the polls, which insulate them from the consequences of their actions. Not least of the advantages of incumbancy is the ability to pull Federal dollars into the district or state representated. Then, when election time rolls around, an incumbant can point to the pork delivered, and argue that his or her seniority would allow them to pull in more in the years ahead than a novice replacement. This fact is why the so-called Stimulus Bill should more properly be known as the Congressional Rescue Action Program (or CRAP for short). I think Mike Huckabee was the first to coin this acronymn.

And voters allow them to get away with it. If Frank and Dodd, and others now in Congress such as Rangel, are not Houstonized the next time they are up for reelection, then American voters will deserve what they get.

01/03: New Deal 3.0

During the transition, I entertained a hopeful hypothesis that Barack Obama was a sheep in wolf's clothing, a center-left statesman so perceptive, patriotic, and post-partisan that he might well govern center-right. Okay--I was wrong in a big way. Most of you were right. Implausible as it might seem to me, Sean Hannity had it right ("the radicals have taken over...").

As it turns out, Barack Obama really is a "liberal" in the tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who worked so assiduously during the 1930s to give the term "liberalism" its modern political meaning: an ideology that favors a powerful and active state committed to social justice and public welfare. In that sense, we now understand that this president is the most committed liberal to sit in the Oval Office since Lyndon Johnson, a Roosevelt acolyte, who attempted to complete the project of transforming the United States into a European-style welfare state during the 1960s.

What is at stake? Think on this: the national transfiguration from limited constitutional governance envisioned during the founding to the modern leviathan we encounter today boils down to two very brief periods in our 225-plus year history.

1933-1937. The New Deal, while failing to solve the immediate economic crisis that fueled its revolutionary ethos, succeeded in forever instilling a popular expectation of government as guarantor of public welfare and individual prosperity. Franklin Roosevelt expertly recast the conception of individual liberty, forever linking freedom to insulation from personal misfortune and a government-given right to "a healthy peacetime life" for its citizens.

1965-1967. The Great Society, coming three decades later, proved wildly unsuccessful at defeating poverty and a litany of other targeted ills that beset humankind in general and our national community in particular. No matter, Lyndon Johnson's New Deal 2.0 further insinuated the virus of personal dependence on the state into the American body politic.

What do those two periods have in common? A powerful liberal president bent on radically remaking the American system paired with a happily compliant overwhelming majority in Congress. One emerged during a period of economic crisis, one during a period of great prosperity, but both presidents understood perfectly the small window of opportunity for a massive re-imagining of the American creed.

Now, some forty-odd years later, we are most likely on the brink of the next (perhaps final) phase of the great transformation of American society. The President understands that he is in the midst of a moment ripe for completing the massive project began so many decades ago. This window won't last for long, but the President and his rubber-stamp Congress don't need all that much time.

What is at stake? Forgive the analogy, but being a conservative is a lot like the old anti-terrorism conundrum. The haunting reality of your mission is that you must defeat your opponent everyday to win, while your opponent only needs to beat you once to totally defeat you.

An Aside: how bad is it really? When Paul Krugman and Robert Reich are beside themselves with joy over the agenda of this administration, prudence, indeed, will dictate that we ready ourselves for a ferocious political battle to preserve the last vestiges of our uniquely American experiment in liberty.

We live in interesting times.

22/02: TCCTA, 2009

I am back from one of my favorite annual events: the 2009 meeting of the Texas Community College Teachers Association.

The history section featured an outstanding slate of eminent scholars: Eric Foner, David Goldfield, Brian Delay, and H.W. Brands. I hope to offer comment at some point on the provocative presentations offered by those luminaries.

However, as is my wont, I could not help myself from sneaking into the government section to hear one of my favorites: Harvard's Kennedy School of Government Professor of Political Science, Tom Patterson, who, once again, lived up to my incredibly high expectations regarding his cogent and dispassionate analysis of presidential politics.

"Can Obama Succeed in an Era of Impatience?"

Patterson: Barack Obama is obviously an exceptional political talent, but, more importantly, he is a natural executive, which, ironically, turns out to be a fairly rare gift among recent presidents (think Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton).

Evidence?

1. Obama ran a superior presidential campaign (the very best ever, in Patterson's view--and I concur). Perhaps most astounding, he did it with presumably second-tier talent. Of course, his staffers are NOW the first-tier players--but we should NOT forget that the overwhelming favorite in the race for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, flush with cash and the glow of inevitability, bought up all the heavy-hitting pros early on in the contest. Undeterred, Obama found a way to draft an over-achieving cohort of talented personnel in the latter rounds and facilitated their development into a cohesive and ultra-effective organization.

2. Upon election, Obama assembled the presidency first. Prioritizing an executive staff over a cabinet and assembling a team of doers, Obama fielded a highly functioning White House ready for battle the first day in office.

An aside: some of you will be tempted to point out some of the stumbles--but, seriously, this team is in mid-season form already. After only a month, this President is indisputably in command and in control of the national storyline.

Where is Obama now?

He inherits a frightening crisis. Ironically, this precarious situation fraught with peril offers him a pathway to presidential distinction. Every "great" chief executive needs an insurmountable obstacle to overcome. Great triumph only comes after great trial (not surprisingly, Brands and Foner both echoed this manifest fact of presidential scholarship).

On the other hand, crisis presents a double-edged sword for a president. Leaders don't always prevail over adversity; sometimes chief executives do not rise to the occasion.

Will Obama succeed?

Most likely. If Obama is lucky, Patterson observes, he will be Ronald Reagan.

As Patterson notes, the President seems to invite comparisons between himself and former greats such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. However, Patterson asserts that this time and place is more comparable to the late-1970s and early-1980s than the era of the Great Depression. How are we different from 1933? We are a much more demanding and impatient culture today, with a wall-to-wall-twenty-four-hour news cycle, a fiscal situation wholly different from pre-New Deal America, and a post-industrial service economy.

An Aside: on the following day Brands, author of the current best-selling FDR biography, also offered an illuminating discussion regarding similarities and differences between the predicaments that face Obama and the collapse that Roosevelt inherited, which I hope to report on in some depth shortly.

Patterson: like Reagan, Barack Obama won election because of who he was NOT. The Election of 2008, like the Election of 1980, revealed more about the electorate's revulsion and frustration with the ruling party rather than an absolute affinity for the respective challengers. Americans rejected Jimmy Carter much more than they unequivocally elevated Ronald Reagan. Likewise, 2008 voters first and foremost voted against the perceived incompetence of George Bush and the faithless Republicans.

Having said that, like Reagan, Barack Obama is very popular and a vessel of hope. However, Patterson reminds us that Reagan's popularity plummeted as the economy continued to stagnate during the first two years of his presidency, with Democrats making big gains in the 1982 midterms. It was not until the economy began to rebound in 1983 and 1984 that Reagan recovered from his historic low approval ratings. Of course, his resurgence was spectacular (as was the economic recovery), as Reagan rolled onto a landslide reelection in 1984.

The Good News for President Obama?

If we see some brand of upswing in the economy before 2012 (as currently predicted by the Fed), the next quadrennial contest could very well be "Morning in America" for President Obama's reelection campaign.

Moreover, this president has two advantages over RR.

1. Unlike Reagan, Obama will not be restricted by principles or circumstances to supply-side solutions alone. His stimulus will attack the downturn from the demand side, pumping mainline injections into the sluggish economy.

2. Unlike Reagan, Obama enjoys shockingly unparalleled positive press. As Patterson correctly asserts, the news media powered his victory in the primary, showering him with disproportionately positive reportage, while hammering the front runner with surly negative portrayals and unfriendly analysis. Of course, Patterson reminds us that the media, although no less gushing in the General Election, played a role significantly less instrumental, for the events of 2005 through 2008 formed an irresistible wave of popular enmity for any Republican standard-bearer. That is, 2008 was a year tailor-made for any Democratic nominee.

Bottom Line: never before has a president faced a press corps so friendly and so thoroughly invested in his success. Contra to regular expectations of a mainstream media driving despair about the economy through negative coverage, we can expect this coterie of national reporters to continue their pattern of lending assistance to this president in unprecedented fashion.

On the other hand, regardless of the supportive White House press corps, the reality of the economic situation will settle into the public consciousness. Eventually, real life will overtake the media-created illusion. And, one day not too distant, President Obama will own this economy.

Patterson expects Democrats in the House to lose seats in 2010, which, of course, will completely reconfigure the current conventional wisdom about the GOP as the zombie party.

However, if Obama gets lucky, like Reagan, he gets "Morning in America" Part II.

If he gets an economic upturn after the midterm setback, and he wins another landslide election in 2012, President Obama may well outstrip the second term of Ronald Reagan. Well-positioned to achieve something close to universal health care and a substantial and historic program to counter the affects of global warming by scaling back carbon emissions, Obama will have a shot at finishing as a "near-great" president.

But, Professor Patterson reminds us, there are some less salutary potentialities as well. How could this presidency go down in flames?

There are the THREE BIG IFS:

1. What if the economy does not respond to the stimulus? Very possible. Many analysts are already talking about a SECOND STIMULUS, which would necessitate more money we don't have. More gnashing of teeth. Will there be any one left to borrow money from? This contingency severely dampens the rosiest Obama scenario. Even if one imagines a reelection victory in the midst of the continuing unease (a la FDR), the possibility of achieving big things in the second term virtually vanishes.

2. What if we drop into a deflationary spiral? Unlikely--but not impossible. Economists see this as extremely remote but no longer unthinkable.

3. What if the economy is exhausted? What if we keep the banks and the car companies above ground--but only on life support? We are surely headed toward a national debt that equals our Gross National Product (GDP). We reached that position at the end of World War II, and we expanded our way out of our financial hole, settling into a long period of dynamic growth in which our national debt decreased steadily until it leveled off and averaged about one-third of our GDP for decades. Now our national debt suddenly equals 70 percent of our GDP and seems inevitably on the way to approximately 100 percent once again.

Can we grow our way out of this kind of mammoth debt in our current state of national health? The USA of 2009 is not the America of post-war period, which was characterized by a vibrant manufacturing sector fueled by a nation of consumers with disposable income and pent-up demand for consumer goods. We are well past that vigorous America now. Today we live in a post-industrial society in which most Americans suffer from high personal debt and cannot honestly say that they want for much.

As you know, I worry that the party is over.

On the other hand, Patterson, an extremely talented handicapper, lays odds that the President is most likely on track for the more optimistic recovery scenario. This would be good news for all of us--at least in the near term. On the other hand, Patterson offers no guarantees, warning that the scariest outcomes are not just remote doomsday eventualities.

To borrow a line from the Brands lecture of the following day: the good news is that Obama has the potential to be another FDR. The bad news is that he also faces a danger of being the next Herbert Hoover.

We'll see.

UPDATE: We are grateful to HNN for the link to this post.
Interesting. Here, video embed from the Rott.
My "Forgotten English" word today is gardyloo. Citations from two old dictionaries define the word as a warning cry given when the contents of chamber pots were thrown from windows into the street or alley below.

For those of you born in the latter 20th century, a chamber pot is a bucket with a lid kept in the house, perhaps in the bedroom, so that one need not make the trip to the outhouse in the dark. An outhouse, or privy, for those of you in ignorance of pre-indoor plumbing architecture, is a small building built over a pit for the purpose of relieving oneself.

Growing up when and where I did (the 19th century lingered late in Sullivan County, Missouri) I am familiar both with outhouses and chamber pots.

The greatest health-care breakthrough in human history was the development of sanitary sewers and waste-water treatment. Before then, all cities were subject to regular outbreaks of disease carried by sewage. In early America when traveling, cities could be smelled before seen if the wind were right. Sanitary sewers and waste-water treatment, along with clean drinking water treatment and delivery systems, have saved more lives than perhaps any other single idea.

Water and sewer services must be community based. It makes no sense to speak of "rugged individualism" when considering clean water and sewage treatment for New York City. America is a nation built upon communities just as much or more than on "rugged individualism", contra Rush. Traditional Mainstreet Midwest Conservatism has always known this.

The History of Sanitary Sewers

How Sewer Systems Work

A History of Drinking Water Treatment
As I reflect on this question, I realize that I am defining qualities needed to be a great president. My previous posts:

From Polk: the ability to analyze a situation rationally and act accordingly, the willingness to go against one's own party if deemed necessary, and the steadiness to hold to rational goals. In Farmer's words, "a keen sense for the possible."

From Lincoln: recognize the greatest challenge and hold to the imperative it generates, communicate goals as they evolve in a way that ties them in with our national story, and acknowledge that there is a purpose in history that transcends our own plans.

Today, George Washington, the First and the Exemplary President.

Many, many things have been said concerning Washington. I would like to focus on three.

First, Washington was very aware that his every word and deed would be watched, and would set an example. He responded with thoughtful, careful behavior and speech. Even though no other president is going to set the pattern for office the way Washington had to do, every president is closely watched both by those at home and those abroad. There is no room for the careless word or action. In today's 24-7 cable, radio, and internet era, not only foreign diplomats and members of the federal government, but ordinary citizens will be parsing, interpreting, reading-between-the-lines, of every word and deed.

Second, Washington was committed to the principle that private interest must be subordinated to the public good. He did not govern with a "what is in it for me?" or "what is in it for my group?" attitude. Washington truly wanted to do the right thing for the good of the new nation. We want such an attitude in our presidents; and in the long view of history, only a president that can transcend the desire for personal glory and partisan gain will be judged great.

Third, Washington knew how to quit. He voluntarily set aside the power of office to return to private life. Granted that his health was failing after he left the presidency, I still cannot imagine him trying for a third term, or searching for any way possible to stay in the public eye. He was our Cincinnatus.

From Washington: act according to the knowledge that every word and move will be watched closely and can have far-reaching effects, place the public good over private interest, and know how to leave the stage.
What do Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt have in common?

I would have voted against every one of them. As a conservative Federalist-Whig-Republican, given the opportunity to cast a vote, I am fairly confident I would have selected John Adams over TJ in 1800, John Quincy Adams over Old Hickory in 1828, Henry Clay over Jackson in 1832, William Howard Taft over Wilson (and Teddy) in 1912, Charles Evans Hughes over Wilson in 1916, Hoover over FDR in 1932, and Landon, Wilke, and Dewey in 1936, 1940, and 1944.

Want to hear something crazy? Even knowing everything I know now, I would still vote the same way given the chance.

What else do Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson and Roosevelt have in common?

They were American heroes and great (or near-great, at the very least) Presidents.

Barack Obama is not out to destroy the United States. Yes. He identifies with the Democratic Party--and that fact of life carries a distinct meaning, but, taken in the long view, hopefully, he is no more a threat to American liberty than the other aforementioned Democratic standard-bearers.

That is, even though Hamilton and Adams felt certain that Thomas Jefferson was a wild-eyed Jacobin who would carelessly squander the hard-won gains of the Revolution, Jefferson's political opponents were wrong. Even though John Quincy Adams sincerely believed that the boorish frontiersman, Andrew Jackson, lacked the refinement or capacity to govern the United States, and Henry Clay genuinely thought that the Hero of New Orleans was a dangerous "man on horseback" along the lines of Caesar, Cromwell, and Napoleon, Jackson's opponents were wrong.

You get my point. In the heat of the battle, we Americans are inclined to believe some fairly unreasonable things about our opponents.

Let's all take a deep breath. The campaign is over. It is time to govern.

Footnote (just for the record): it is possible that I might have voted for Jefferson in 1804.

UPDATE: Thanks to HNN for linking us as one of the "quotes of the week."