The Age of Incompetence: Part III

May I say, I told you so! Someone not long ago asked me why I don't write a blog on the internet. I answered, no time, no interest. But I'm beginning to think I should reconsider because my predictions about current political affairs turns out not only to be right more often than the so-called experts who get paid for it, but my predictions come earlier.

Like the one about the new president, Barrack Obama. I predicted almost from the day in 2007 when he announced he was running that he would eventually be the Democratic candidate, not Hillary. I predicted he would then become president, no matter who the Republican opponent.

But I saw something in his debates with John McCain that cast a pall over the future. (I wasn't the only one who saw it Maureen Dowd in the New York Times September 27, also saw it.) It was reluctance to K.O. his opponent when the opponent lead with his chin. It was as if Obama wanted to play rope a dope not with a heavy hitter like George Foreman but with a palooka. I suspected a man who was content to win on points when he could win by K.O. was not a man to lead a country in time of crisis. I thought we needed courage and common sense, the kind Harry Truman had. And I said so. So amazingly until the economy fell off the cliff in October the race for president was neck and neck when it should have been a blow out.

Evidence continues to gather that my prediction was more correct than I wanted it to be. Recently Obama went down to the House of Representatives to have a little chit chat with the Republicans to ask for their support for his stimulus package. Our Ivy League president no doubt thought by adding some tax breaks, the same cool aid that got us into this mess in the first place, and some smoozing he could curry favor. The result was not a single Republican voted for the bill. One observer had it right when he wrote that all Obama would accomplish by his tactics was alienate his own democratic base and appear weak before Republicans.

The bill passed of course because of the Democratic majority but now it goes before the Senate. We've seen this movie before anyway. In 1993 when President Clinton introduced his economic plan, which included tax increases, the Republicans howled. There were predictions of economic collapse and Newt Gingrich predicted the mother of all recessions. In the Senate not a single Republican would vote for the Clinton plan and Vice President Gore had to cast the deciding vote. What happened was the greatest growth in jobs since World War II and an actual surplus was made and if Bush 43 and his minions had left it alone the United States was on track to be out of debt by - guess - 2009! Can you imagine it?

It all has a kind of Titanic pale to it now. I am currently teaching two classes British history and we've reached the end of the 19th century, the Victorian period. I found an interesting history book for support work. After seven wars abroad from 1839 in China to 1899, the Boer War in South Africa, the cost of keeping up its empire was costing the Britain more than it was taking in. "At the beginning of the 20th century people did not realize that they were living at the end of an age...They believed things could get only better and better," the author, David McDowel, wrote.

I could not help but fast forward 100 years and think of America in 2001. We were told there could be tax cuts, but there could still be a balanced budget. There could be a war in Iraq, but it would be off budget, as if money for it could be drawn from some secret account, everyone could borrow money for a home, whether they could repay the loan or not. Like Britain's empire, we had military bases at 132 places around the globe outside the U.S. While Britain was selling Indian opium in China in the 1800s we were selling "Shock and Awe" in Baghdad in 2003.

McDowel, added, "A nation's story is not, or should not be, solely about wealth or power, but about the quality of the community's existence."

During the years of "Shock and Awe" the average American's quality of existence went down. Debt was piled upon debt. Actual wages went down. More and more working people lost basic health care. Education standards declined. At the same time illegal immigration became a flood.

Mr. Obama at his inauguration address said, "We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on earth." Clearly that is a platitude and not true. We are broke. And we do not even as yet know how deep the debt we are in is because our zombie banks have hidden their "toxic" debts. There is still more shock and awe to come.

There is a film Mr. Obama should watch, a 1960s Western drama, Hombre. It's a story of a man who is shunned by passengers on a stage coach and forced to ride topside with the driver, but when it is held up by cutthroats and they are left afoot in the desert to perish, they plead for the one they shunned to lead them out of the desert because only he knows how. One of the passengers is an embezzler whose lust for money puts all the others at risk. Against his better judgment Hombre agrees to be their guide. It ends up costing him his life as their poor judgment puts them back at the mercy of the same cutthroats who robbed the stagecoach.

America needs a hombre to lead it safely out of the wilderness. A tough savvy hombre who knows the lay of the land and knows the cutthroats we are up against, both foreign and domestic. The times do not call for an Ivy League president but a hombre.

One has the eerie feeling, like the film Hombre, we have shot the messenger, who could have guided us to safety, one too many times and our ending will be melancholy, as the word Titanic still summons a sense of the melancholy. I forgot who said it but it rings true today more than any time I can remember, "In war men are nothing, a man is everything." Wanted: one tough hombre.

All rights reserved Roger Burke 2009