All Life Is Problem Solving

Warren Buffet said today that the leaders of this nation need to treat the President as the commander-in-chief of an economic war because that’s what we’re in right now, and he characterized the economy as falling off a cliff. Well, I’m not sure I’d go that far, since we’ve so recently gotten into far too much trouble treating a President as though he were a commander-in-chief beyond criticism. Having said that, however, I do think that the public at large needs to recognize that the President is engaged in a sustained effort to re-create an economy that will work for Americans and that his effort to do so will take continuing support beyond just patience with his early attempts to “get ahead of the curve.”

To help in getting that kind of support, I think the President needs to set expectations in a different way. Some think he should frequently express confidence in the outcome of his initiatives thus far, and should adopt a mask of optimism about an economic upturn to wear in public appearances. This is a mistake. It’s not what FDR did during the Depression and it’s not what Obama should do now. FDR never promised people a rose garden, and he never said that any particular initiative he tried would work to end the economic disaster. What he did promise, and what he and his administration demonstrated in every conceivable way he could, was that he would not rest until the problem of the Depression was solved; that he would leave no stone unturned in this effort, and that he would evaluate his effort as he went forward, and that when certain things didn’t work he would try other things, until he found the things that did work to end the Depression.

FDR’s administration is often portrayed by Republicans as ideological, as attempting to bring Socialism to the United States. But this is nonsense and a big lie. The philosophy of the Roosevelt Administration wasn’t Capitalism, or Socialism, or Liberalism. It was Pragmatism: the home-grown American Philosophy/non-ideology that we ought to seek to solve problems by first facing them, and then finding and applying what works, and that we ought to disregard whether what works is called “Capitalist” or “Socialist,” or whatever, and recognize that if it works, it’s “American.”

Republicans are fond of saying that the President wants to make America like France or like Europe. The proper answer to that is “if it works, it’s not only like America; it is American.”

So what Obama needs to say more and more, as he tries to lead us out of the increasingly dark economic place that we are in, is that his Administration is about solving the primary American problems including the current economic crisis that have been neglected and that have built up over the many years of the Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush administrations. And that to be successful at this, he needs the support of the people against the many who want to see him fail, and who will, if given a chance, try to cause his failure by opposing his necessarily continuing attempts to solve these problems, with 1) proposals for balancing budgets, freezing spending, leaving business alone, and further dismantling the existing social safety net, and 2) with labels like ‘socialism,” “communism,” “radicalism,” “European,” and various combinations of these.

In asking for this support, President Obama has to make clear that he believes very strongly that we can and will solve our economic problems, but that no one really knows, in advance what combination of programs and policies will work, so that we have try to different things as rapidly as possible until we hit on the right combination. And he also needs to emphasize, very strongly, that even though no one can say for sure what will work to get us out of the recession soonest, we are very, very clear about what won’t work.

He can then make sure people understand that worrying about balanced budgets right now won’t work, because that will entail cutting Government spending at a time where the Government is needed to increase the woefully weak demand in the economy. He also needs to emphasize that weakening the social safety net by “reforming” social security right now will also not work and for the same reason. Finally, he needs to say that we also already know that “freezing spending,” that favorite proposal of Hooverian wingnuts like Rush Limbaugh, Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, John Boehner, and Darrell Issa, also will do nothing except to make the recession worse even faster.

Hoovervilles have now returned to the American scene in the form of a “tent city” in Sacramento, California. Jealous of Hoover’s place in history, the wingnuts are now looking to create “Limbaughvilles,” “Boehnervilles,” “McConellvilles,” “Pencevilles,” and “Issavilles,” because they want to see the President fail, more than they want to see him and America succeed. This is where selfishness and a religious faith in one’s ideology leads. But now is not the time for unshakable faith in the false God of the free market. It is the time for finding out what works, and for support of a President who will take us to that place wherever it leads, and ideology be damned.