(The Citadel at Ankara, Turkey.)
This has been a tumultuous week, hasn’t it? I don’t know about you, but between the loss of old friends and the impressive come-back of the San Francisco Giants to meet the Detroit Tigers tonight in Game One of the World Series my emotions have been whip-sawed quite effectively.
I am a little late this morning, and will have to dip a toe in politics, something that I have attempted to keep at arms-length due to its toxic aura. My intent was to write about the three kittens who have appeared on the porch of Willow owner Tracy O’Grady. It is a cute story.
Instead, I was forced to confront the political mess today because a talented Turkish Journalist of my acquaintance is writing a piece on the American election for a paper in Ankara and asked me for my thoughts. I got off on doing that, trying to capture my feelings about the circus and feeling unease about what is happening in our great nation.
What is one to make of a choice of between flavors of economic folly and balanced against an implacable attempt to restrict individual rights? Where is the choice? Here is what I said:
“The campaign leading to what some people are calling the “most significant election in our lifetimes” here has been very strange.
It has been a tumultuous four years for us who live under the Obama Administration. For the first two years, the President had an unassailable majority in the House and Senate. America was in the grip of an economic malaise unprecedented in nearly a century. Wall Street was out of control, and the depths of depravity had yet to be plumbed. The phrase “too big to fail” was applied to the big investment banks. It really should have been applied to the complex system-of-systems that is America itself.
I have the Newsweek cover that symbolized the time pinned up on my office wall: “We are all Socialists now!” are the words below an image of a red hand clasping a blue hand. I think Newsweek just announced they were going to stop publishing the magazine in hard copy, so maybe we are not.
I snorted when I saw it. America is a center-right nation that occasionally veers to the left. This is at variance with an educated class that is overwhelmingly liberal in outlook and Democrat-oriented in politics. The swooning over a President who represents progressive change made- and makes- the traditional media a virtual adjunct to the Democratic National Committee.
With that complete dominance of social discourse, Mr. Obama rushed to the rescue of the global economy by turning over management of the more pressing issues to his financial team and an ambitious plan to nationalize (and rationalize) the health care sector of the economy- a 25% share of the gross domestic product. It really should be known as PelosiCare, but enough. It is what it is.
Between the last-gasp stimulus of the Bush Administration and the first floodgates of Mr. Obama’s, more than a trillion and a half dollars were thrown at supplementing strapped state budgets, at allegedly “shovel ready” public works projects and green energy initiatives.
Had any of this been without controversy and corruption, things might have gone well, but they did not. The public works projects were steered to Obama supporters. The green technology projects were not ready for prime time- and many of the largest and politically connected ones have gone bust, first with solar panel manufacturer Solyndra and most recently A123, a battery producer that failed along with the innovative and problematic Chevy Volt. It was a total loss of taxpayer money, and the manifold failures of the vast give-away program sparked the rise of the Tea Party and the resurgent Republican base in the 2010 elections.
The last two years of the Obama administration has had many good words and little progress. The Republican majority in the House has stymied the President’s initiatives while the Democratic Senate has played political rope-a-dope with the grandstanding of the pugnacious House leadership. Nothing of legislative consequence has been achieved since the 2010 election.
Not having a great deal of experience with anything except campaign politics, Mr. Obama has demonized the opposition, and accomplished nothing. His campaign strategy against Governor Romney has been the same, and the recently concluded series of debates has only demonstrated that Mr. Romney is a pretty good guy, not the monster straw man that Mr. Obama’s campaign has created.
Not that Romney is a really good guy- he is a compromise candidate who had to “run right” in the primaries and “run to the middle” for the general election.
I am far too libertarian in outlook to be comfortable with either of the Big Government parties, and the Taliban wing of the Republican Party is far too willing to insert government into my life for me to be very happy with them. The issues there are things that I find offensive: Women should have control of their own reproductive lives, people should be able to marry whoever they wish (and suffer the consequences), smoke what they want (or not), insure their health (or not) and generally live lives without the intrusive assistance of the Federal Government.
To say that the government is dysfunctional is to be charitable. Mr. Obama’s record is abysmal and the recent news of improving unemployment numbers is widely viewed as suspicious in the extreme. Since the record is not defensible in any rational manner, the drumbeat of Romneysia-style insults has had to stand as an outline for a second Obama administration.
Which is to say, there is no agenda.
People have watched the debates and seen that Governor Romney seems much more likable than the caricature the President has been running against. The polls reflect that trend, depending on which ones you believe. It may not suffice to provide a victory for Mr. Romney, and in one of the more likely scenarios, Mr. Obama will return while the Republicans will hold the House and gain in Senate, though the Democrats will retain a slim majority.
That is a recipe for more gridlock in a second Obama administration, problems for an initial Romney administration, and uncertainty for the Middle East as the dust settles.
Mr. Romney’s relationship with Mr. Netanyahu suggests greater solidarity with the Jewish State, if he is elected. Will he countenance a war with Iran, when there is so much war fatigue here? If Mr. Obama is returned, it will probably mean “doubling down” on the muddled American response to the Arab Spring, and no one quite knows what that means.
Whatever happens, the US government is still borrowing nearly half the money it spends. That can mean no long-term good for the looming debt and entitlement picture, though austerity imposed to solve that problem will cause massive dissatisfaction, if not outright violence.
It is going to be interesting, if not ominous, regardless of what happens. I am eager (and resigned) to discover what will come of things after the sixth of November.
Could it be a Republican Congress and President? Or will it be a mix-and-match return of a rudderless administration accompanied by more gridlock and governance by decree?
Talk to me in 13 days.”
I will be interested to see what my pal makes of that, if anything, and the general perspective from Ankara, which is tempered by the impact of mortar rounds fired from disintegrating Syria next door, a ruling Islamist party democratically elected to head a secular state, the looming Iran Problem and the chaotic consequences of the incomplete Arab Spring across the region.
The weekend seems a long way away. I am looking forward to getting down to the farm where nothing at all is changing except the color of the leaves on the trees.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com