Musings on Meltdowns

I wrote this in response to a Washington Post article on September 19, 2008.

Being a pessimist--or at least a very, very weary once upon a time optimist--I don't find Senator McCain's daily peregrinations about the economy, foreign affairs or his attempts to somehow associate Senator Obama with Freddie and Fannie to be very reassuring. His efforts to endlessly repeat that "he knows what to do" without specifying--or even generally outlining--just "what" it will be are also beyond my ability to even sort of give him any benefit of credence. We've had people in place for eight years who made claims about "knowing what to do," usually with the support of Senator McCain. Now his campaign, in an effort to disassociate him from policies and people he supported twice and followed an overwhelming percentage of the time-- has decided to repeat "maverick" so often that I'm beginning to think Tom Cruise will pop out of his campaign plane to the tune of Top Gun. Neither the current occupants--with the notable exception of Secretary Paulson, who at least recognizes the seriousness of the matter--nor Senator McCain have a clue, I think.
I'm not an economist and I no longer have a reflexive reliance upon the central government to fix or even mitigate what we're facing. My suspicion is that government intervention will almost inevitably make matters worse over the long, or even the short, term. Too many people have too many vested interests to simply allow "good governance" and "good policy" to take hold here. So I'm not sure, even if I were an economist, what policies will work.
For the moment, however, what a President can do--and the next one must do on a variety of interrelated, byzantinely-related fronts--is demonstrate leadership. He needs to operate from a basic set of core principles around which everything else is flexible (and remember Everett Dierksen's line about how these two are connected). Part of that leadership is to be willing to answer questions from the press and citizens alike. Even if by saying "I'm not sure about that specific instance, but I will get back to you personally," a President can provide reassurance and calm in the face of a universally-acknowledged--except in the White House and on the Mccain campaign until two days ago--"meltdown." In that sense, I'm not surprised that President Bush has done nothing but sit in the White House and let Secretary Paulson and Chairman Bernanke try to stem the flow of good, bad and teetering money. We as a country are suffering from the accumulated idiocy from the last 8 years of massive debts, massive tax cuts, pre-emptive war and the loss of our moral position as "leaders" of the democratic world. Those policies and their consequences have become linked together in a downward spiral from which we'll be lucky to escape with something approaching our former standard of living. I'm not sure Senator Obama can restore or renew what we once had, but I am quite certain Senator McCain can't.