Obama At Risk

Just my quick unqualified thought. I never supported the bailouts or the big economic stimulus package but I'm nobody and don't know much. (I gotcher stimulus package right here, baby!) I just have a bad feeling about government taking the reins to save people from themselves. Plus the rhetoric has been dishonest. They keep blaming Bush, who actually tried to regulate the FMs some more and was stymied by Congress, and Greenspan, who was Clinton's darling if I recall, and of course the set-up so people could buy houses they couldn't afford, which was absolutely not a Republican deal, never has been. In other words, I deeply distrust the public discussion on this, and am not convinced that the current power has any better a combination of competence and good intention than the last.

So. These bold moves have Mr. Obama's imprimatur, these vast trades of money for control, these tax-funded infusions to try and jump-start an ailing economy in the mold of FDR's programs to end the Great Depression. Everyone's a Keynesian all of a sudden. But the markets so far have responded poorly. They keep sinking. And it isn't that markets are all Republicans who would rather lose money than see Obama get a win. Markets are self-interested and thus can be trusted as an indicator set of the wisdom of the crowd. If the market, which is forward-looking, doesn't like something, maybe that something ain't so great.

So we have a situation where mere weeks into his presidency, Obama has hitched his wagon to an unproven and expensive program about which the non-political self-interested crowds outside the Beltway are gathering doubts. It's not hard to predict what may happen next. Mrs. Clinton and her husband were dogged for years by the failure of her bold program to reform healthcare. Mr. Schwarzenegger was rendered relatively ineffective once his early and bold proposals to correct California's more intractable problems failed at the ballot (thanks in my opinion to the pernicious influence of self-protecting power centers called "unions" but that's fairly moot now). Obama is at risk of losing his momentum, initiative, popularity, whatever it is that enables a politician getting things done, and winding up kind of a meh president and risking a GOP comeback in '12.

That's all. Half a long unedited essay is better than none, if I'm just bleating to the net before cranking up on yet another day here in corporate America where we are living the dream.

(Bonus round: "Young Chuck in Montana bought a horse ...")