Don’t Blame POTUS
By John Batchelor on November 25, 2009 at 2:45 AM in Current Affairs
* bumped up *
It is Washington’s fault, it’s Washington’s dysfunction, what Friedman refers to with the old-fashioned metaphor, “paralysis.”
At first this sounded to me to be avoiding the question of POTUS.
Is he adequate? Is he capable? Does he understand the job? Is he learning? Why does he work so distantly with Congress? Does he work with Congress?
But then again, saying that Washington is paralyzed like the “failed state” of California is not after all a new cynical recognition.
Washington has been paralyzed since Tom Jefferson’s accidental success of the Louisiana Purchase — and certainly since King Andrew Jackson the First challenged and outmaneuvered Congress and the bankers to break the Second National Bank in 1832.
A paralyzed Washington is what developed the Civil War, what abandoned the West to the railroad cabals, what cooperated with the rise of the monopolies and trusts and Wall Street “interests.” A paralyzed Washington explains the Great Depression.
What Tom Friedman has come up with is a self-assuring even narcotizing way to say to himself that it isn’t President Obama’s fault. Is it?
Then again, it is President Obama’s fault because he is part of it. It is his watch. Was it Jefferson’s and Jackson’s (Second National Bank, now that was dysfunction) and Lincoln’s and McKinley/Roosevelt’s and FDR’s faults? Yes.
The rules are that it is your fault if you are POTUS when it happens. However it wasprobably comforting at the time of the presidency (Jefferson, Jackson etc) to say that the president is “charismatic” and bold, and heroic and smart, however the Congress and the Washington system are so broken that even this present successful president cannot solve them.
We call it today, liberty. It means that power is in the hands of the people who live here. The Constitution of 1789 was a lawyerly worked up version of the original concept, with a lot of hands from Virginia and Massachusetts organizing the cooking and laying on a lot of silly sauce, but what it comes to is that liberty remains in the hands of the people who live here.
The founders were aware of what happens when you give back power to a king, an executive. Instead, they distributed power so broadly that almost anyone could both claim to have power and at the same time not feel powerful at all. It is called checks and balances.
Friedman knows all this. He just has decided to step around the issue to make an excuse for Present Obama for the next ten minutes. Blaming Washington is the same as blaming the founders and the Constitution. Every president who runs into trouble also blamed Congress and the bankers and the previous regime and Washington in general.
King Andrew the First blamed Washington so effectively that he founded a party to blame Washington, the Democracy, which promptly took over Congress and became part of the problem that Jackson blamed. Nothing fancy here. President Jackson was called the Chief Magistrate, but he was in fact just another noisy part of the government under the Constitution. Same for Lincoln and TR and FDR and Reagan. Same for Obama.
The republic is not paralyzed. We long ago decided and agreed that the jeopardy of an unchallenged and uncontained chief magistrate is so great that it is just plan common sense to make sure that no one is in charge.
Don’t like California? Don’t live there. And if you do live there, you will figure it out — it’s where you live. Don’t like the present state of the Union? You will figure it out. (That AIG thing was a doozy, and look here, Tim Geithner was part of the problem!)
Will President Obama figure out that he is not in fact in the boss? That Congress is not in charge? That Washington is not in charge? That mandating laws to the people who live here is not successful government?
Yes, but slowly. What is wrong right now — the Obama administration is frustrated and self-conscious and reluctant and clumsy — will all work itself out or it won’t and there will be a new team.
My guess? At this time my guess is that the “Don’t Blame President Obama School” invented here by Tom Friedman will turn into the “Blame Obama School” before long. Same as it was for King Andrew the First, so that by the time Jackson ran for reelection, and won, no one in Washington or the banks was speaking with him; and by the time he finished his term, the country was plunged into a panic so deep that no one even noticed Andrew Jackson had left town to sit in his rustic Hermitage another few years, spitting tobacco and blaming Washington.
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