"In
normal times, that wouldn't be too disturbing. But these aren’t normal times.
The economy is in danger of deflationary strangulation. … These times require a
president who must go beyond the partisan divide - a president who uses the
'bully pulpit.'"
At the beginning of the last
century, President Theodore Roosevelt said that the White House was a “bully
pulpit” - a “great platform,” a tool of maximum resonance from which the U.S.
chief executive can advocate, explain, and in short “sell” his policy - if he uses
it well and sparingly.
This wasn't the case during
the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency. The 44th president of the
United States has a distant, professorial way - some say arrogant - of
exercising his mandate. This has undoubtedly contributed a lot to the defeat he
suffered Tuesday, November 2nd, in the midterm elections.
The opposition Republicans
won a comfortable majority in the House of Representatives and grew stronger in
the Senate. It also won a majority of governorships. For Mr. Obama, the warning
is clear.
It is a matter of style, it's
been said. But when it comes right down to it, of course: Tuesday’s vote was an
angry slap from Americans, a majority of whom face a dire economic situation.
Unemployment is nearing 10 percent, growth is lackluster (2 percent), and
morale has been rendered durably worse.
There is an unfair side to
this punishment. In domestic policy, Mr. Obama’s balance sheet is quite
respectable: he rescued the financial system, passed laws on health care and
education reform, drafted the outline of climate legislation, and his plan to
stimulate the economy may have proven inadequate, but without it, unemployment would
have surpassed 12 percent.
It took compromise to pass
these laws, and Mr. Obama disappointed the left. His ensemble has created an
image of a government that is too intrusive, so Obama frightens the right. The result
is disastrous. The United States finds itself with what is known as “divided government”:
the White House on one side, part of Congress on the other.
It’s a common pattern in
Washington. It wasn’t a source of deadlock when the two major parties were
still able to find areas of agreement. But this is less and less the case, and it
is feared that the “divided government” of 2010 will be a paralyzed one. That's
bad news.
The fault lies mainly with
some in the Republican Part, which has members who received narrow-minded and
dogmatic training. As of Wednesday, the future House speaker, John Boehner,
hasn’t hid that his agenda is to fight from day one: no compromise with the
White house, and do everything possible to keep Mr. Obama in check.
In normal times, that
wouldn't be too disturbing. But these aren’t normal times. The economy is in
danger of deflationary strangulation. Witness the extraordinary and
exceptionally dangerous measure that the Federal Reserve has just announced: an
injection of $600 billion into the economy by printing more money.
These times require a
president who must go beyond the partisan divide - a president who uses the
“bully pulpit.”
