What We Hope
He was raised by Kansas farm people and taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago for twelve years. He’d been the smartest guy at Harvard Law School where everyone seemed to know he’d be President one day. That day comes next Tuesday and everyone we know prays for his success; given the state of our world we’d be fools not to. There is much we could say about our new President but it hardly seems necessary. Never has the level of expectation been higher for a man’s worldly ascension and rarely if ever has anyone shouldered the hopes of billions of people around the world as this one does. That we’ve chosen him suggests a wisdom that we’d scarcely dared to hope would soon guide our future but it will, his inauguration is a moment in history worth being here to witness.
President Obama’s clear ethical task is to reestablish in the eyes of the world our nation’s moral authority, which our founding fathers laid out as our guiding principals of governance. Many of us have long struggled to believe this even possible when our recent national leadership, its policies, priorities, and choices, have been so disastrously and recklessly amoral or worse. Freedom is our birthright, not a mask for subduing others and justice isn’t a department run by political hacks to control each another and everyone else. But we have it seems chosen a different course now, one that may well be able to return our nation to its former place at the head of the world community. If we succeed at that, if our new President can reestablish for us a credible moral authority in the world, then our chances of success at everything we need to do in the years ahead will be vastly enhanced.
Looking at the precipice before us we all see that none of this will be come easily or without conflicts from legitimately differing perspectives. We’re told and we’ll no doubt be told repeatedly that finding solutions to our many and complex problems will take time, honest good faith, and a willingness to work together that we’ve rarely managed before. As a starting point to the process there’s an obvious set of economic policy precedents set seventy-some years ago under FDR’s enormously successful leadership. Those precedents changed not just our view of government as the engine of our collective progress, but created the modern basis of our trust in it as a force for the collective good. We believe it is, even if along the way we’ve made serious mistakes.
So in the coming weeks we expect to learn how this next chapter in our history begins. Plans will be laid out for what’s expected to be the largest commitment of public resources ever undertaken. Some of what’s proposed will be short term in scope, because as FDR’s head public works administrator pointed out, people don’t eat in the long term. But most of what’s coming is intended to address the long term structural problems we’ve allowed to evolve, from our resource consumption to our neglected public infrastructure to the wildly destabilizing deregulation of our financial systems. Practically everything needs rethinking and practically everything needs major investment.
That investment in our future survival is under construction and about to be launched. Its shape isn’t clear yet though it’s looking a bit like the hull of a great ship or maybe the biggest feed trough ever built. It’ll be hard to steer of course but at least it’s too big to be hijacked by pirates. Manned mostly by salty sea-dogs from the SS Clinton, we think it will float and it might even fly. Either way its propulsion system is faith-based. If enough of us believe it can move, at some point it should. The scary part of the trip is the slow part, getting to that point.
The immediate questions we face are how we prioritize, how we choose to invest in our national economic recovery. That’s where the dialogue needs to focus in the coming months and opinions will be plentiful. Our view is that the answers to creating a stable and sustainable economy are long-term and global in perspective. That compels us to accept that we and the Chinese and the Islamic world and everyone else need one another for the stability all our economies require. Global economic recovery means active collaboration amongst competitive national interests or we all fall to the bottom together. Any other choice won’t work, our world has been there and it’s had enough.
So as we began, a first key to our economic recovery is a major reformation of our nation’s moral authority in the world. We stand now at such a point, and we pray that is where our President’s inaugural address will take us. As to the stimulus package sight unseen, we say let’s go, so long as there’s good adult supervision. With a similar investment beginning in 1932, our economy grew at three times the rate of our best recent years. Surely since the days of our grandfathers we’ve learned enough to invest in ourselves half as well.
BP