As Barack Obama builds his Administration team you can sense the frustration starting to build on the left and among those who are still paying attention. In an article in yesterday’s New York Times, Obama Describes Team as Experienced Yet Fresh, you can anticipate the eloquent gymnastics you are about to read as you would watching the young Chinese girls at the Beijing Olympics.
The Perception of Change
As the agent of hope and change, some people are beginning to wonder that if this is so, why is he populating his administration with so many people from the Clinton administration, causing one pundit to ask if we wanted a return to the Clinton Administration we would have voted for Hillary. The master politician responded to this line of thinking thusly, “Americans would be ‘rightly troubled’ if he overlooked experience to create the perception of change.’” Let me see if I have this right. If you actually change, it is a perception of change, but if you don’t change, it is real change? I got it.
He went on to elaborate, “What we are going to do is combine experience with fresh thinking. But understand where the vision for change comes from first and foremost: It comes from me.” Okay, let me take a hack at that one. Barack Obama is bringing together all these people with long resumes in government, with years of experience, and confident in knowing what to do and how to do it, but they are all going to follow Barack Obama’s direction and apply fresh thinking to their settled ways. Or might they say, yeah kid, go back to the Oval Office and we’ll call you when we need you.
The Voice of Experience
Painting the picture further Obama says, “I suspect that you would be troubled and the American people would be troubled if I selected a Treasury secretary or a chairman of the National Economic Council at one of the most critical economic times in our history who had no experience in government whatsoever.” But an inexperienced president? No problem. Even JFK, who was elected the youngest president in our history, had served one full term in the Senate, was reelected, and was two years into his second term before becoming president. And he had a pretty rocky time between the Bay of Pigs, his Vienna meeting with Khrushchev, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Viet Nam, in less than three years. Barack Obama was four years into his first term and half of that time he spent running for president. Should we not be concerned at the lack of experience at the top?
The Definition of Freshness
To prove his point about the freshness of hope and change, he spoke of Paul Volker. Now, I think very highly of Paul Volker. I believe it was he who got inflation under control after the disasterous Carter Administration economic policies. Obama appointed Volker to lead his economic advisory board. At 81 years old, he is the epitome of freshness. How is that you wonder? Obama masterfully spins it this way, “Paul Volker hasn’t been in Washington for quite some time and that’s part of the reason he can provide a fresh perspective.” So where does that leave Obama? Is he stale because he has been in Washington or his he fresh because he has been out campaigning for the last two years?
To cap it off in a question and answer period Obama said, according to the Times, “his [Obama's] call for new ways of thinking on the economy should not be interpreted as a reflection of frustration and disappointment with the Bush administration’s recent economic-recovery efforts. He signaled his support for the latest $800 billion government bailout plan, which is intended to provide new lending for consumers as well as push down home mortgage rates.”
Anyone Out There Feeling Buyer’s Remorse?
So the purveyor of hope and change wants us all to believe that bringing back the Clinton administration is change; that 81 year old Paul Volker is fresh, but 72 year old John McCain is ancient; that Bush is the cause of all that is wrong with America, but fresh thinking should not be interpreted as frustration with Bush.
My sense has been that Barack Obama was painting himself into a corner. All the while he believed that with his adroit political and verbal skills he would be able to slip out of the corner unnoticed.
The Democrats have only held the White House for eight of the last twenty-eight years. So realistically, where else would Obama go for experienced executives? With no executive experience himself, it’s not like he can bring colleagues in from his past executive positions, like Carter from Georgia, Reagan from California, Clinton from Arkansas, and Bush from Texas. With only four years in Washington, two of them spent on the road campaigning for president, it’s not like he built a network of experienced executive branch contacts there either.
He is also in the precarious position of having built up expectations so high, there is really no where for his job approval ratings to go, once he takes office, but down. In addition to all this, he has to watch his left flank. There are a lot of grumbling noises coming from that direction from a bunch of people with balled up IOUs in their fists, thinking we got you here, where’s the payback?
Groundbreaking? Earth shattering? Paradigm shift? What is the right word or phrase to describe what just happened in Colorado where a local school district implemented a school voucher program where any student can go to any school and the money will follow them.