While he has encouraged them in only the most oblique of gestures, using the Lincoln Bible for the Presidential Oath, paying Dick Cheney to sit in a wheelchair, and having two adorable children and a glamourous wife, Barack Obama basks in the commentariat’s adulatory comparisons to Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
However, after just two weeks in the White House, mired in the chaos accruing from the smoothest transition in the history of the world, Obama’s performance thus far bears comparison to a much less successful President. No, not Jimmy Carter, though that’s not a bad guess. I was thinking more of Chicken Little. Now, some might argue that Chicken Little was never elected President. That’s a good point, but it doesn’t change the simple fact that THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!
That, at any rate, seems to be the message Obama is trying to hammer home. Because some mean spirited Republican Senators are trying to trim a paltry one hundred billion dollars from a seriously bloated and incredibly expanding “stimulus package,” our President finds it necessary to warn that “if we drag our feet and fail to act, this crisis will turn into a catastrophe.”
This morning on “The Washington Post” Op-Ed Page, he crowed that, barring hasty, ill-considered action, “our nation will sink deeper into a crisis, that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.” Think of that statement for a moment. A crisis we may not be able to reverse? What exactly does that mean? The utter collapse of our entire economic system? Will our civil society, or what is left of it, vanish? Will we be reduced to huddling in the dark in our sod-roofed cabins, scraping out a tattered existence from our three-acre plots? Or will crops no longer grow? Will the sun die out? Will Obama fail to deliver on his promise to halt the rising sea levels? Will human life itself be blotted out from the planet?
What exactly does an irreversible crisis mean?
On the other hand, dutifully playing my role in a postpartisan culture, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, he’s only been on the job for a couple of weeks, he doesn’t have a lot of experience, and most of the people he tapped to advise him during the smoothest transition in the history of the world are stuck in line down at the IRS office trying to get an extension.
There he is, stuck all alone in the White House, with only Joe Biden to tell him what to do (and Biden keeps saying, “Go back on TV, ‘Rack. You know, like FDR did. Tell them the only thing to fear is confidence itself.”) Then he turns on CSpan and he sees Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi warning that “every month that we do not have an economic recovery package, 500 million Americans lose their jobs.”
No wonder he is panicking. Maybe THE SKY REALLY IS FALLING.