The Administration

The country desperately needs smart action to deal with the bad economic news on the home front and the tragic, wasteful war being pursued in Afghanistan.

Camp followers of that clever system of history outlined by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book The Fourth Turning will be closely watching this week’s events as world economy unravels; unraveling as well the current president. Strauss and Howe have it that all historic periods begin and end with a major conflagration and that historic periods follow generationally, each generation having a 20-year influence. At the end of 60 years the entire system starts to collapse. Struggles ensue in the next 20 years as collective intelligence and will strive to be born again to a new era. We are now 65 years into the post-war period and are feeling, experiencing the descent. The theory marks culture as well as politics, each generation antidotal to the last. That is, in a phrase historian Arnold Toynbee used, yin becomes yang. My opinion on those who most affected our post-war period and brought about its metamorphosis are in generational alternating sequence: Dwight Eisenhower, John Lennon, Ronald Reagan and the Dalai Lama.

Many followers of this system, which is based on archetypes as well as demographics, saw Barack Obama as the figure who would rise to awaken the transitional period; a period that would also awaken the century and potentially the millennium. I did not. I saw him as the figure who completed the Kennedy period and even the age of Lincoln. The Obama presidency also ends the exclusive influence of the northeast as the historic determiner for America. Mission accomplished. As Teddy Roosevelt was prelude to FDR, Reagan was prelude to the age ahead that will advance a political and cultural awakening to the South, the West and the Heartland. When history fulfills its purposes it moves on. Every period gives evidence to that. I see the rising figure as Rick Perry, governor of Texas. Demographics have been moving in that direction since the end of WWII. It is entirely appropriate and right that he begin the tenure of such vast responsibility and scale with a prayer as he did this week in Texas.

The greatest bungle in the debt-crisis debate was on July 19, when, as NPR reported: “Former President Bill Clinton said if faced with default, he would single-handedly raise the debt ceiling using the 14th Amendment and he’d do it ‘without hesitation.’ ”

The boorishness and bluff of the language calls to mind Bull Connor in the Civil Rights days, but this from a laconic, Big Hair Southern governor with 50 gold watches and a string of mistresses who so wanted to be a New Yorker; a kind of Simon Legree in reverse. Since, a garden variety of prominent Democrats like House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer (Md.) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (Calif.) have called for the 14th Amendment, and Obama himself preposterously said that he was “tempted” to solve the debt crisis that way. Dictatorship is always the temptation and should reveal the illusion of representative government with these people. Obama would be facing reelection under impeachment, so it is not likely to happen.

The president's speech Monday night was typical of his entire presidency; he demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of fundamental economics and leadership.

Once again he implicated President Bush as the cause of all our economic problems. Once again he demonized the rich without acknowledging the fact that the leader of his own party, Harry Reid, put forth a plan that includes no increase in taxes on anyone. This is because Reid recognizes that the additional revenues that would be generated by increasing taxes on the rich wouldn't come close to solving the problem.

The very first question President Obama should ask Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) when they meet next is: “Got a cigarette?”

Gone are the days of the soaring oratory and the early speeches better than any president, including Lincoln, has ever given. Gone is the original, elegant prose, the moving images, the complexity of thought, the subtle historical nuance of his early autobiography — and it went so quickly. He did write that stuff, no?

Now, as of last Friday, the eyes grow wide as he berates America in flowing formless and alien anecdotal vindictive and righteous indignation like a neurotic cat chasing a string. We are entering dire straits, says Dan Balz of The Washington Post, but both parties see only the end and not the beginning.

The political left that President Obama has disappointed and the right that is dedicated to his political defeat must agree that he is a decent and good man. Despite both their wishes (though their motives are quite different) that America had a different (read stronger-weaker) leader, he may be reelected, though the likelihood of that inevitability is diminishing (how it could happen is the subject of another essay to follow). Those of us who were elated by his campaign and election — we who, as the expression went, “drank the Kool-Aid” — have a lesson to learn about electoral politics.

A recent editorial by Matt Bai in The New York Times stated that neither President Obama’s election in 2008 nor the Republican congressional victory in 2010 really had as much to do “with the orthodoxies of liberalism or conservatism” as advertised. Bai attributed both those political phenomena to “manifestations of long-bubbling frustration with the status quo … ” That may be so, in part, but in the case of President Obama, I have another theory.

I gotta give Mitch McConnell credit for a very good piece of work. His strategy, for those who have not figured it out yet, is to make President Obama the debt-ceiling dictator. Give Obama all the power. Surrender to him totally. Make Democrats cast all the votes. Let Republicans vote no. Repeat this every few months. Let Democrats take responsibility for everything!

For pure political artistry, I tip my hat. It is a brilliant partisan ploy. Last night a major Democrat called me and said: We won! I said, no, pal, it is a death trap. Oops.

McConnell's ploy is enticing. For Obama, the vanity play of a great victory must be tempting. For Democrats looking for what looks like an easy way to avoid a crisis, this must have appeal. Good thing the Tea Party members of the House aren't as smart as McConnell. They would rather walk into their own trap. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

Last week Lawrence H. Tribe, the professor of constitutional law at Harvard, wrote in The New York Times that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s suggestion that Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, known as the “public debt clause,” provides “false hope of a legal answer that obviates the need for a real solution.”

Week by week and month by month it has become increasingly clear that the suggestion by Jim Rogers, the legendary investor and co-founder of the Quantum Fund, that Geithner was a poor choice for the job because he “doesn’t know what he’s doing” was prescient.

There is one certain way to assure that our presidents act strictly in the public interest, and earn their honored place in American history: Limit presidential terms to one year.

Presidents could not be reelected, so incumbents would have no need to kowtow to special interests. The role of money in elections would be dramatically reduced, as the investment would become too transitory. Funding would be provided from public funds in equal (modest) amounts to candidates. Between transition-time and lame duck-hood, second-raters couldn’t do too much harm.

Marcos Cintron.
Brian Backus.
Alvin Boatright.
Edwaard Dixon.
James Harvey.
Josue Ibarra.
Tyler Kreinz.
Gustavo Rios-Ordonez.
Scott Smith.
Alan Snyder.
Jared Verbeek.

These are names of young Americans whose deaths were publicly announced the morning after President Obama’s message about our role in Afghanistan. President Obama has sacrificed their lives and others in a futile and extraordinarily expensive war. Ask their families if they think the president’s approach to troop withdrawal in Afghanistan is "balanced,” as advertised.