A president has only so much capital to
expend, both in tax dollars and public tolerance, and Barack Obama is
dangerously overdrawn. He has tried to have it all on three fronts, and
his administration is in serious danger of going bankrupt. He has
blundered into a deepening quagmire in Afghanistan, has continued the
Bush policy of buying off Wall Street hustlers instead of confronting
them and is now on the cusp of bargaining away the so-called public
option, the reform component of his health care program.
Those are not happy sentences to write for
one who is still on the e-mail list of campaign supporters urged to
back the president in the face of attacks that are stupidly
small-minded. But to remain silent about his errors, just because most
of his critics are so vile, is hardly an example of constructive
concern for him or the country.
Yes, Obama was presented with a series of
crises not of his making but for which he is now being held
accountable. He is not a "socialist" who grew the federal budget to
astronomical proportions. That is the legacy of George W. Bush, who
raised the military budget to its highest level since World War II
despite the end of the Cold War and the lack of a formidable military
opponent- a legacy of debt compounded by Bush's decision to first
ignore the banking meltdown and then to engage in a
welfare-for-Wall-Street bailout. And it was Bush who gave the
pharmaceutical companies the gift of a very expensive government
subsidy for seniors' drugs.
But what is nerve-racking about Obama is
that even though he campaigned against Bush's follies he has now
embraced them. He hasn't yet managed to significantly reduce the U.S.
obligation in Iraq and has committed to making a potentially costlier
error by ratcheting up America's "nation-building" role in
Afghanistan.
Just as he was burdened with the
Afghanistan situation, Obama was saddled with a banking crisis he
didn't cause, and the worst that can be said of his attempted solutions
to the financial mess is that they were inherited from Bush Treasury
Secretary Henry Paulson. But Obama, who raised questions before his
election about the propriety of a plan that would rescue the banks but
ignore the plight of ordinary folks, has adopted that very approach as
president. He elevated Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, the two
Democrats most closely aligned with Paulson's policy, to top positions
in his government.
Obama's proposed new regulations, while
containing some kind words about better informing consumers, do not
portend any breakup of the "too big to fail companies" whose problems
were permitted to fester by previous deregulatory measures. His answer
is to increase the regulatory capacities of the Federal Reserve, which
failed to use its already existing and considerable powers to avoid the
debacle.
The
promise is that next time the Fed will behave better. As Obama put it
Monday, "So our plan would put the cost of a firm's failures on those
who own its stock and loaned it money. And if taxpayers ever had to
step in again to prevent a second Great Depression, the financial
industry will have to pay the taxpayer back every cent."
Why not now? And why has he accepted the
Wall Street line that all this represents a "collective failure," as if
the con men and the conned had equal responsibility? According to
Obama, "It was a failure of responsibility that led homebuyers and
derivative traders alike to take reckless risks that they couldn't
afford to take. It was a collective failure of responsibility in
Washington, on Wall Street, and across America that led to the
near-collapse of our financial system one year ago."
Hogwash. The chicanery of the financial
system, securitizing highly suspect mortgages, was codified into laws
that made the hustle legal.
That insistence on equating the swindled
with the swindlers is also what is wrong with the evolving health care
reform plan. The assumption from the beginning, when Obama reached out
to insurance companies to come up with a deal, was that they had the
interest of their customers at heart. They don't, and it is the purpose
of government regulation in the area of health as well as banking to
even the scales between the powerful corporations and the consumers
from whom they profit. That is the purpose of a public option worth its
name.
Without a government program as a check on
medical costs, Obama will end up with a variant of the Massachusetts
program, one that forces consumers to sign up with private insurers and
costs 33 percent more than the national average. He will have furthered
the Bush legacy of cultivating an ever more expensive big government
without improving how the people are served.