Snippets of some good articles
FDR’s Lessons for Obama - David Ignatius, Washington Post
WASHINGTON — It may be the end of an economic era on Wall Street, as commentators have noted over the past few weeks. But it is not yet the beginning of a new political era in Washington. In that gap lies the opportunity for Barack Obama to explain to the nation how he proposes to make a new start.
The frantic debate over the $700 billion bailout plan has obscured the reality that a new framework for recovery will have to be built by the next administration. The crisis package is important, but it’s the political equivalent of an overnight loan, a short-term fix to keep the system functioning. The definition of the new era — the post-crash era — hasn’t really begun.
To win, Obama will need to give voters a clearer sense of how he will govern in this new era. He still talks like a lawyer, making debating points and rebutting arguments, but not explaining how he will rebuild a shaken and traumatized country. This “vision thing” will become all the more important in coming weeks, as the economic crunch moves from Wall Street to Main Street and the country begins to feel real pain.
Franklin D. Roosevelt is the obvious model for a new president taking office amid severe economic difficulty. But what are the lessons that FDR teaches?
The Speech John McCain Should Give - Rod Dreher, Dallas Morning News
My friends, I am neither young nor eloquent, handsome nor smooth. But I have lived a long life, much of it in service to America in war and in peace. And I have always stood for straight talk. There has been no time in our nation’s recent history when the American people more needed to hear the plain truth from their leaders. A fundamental reason our country faces economic catastrophe is that we have built our lives around running from truths about the American way of life.
Washington has run from the truth. Wall Street has run from the truth. And if we’re honest with ourselves, all of us have, in one way or another, run from the truth.
We have accepted the lie that we can live exactly as we want to live, with no concern for the consequences. We have taken the blessings of liberty and prosperity and turned them into a curse of debt slavery - bondage that will be visited on our children, and our children’s children, if we don’t change.
Everybody has a theory about how we got into this mess, and it’s usually one that absolves them and their party from blame. My friends, I’m here to tell you that this crisis is the Republicans’ fault. It’s the Democrats’ fault. It’s the fault of every one of us who believed in the fairy tale of a free lunch.
It’s time for all Americans to take responsibility for what we’ve done. It’s time for all Americans to pull together to help our families, our neighbors and our country through hard times.
Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain - Frank Rich, New York Times
We are not a nation of whiners, as Phil Gramm would have it, but the G.O.P. is now the party of whiners. That rebranding became official when Republican House leaders moaned that a routine partisan speech by Nancy Pelosi had turned their members against the bailout bill. As the stock market fell nearly 778 points, Barney Frank taunted his G.O.P. peers with pitch-perfect mockery: “Somebody hurt my feelings, so I will punish the country!”
Talk about the world coming full circle. This is the same Democrat who had been slurred as “Barney Fag” in the mid-1990s by Dick Armey, a House leader of the government-bashing Gingrich revolution that helped lower us into this debacle. Now Frank was ridiculing the House G.O.P. as a bunch of sulking teenage girls. His wisecrack stung — and stuck.
Palin is an antidote to the whiny Republican image that Frank nailed. Alaska’s self-styled embodiment of Joe Sixpack is not a sulker, but a pistol-packing fighter. That’s why she draws the crowds and (as she puts it) “energy” that otherwise elude the angry McCain. But she is still the candidate for vice president, not president. Americans do not vote for vice president.
So how can a desperate G.O.P. save itself? As McCain continues to fade into incoherence and irrelevance, the last hope is that he’ll come up with some new game-changing stunt to match his initial pick of Palin or his ill-fated campaign “suspension.” Until Thursday night, more than a few Republicans were fantasizing that his final Hail Mary pass would be to ditch Palin so she can “spend more time” with her ever-growing family. But the debate reminded Republicans once again that it’s Palin, not McCain, who is their last hope for victory.
You have to wonder how long it will be before they plead with him to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.
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