Ezra Klein nails the current crisis.  It’s not just economic, it’s political.

Above all, though, this is a failure of politics. Like with global warming, with health care, with the national debt, with immigration. It is further proof that we have a calcified political system incapable of responding to either long-term threats or short-term crises. The electoral and partisan incentives have made actual action too dangerous and rendered obstruction everyone’s easy second choice. And in politics, you just about never get your first choice. And so the Republicans killed this bill. Without their cover, the Democrats couldn’t save it, because politically, they couldn’t take ownership of it.

It’s easy enough to imagine a society running atop a stable economy even when it has an unhealthy politics. And it’s simple enough to see how an unstable economy can be calmed through concerted action by an effective political structure. But an economy in chaos and a political system in paralysis? What happens then?

What happens then, Ezra, is stalemate, crisis, disaster.  We’re entering territory we’ve only seen twice before in American history: 1859-1861, the greatest political crisis this country has ever seen, and 1929-1932, the greatest economic crisis this country has ever seen.

The only question is whether the next President can do what Lincoln and Roosevelt did:  provide the leadership necessary to end the crisis and get the United States back on track.

And which of our two current candidates does anyone seriously think can do that?

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Three observations about the current mess.

1.  Last night, Bush looked scared, lost, and out of place.  As my wife Molly put it, he was reading words put into his mouth rather than expressing his own thought.  For all our mocking of Al Gore as Mr. Roboto eight years ago, no President has ever looked as wooden as Bush did last night.

But it was not merely a question of performance.  Bush looked small — a sad little man out of his depth, more Willy Loman than Atticus Finch.  It was a pathetic exercise in ass-covering and special pleading.  Where others have risen to an occasion, Bush sank into the depths of his own failure.

2.  It is easy to regard our current mess as a question of insufficient liquidity.  Although the past two weeks’ event are clearly the product of the current Administration’s disastrous economic policies, what we’re really facing is a crisis in confidence.  That’s why the Paulson-Bernanke decision to turn this into one of the biggest crises in American history was so devastating:  it created the conditions for a collapse of confidence in the American economy.

If bankers continued to believe the economy was sound, they would lend.   If foreign investors still thought the United States as a good place to put their money, the failure of a few large firms would do no more harm to our economic prospects than the Chrysler bailout, the collapse of the savings and loan industry, or the Enron meltdown did.

Credit isn’t drying up because there’s no money; it’s disappearing because people are afraid — scared to lend, scared to buy, scared to do much of anything at all.  In the end, the Paulson plan (or the Dodd plan or any other proposal for that matter) will succeed or fail not because it pumps money into the system, but because it restores confidence.

What is required of leaders in times like this is not merely policy prescriptions, but also reassurance.  Think about 9/11.  For all we may despise him now, Rudy Giuliani — not Bush, I would note — demonstrated that kind of leadership.  For about a week, Giuliani became almost a second President, offering Americans the comforting words they so longed to hear — words that Bush, whether unwilling or unable, never himself got around to saying.

In the current crisis, we have yet to see anyone play a similar role.  Bush has been a disaster.  McCain’s abrupt decision to “suspend” his campaign looked more like political panic than economic stewardship.  Obama has been so cool, calm and collected that he looks detached.  Paulson and Bernanke have turned into the Panic Twins, and no one in Congress has stepped to the plate.

3.  I could not help contrasting Bush’s speech last night with one delivered during  an even greater crisis.  On March 4, 1932 (the official date of Inauguration Day had not yet been moved to January), Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his First Inaugural Address, three years after the Great Crash of 1929 had plunged the United States into the Great Depression.  It was a desperate time, far worse than what we face now (at least as of now), the country teetering on the edge of chaos, despair, and the collapse of democratic government.

In response, Roosevelt gave what is one of the greatest inaugural speeches in American history (surpassed, perhaps, only by Lincoln’s Second), helping to calm American fears and start the long hard road back to prosperity — a process that lasted until the end of  the Second World War, nearly sixteen years after the Great Crash.

Despite the fact that it would take over a decade for the United States to recover fully, Roosevelt’s speech that day was a turning point, if not in terms of economic growth, then in terms of Americans’ willingness to bear down and try to fix what was ailing the country — and in terms of saving our democratic form of government.

In this environment of fear and political posturing, I think it would be useful to recall what real leadership looks like.  The following are excerpts; you can read the entire speech here.

I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impel. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. . . . Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it.

Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. . . .The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live. . . .

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.

With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.

Action in this image and to this end is feasible under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors. Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations. . . .

For the trust reposed in me I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less.

We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of the national unity; with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral values; with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stern performance of duty by old and young alike. We aim at the assurance of a rounded and permanent national life.

We do not distrust the future of essential democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it.

So how about it Senator Obama?  If John McCain does not show up tomorrow night, it’s your chance to give a speech that could reassure the nation, one that would match if not surpasses the best you’ve given in the past.  It might do more to restore confidence than anything that’s happening in Washington.

And if that isn’t enough incentive, it also just might win the election for you.

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Take a moment to watch this clip.  It’s from an Obama town hall appearance yesterday in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

At first glance, it seems pretty good.  He says that “there should be no contradiction between keeping America safe and secure and respecting our Constitution.”  He gets in a good shot in about the need to catch the terrorists before you worry about what to do with them.  And he has a great line at the end:  “Don’t mock the constitution.  Don’t make fun of it!  Don’t suggest that it’s un-American to abide by what the founding fathers set up.”

Those are all good points.  The problem is that along the way, he violates two fundamental rules of messaging:

1.  Don’t use your opponent’s talking points to frame your arguments.  Obama did that on three occasions:

“Senator Obama is less interested in protecting people from terrorism than he is in reading them their rights.”

“You may think it’s Barack the bomb thrower, when in fact it might be Barack, the guy running for president.”

“The reason you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism.”

When you do this, you reinforce people’s preconceptions about you.  If folks are already inclined to worry about whether you’re the right guy, then what they’re going to hear is that Obama is soft on terrorism, has a Muslim name, and is interested in protecting the bad guys.

2.  Don’t try to convince people with facts.  Obama spends over a minute explaining the concept of habeas corpus.  He sounded like a professor.  Most people don’t have any idea what the words “habeus corpus” mean.  But they do understand the underlying principle:  that sometimes, our government makes mistakes, and we need rules to protect innocent people from being thrown in jail indefinitely.  They’ll understand that much more readily than talking about how this right goes back to before we were a country.

So what should have Obama said?  How about something like this:

You know, all of us want to be treated fairly.  You could say that’s the basic idea behind the Constitution and the Bill of Rights:  do unto others as you would have them do onto you.  In this country, we give people the chance to be heard. We promise them that they won’t be tortured.  We say to them that they have the right to prove that they are innocent of the charges against them, and that they don’t have to incriminate themselves.

These are our core values.  These are incredible gifts that the founding fathers gave to us.  And these are the very things that our opponents are now mocking.  How dare John McCain and Sarah Palin suggest that what was good enough for Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Benjamin Franklin isn’t good enough for us.

Other than our familes, our freedoms are the most precious thing we have .  They are what made this country great.  They are the promise that all men and women are created equal, that we are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and, as you said so beautifully, ma’am, that we are the sweet land of liberty.

John McCain and Sarah Palin, just like George Bush and Dick Cheney, want you to believe that our security is more important than our freedoms.  What you know and what I know — and what McCain and Palin and Bush and Cheney certainly should know is that we cannot have security without freedom.  We cannot have justice without freedom.  We cannot be America without our freedoms.

Those who suggest otherwise should be ashamed of themselves.

They should be ashamed for resorting to torture, for doing the very same things that John McCain himself suffered in Vietnam.  They should be ashamed for letting places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, instead of places like Farmington Hills and Peoria define who we are.  They should be ashamed for allowing waterboarding, beatings, sleep deprivation, and other techniques that we used to think only happened in places like Zimbabwe and Burma and Cuba.  They should be ashamed of themselves for believing that it’s all okay because the President can do anything he wants anytime he wants.

That’s not my America.  That’s not your America.  That’s not George Washington’s or Abraham Lincoln’s or Teddy Roosevelt’s or FDR’s or JFK’s or Ronald Reagan’s America.  Nowhere in our Constitution does it say the President can do anything he or she wants.  Nowhere.  That’s not Martin Luther King’s or Susan B. Anthony’s or Bobby Kennedy’s America.  That’s George Bush’s America.

It’s time we reclaim our heritage of freedom, our role as that shining city on the hill.  It’s time we say “not on our watch,” not here, not in Guantanamo, not anywhere.

It’s time that we say to Bush and Cheney and McCain and Palin and anyone else who supports them, we’re taking America back.  We’re taking America back to what it stands for.  We’re going to make America great again.  We’re going to be the America that respects people’s rights, that honors our core values, that draws so many people around the world to our shores.

Let’s start showing the world why we’re better than our enemies.  Let’s honor our founding fathers by returning to the values that make America America.

That would knock McCain and Palin on their butts.  It would force them to explain why they support the very torture techniques that  John McCain himself endured.  It would make them explain why they aren’t un-American.  It would require them to argue that they don’t want to destroy the Constitution or shred the Bill of Rights.  Tar them with every sin of the Bush Administration, and do it in a way that will leave them no space to reply except by repeating your arguments.

That, after all, is exactly what they’re doing to the Democrats.

So for crying out loud, Senator Obama, stop defending yourself and start attacking them.  It’s the only way you win.

P.S.  To my colleagues in the blogosphere and the mainstream media, this goes double for you.  Stop caring about how many times Sarah Palin lied about the bridge to nowhere and start talking about why Obama and Biden are the right choice. Stop parsing every lie that McCain and Palin tell and start talking about what their Administration would do to the country.  And if you can’t, then shut the hell up.

It’s the Dean Wormer Theory of Politics.  In Animal House, Dean Vernon Wormer tells Flounder, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”

In politics, defensive, bitter, and angry is no way to win an election. 

Related posts

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• The Manchurian President
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Assume for a moment that John McCain is a transitional figure, and that he will serve only one term if he actually does manage to get elected.  If that is true, where does the Republican Party go after he leaves office?

Sarah Palin represents a dead end for the Republicans.  A Palin candidacy in 2012 will be to the Republicans what George McGovern was to the Democrats:  a transitional, highly partisan individual who appeals to the base without significantly expanding it the way Reagan did.

To make an even more forced analogy, Palin is the Republicans’ Neil Kinnock, the Labor Party leader who preceded Tony Blair.  Kinnock was an old-school traditional Labor ideologue who helped solidify the base but could never translate that into electoral success.  It may be that Republicans have to go through a similar period where they enjoy the false comfort of an ideologue in charge, one who gets trounced regularly, before moving back to a centrist, more inclusive place in American politics.

To further strain the analogy to the breaking point, the fundamental question is who will be the Republicans’ Bill Clinton/Tony Blair/Bruce Cameron — the thoughtful, charismatic, and young centrist who pulls his/her party back into the mainstream of the political discourse.

Another way to look at it is that John McCain is to Ronald Reagan as John Major was to Margaret Thatcher:  the last exhausted gasp of a once-vibrant worldview.

There really are three types of political leaders in the United States:  base mobilizers (McGovern, Mondale, Bush II, Palin), centrists (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush I, Clinton, Dole, Gore, Kerry, McCain), and game-changers (FDR, Goldwater, Reagan, and perhaps Obama).

The problem for Republicans is that they will see Palin as a game-changer when in fact she is only a base-mobilizer. And with the (disastrous) exception of Dubya, most base-mobilizers don’t win elections.

Discuss.

Related posts

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Nate Silver over at 538.com has a terriffic and fun post in which he lists all the recent presidents and presidential candidates to which Barack Obama has been compared.  But why stop there?  I went to The Googles for a few minutes and this is what I found.

Let’s look at earlier Presidents, for example.  I started with two of the great ones — so great they have been immortalized in the Washington Nationals’ President Races.  Obama is the new…

Abraham Lincoln

• Tim Rutten
• Ken Burns
• Artist Ron English

Teddy Roosevelt

• Blog “The Edge of the West”
• Blog “Associated Content”
• Joshua Hawley in The Washington Independent

But let’s not limit ourselves to those parodied with life-sized puppets.  Obama is also the new…

Franklin Roosevelt

• Blog “South Puget Sound Libertarian”
• Michael Cohen

Okay, you get the idea.  Here are The Google’s search results for Obama and other Presidents (three regarded as great, and one, well, not-so-much).  Not every link is of the “Obama is the next…” variety, but there’s at least one in every search:

• George Washington
• Thomas Jefferson
• Woodrow Wilson (do these guys forget what an unrepentant racist Wilson was)?
  
• Warren G. Harding

I couldn’t find anything for James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore or Franklin Pierce, but I’m guessing that at this point, Obama has been compared to at least 50 percent of American presidents.  I would encourage someone else to do the research here.

But why stop at the prezzies?  Some on the right, as I noted in my post on Bush, the Chinese and torture, love to compare the latest Democratic Presidential candidate to the worst people in history (and to be fair, most of these guys would be on my list too).  Here are the search results for Obama and…

• Adolph Hitler
• Joseph Stalin
• Mao (including one that says Obama is Mao plus Hitler)
• Fidel Castro
• Che Guevara
• Karl Marx

I’m sure if I looked hard enough I could find comparisons with Chavez, Ahmedinijad, and other such worthies, but I started getting bored after the first six.

Then, of course there are the inevitable comparisons to the heroes of various popular movements, some for good, some for ill.  At least we can strike Jesse Jackson from this list:

• Martin Luther King
• Malcolm X
• Bobby Kennedy
• Nelson Mandela

But why stop there?  After all, for some Obama is, to paraphrase Depeche Mode, their own personal Jesus.  But it doesn’t stop at Christianity:

• Buddha
• Mohammed
  
• Shiva

And to cap it all off, here is my all time favorite.  Some wingnut over at Free Republic actually compared Barack Obama to…

• Mohammed’s horse

No I’m not making this one up — click on the link look for yourself.

Hey, I have an idea.  Barack Obama is like… wait for it…

• Barack Obama

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