In olden times things were different. David Halberstam opened The Best and the Brightest with a profile of one of the Wise Men of the old Democratic Party, Robert Lovett. Administrations came and went, but there were serious men, keepers of intergenerational wisdom, who provided adult supervision to callow newcomers. From the gross ineptitude of the Obama administration, it would appear that times have changed and the Wise Men have disappeared.

In interpreting Obama’s strange indifference to the stock market’s most recent crash, the choices are not happy ones. Either the man hasn’t a clue about what he is doing, or the market decline suits his purposes (as some have alleged). In either case it is bad news for America.

The really vexing thing is that the economy’s current problems aren’t all that hard to fix, though it is important to do so promptly, so that recovery from this nasty recession can take its normal course. We’ve been through business cycles before, and we’ll go through them again every decade or so. This one is principally unusual in that the Obama administration has dithered instead of fixing the banking system, which has caused unnecessary but serious problems.

The government really only has to do three things in order to let the economy recover as it can: (a) by far the most important task is to stabilize the financial system, which is actually quite easy to do, as history demonstrates; (b) enact a traditional recession stimulus instead of a peculiar boondoggle; and (c) inject some monetary and risk-taking juice into the system by extending the Bush tax cuts for a couple of years (instead of Obama’s extraterrestrial monstrosity of a budget). Some combination of the above have been traditional, bi-partisan medicine in recessions; why not one more time?

In being an effective executive, the number one prerequisite is often figuring out which of all the various elements before us are the important variables to manage. Choosing what to manage is usually the most critical thing of all. In the midst of a recession and financial institution meltdown, Obama has chosen to manage and promote irrelevancies like universal health care and global warming. That he has chosen sideshows rather than critical items bespeaks a man who is either a complete incompetent as an executive, or one who is so cloistered and ideologically blinkered that he can’t see the forest for the trees.

Obama is sometimes compared to FDR, but in a way he’s more like Herbert Hoover. The market crash and recession of 1929 did not have to become the Great Depression. The Depression happened because in the fall of 1930, the authorities started letting banks fail one after another. It was the failure to address this folly on Hoover’s watch that turned a normal business cycle into the Depression (Andrew Jackson had similarly bad judgment during his term.) Obama has that rare opportunity for a President to make a truly catastrophic mistake — and so far he has made the most of it.

It is obvious how to put the country on the road to recovery during this recession, and not very hard to do so. If it is so clear to us, surely it must also be clear to some senior Democrats who have lived a long enough life, studied some history, and have experienced some of the bitter and sweet in the world of commerce and affairs. So where are the Democrat Wise Men at this time when the need for them is critical?

The answer: in the first year of the Obama administration, the wise men have been unheeded on matters domestic and foreign.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 1:51 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Republicans, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.