An historical analogy?
Richard Fernandez talks about Waterloo, Moscow, Obama, and healthcare:
Health care is not Obama’s Waterloo. Waterloo was Napoleon’s last gasp. Obama is still moving forward, albeit much more slowly than just a few months ago. 2009 is not yet Obama’s 1815. A better analogy is 1812: the year of Napoleon’s arrival in Moscow, when his army seized the capital he long desired only to find he could not loot it of enough to sustain his men. “La Grande Armée, that set its position in a military camp manner and was carelessly looting sellable valuables, had also its share of responsibility: many buildings caught fire from bonfires they made for cooking.”
Having stripped everything before it like a swarm of locusts, La Grand Armee was forced to return the way it came, over the same landscape it had picked clean. Tolstoy denied that Napoleon had been defeated by the strategic generalship of his opponents; he was simply beaten by harsh arithmetic of nature and of negative sums and by his own hubris. In his ambition, Napoleon forgot that conquest was not the same thing as governance…
If Obama’s victories — the stimulus, bailouts, cap and trade and now health care — are from another point of view, a kind of looting, then he may have arrived at the point where there is nothing more to loot. Like Napoleon, the capital is his, but it lies in ashes, unable even to sustain his victories.
From one perspective, the Obama administration’s insistence on quick enactment of the stimulus, cap and trade, and healthcare makes great sense, and so Obama is willing to say the craziest things if it only helps accomplish the goal. But what if a majority wakes up a little early and doesn’t take kindly to its pocket being picked? It’s a pity the Republican party is so worthless at the moment that it can’t seem to capitalize on the great opportunity that Obama is creating.
July 26th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
It’s not that the Republican party is worthless; it’s that the same ruling class that peoples the Democratic party makes up the ranks of the Republicans too. Our political leaders are so distracted by the opportunity of enriching themselves they forget (if they ever knew) why they were elected in the first place. Term limits are looking better all the time, but they don’t seem to work out very well where they have been instituted. F
July 27th, 2009 at 7:41 am
I came to offer much the same point that F makes in his/her comment. The incentives for all politicians is to get reelected and gain power. The mechanism for that is to “buy” votes with taxpayer funds for voter constituencies and to “buy” campaign contributions with subsidies and regulatory protection. The targets for these actions may differ – small-medium business and religious voters for Repubs and minorities, lawyers, unions and the over-educated for Dems – but the objective is electoral success. One might argue that favoring one of these set over the other will produce better results and commit fewer mistakes, but the rules of the game are known and understood by both sides. As I see it what we are witnessing is the collapse of the Welfare State model of government, i.e. we are burning the last remaining bits of “Be All, Do All” government furniture right now. “Recovery” and “green shoots” are illusions until the debt bubble (private, financial and GOVERNMENT) is well and truly popped with asset values reverting to the mean and the demographic transformation (consuming and investing Boomers to penny pinching retirees) is nearing its end. Neither party appears able to comprehend what is taking place, let along offer a compelling roadmap for structural transformation. Where do we go once “the capital is in ashes”? Interesting times.