Steady on the rudder

Just a brief comment on the week's political news. Political writers are now filling the news pages with their analyses of "What Went Wrong?" Has the country become a nation of "tea partiers"? Is Obama's presidency a disaster to the Democratic party? Can Obama win re-election? Will Obama even be renominated? Will the party turn now to Hillary? (She says, by the way "not interested.")

Look: There were plenty of commentators who, before the 2008 election, wondered whether a win in 2008 wouldn't be a Pyrrhic victory for whichever party won. The economy was in free fall, and no one expected a significant recovery before 2010, maybe even 2012. The party in power would be blamed in 2010. Furthermore, Obama campaigned on a specific platform in 2008, which included health care reform as a major plank. He indicated from the outset that he was more concerned with accomplishing the goals for which he'd campaigned than he was in winning re-election in 2012.

He's done as much to accomplish those goals as the most partisan Congress in modern history has permtted. No, he hasn't returned the country to pre-2008 prosperity. But he has prevented the country from falling into a depression. (And, by the way, if you think our citizens today face anything like the hardships of the 1930's, you'd better go back and read your history.) He has prevented the collapse and/or nationalization of the banks, and has saved the auto industry from collapse.

I predict that historians, with the advantage of hindsight, will judge his first two years as one of the most successful of any president in modern times.

So let's all just calm down and see what happens next. If the Republicans adopt a newly conciliatory approach to government, the country will be in much better shape in two years. In that case, Obama will be re-elected, and we probably will have a Congress fairly evenly balanced between the parties, along natural philosophical lines. If, as now appears more probable, the Republicans are guided instead by "tea party" philosophy and by a predominant desire to hurt Obama politically, the country probably still will recover. All economic indicators are on the upswing; employment, although a trailing indicator, is already showing weak signs of improvement. The voters will be less upset by the economy, and will increasingly view the Republican party as a group of idealogues, uninterested in pragmatic approaches to public policy, opposed to the welfare of the average citizen, and motivated solely by political objectives.

Obama has done what the voters in 2008 asked him to do. But having a job is always an adult's primary concern, and voters may feel -- with some justification -- that other goals should have been subordinated to a governmental attack on unemployment. When they discover that the Republican economic approach is not to fight harder against unemployment, but to return to "trickle down economics" -- let's give the rich lots of money, and, with luck, some day the rest of you will get a little extra in your paycheck -- I don't think they'll be impressed.

In politics, as in life itself, things are never as good or as bad as they seem at the time. Let's wait this one out and keep our composure.