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When will our political leaders get real?
The Wall
Street Journal’s peerless Peggy Noonan asked that question
last weekend in a column that was circulated widely, and it is probably high
on the list of everyone else who cares about the state of the union For the
time being, unfortunately, far from facing up to The Great Recession, our
President has obsessed over “shaping a story” for the American
people, presumably to soften us up for whatever it is that Big Government
would purport to do next in our behalf. Mr. Obama went as far as telling an
interviewer, Confidence Men author Ron Suskind,
that dealing with the nation’s high unemployment had thus far failed
because of the complexity of the problem, but also because “we
didn’t have a clean story that we wanted to tell against which we could
measure various actions.” Come again? It wasn’t
“clean,” he explained, because “what was required to save
the economy might not always match up with what would make for a good
story.” Nothing like a good yarn to help get the jobless back to work.
Later in the interview, he amplified the point while inadvertently
underscoring the smallness of his presidency: “The irony is, the reason I was in this office is because I told a
story to the American people.” Ahhh, so
that’s what the hope and change thing was all about!
This fixation on what Noonan refers to as The
Narrative has got to stop, she says, since there really is no story:
“At the end of the day,” she writes, “there is only
reality. Things work or they don’t. When they work, people notice, and
say it.” Unfortunately, political leaders on both sides of the aisle,
unchallenged by a news media that is either too stupid or too lazy to deviate
from the party line, seem to think our problems can be solved by talking
about them and persuading Americans to see them in a certain way, rather than
by simply acknowledging what is and attacking the problems at
their source. No better example of U.S. politicians’ failure to face
reality could be cited than yesterday’s news that the Senate will seek
to sanction China with tariffs for allegedly manipulating its currency. The
senators, voting 79-19, would have us believe that a supposedly underpriced yuan is a significant cause of our economic woes. Just
what we need: a trade war with China! And has the Senate perhaps overlooked
the fact that the U.S. economy would have tanked – really
tanked — years ago if China, recycling its trade surplus, had not been
a promiscuous buyer of U.S. Treasury debt?
For sure, quite a few of the clowns taking up
space under the Rotunda are going to be swept out of office in 2012. Will
there be anyone to take their place with the courage to say what is,
and to act appropriately?
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