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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And Peggy ought to know all about The Narrative, since she helped spin one for The Great Prevaricator (aka Ronald Reagan).