Managerial Expertise, Yes! Vision and Leadership, Not So Much

There were two key passages in President Obama's speech last night, I think; one came near the beginning, the other near the end. First:

You know, for generations, men and women who call this region home have made their living from the water. That living is now in jeopardy. I've talked to shrimpers and fishermen who don't know how they're going to support their families this year. I've seen empty docks and restaurants with fewer customers--even in areas where the beaches are not yet affected. I've talked to owners of shops and hotels who wonder when the tourists will start to come back. The sadness and anger they feel is not just about the money they've lost. It's about a wrenching anxiety that their way of life may be lost. I refuse to let that happen. Tomorrow, I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company's recklessness.

Second:

For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we have talked and talked about the need to end America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires....[T]oday, as we look to the Gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude. We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash American innovation and seize control of our own destiny....Each of us has a part to play in a new future that will benefit all of us. As we recover from this recession, the transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of good, middle-class jobs--but only if we accelerate that transition....

Now, there are costs associated with this transition. And some believe we can't afford those costs right now. I say we can't afford not to change how we produce and use energy--because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater. So I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party--as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels....But the one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet. You see, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon. And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom. Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is our capacity to shape our destiny--our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we're unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don't yet know precisely how to get there. We know we'll get there.

What do I get out of these two passages? From the first, I get compassion, but a fairly narrow compassion, one that elicits a sense of determination more managerial than moral. What is at stake in the Gulf Coast right now, thanks to the unprecedented environmental catastrophe caused by the oil spill? An entire "way of life may be lost." How to conceptualize an enormity like that, address it, and respond to it? Obama chooses to do what, frankly, is the obvious thing to do in our complex, late capitalist world: issue checks. British Petroleum will be required to "set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company's recklessness." That some of the harm felt in the wake of this catastrophe may not be able to be strictly accounted for in terms of declining revenues and property values, that it may have at least as much to do with health and stability and beauty and history...well, unfortunately, BP and the government can't do anything about that. Which means, really, that neither agency can really get a handle on what it means to speak of a "way of life" at all. Ways of life are developed, one must suppose, by ordinary people over the ordinary course of time, something that has to happen completely separate from (though in the midst of) the foremost imperatives of our present economic and legal regimes: totaling up costs, assessing fines, and mailing out the compensation bonuses.

I'm not arguing that such an approach is wrong. On the contrary, while I recognize that the principle of damages and compensations, torts and liabilities can be abused, I'm more or less completely in favor of such, and will remain so as long as we live in the midst of economic and legal regimes which treat the natural environments within which people live and ways of life develop as property that corporations can buy, sell, develop, and abuse, within minimal democratic accountability to the communities their decisions affect. So yes, make BP pay! But at the same time, such an approach is profoundly limited. As my friend Nate Oman points out (though he comes at this from a very different direction than I), relying upon complaints and judgments fails to provide even the stability which private insurance supposedly can, and creates a "feast or famine" mentality which has problems all its own. Most importantly (and here I disagree with Nate's argument), talk compensation for corporate recklessness is, at best, a limited and secondary way to establish norms for civil discourse--by which I mean, the ability of people to talk to one another, learn from and lean upon one another, to take responsibility for and make authoritative decisions regarding the communities and environments (both civil and natural) within which they live. BP still has the power; they still have the deep-water wells; they're still the corporation (or one of them, anyway) which provides the jobs and the infrastructure and the wealth around which so much of life (again, both natural and civil) in the Gulf Coast has developed, and become dependent upon. All you're really doing is forcing the local boss (or bully, or big-time operator; take your pick) to shell out some extra change, to help you, the ones whose way of life was affected, to pick up the pieces (perhaps by picking up and moving on). Consider David Kurtz's thoughts:

The Gulf is not a pristine environment. If your only exposure to the Gulf has been on the beaches of Florida, you might convince yourself that the Gulf is a deep blue aquatic wilderness. But as you travel west, the beaches give way to the marshes of the Mississippi delta, which are crisscrossed by oil and gas pipelines, manmade canals, and flood control levees. Further west, in Texas, the beaches reemerge, but shipping canals, giant refineries, and petrochemical factories persist. Over the horizon, in the Gulf itself, thousands of oil and gas wells pump night and day....

The Deepwater Horizon disaster is as organic a product of human processes in the Gulf as Hurricane Katrina was a product of natural processes. Shipping, flood control, and natural resource extraction have taken a nearly century-long toll on the coast. The Gulf has been abused, exploited, fouled and taken for granted for so long and with such consistency that the shock and horror over this one incident becomes in its own way a salve for our consciences....The spill is...like the ruination an alcoholic leaves in his wake. You can clean up the mess, try to prevent it from happening again, and hope for the best. But as long as he's still drinking, disaster looms.

What would I have liked to hear from the president? Not necessarily more "anger"; anger is a limited rhetorical tool, and besides Obama clearly doesn't do it well. But, for better or worse, leadership in democratic politics (especially in mass polities like our own), is in part theatrical; it involves expressing themes and harnessing attention, so as to build passion and cultivate awareness, to enable citizens and voters to see themselves in an interconnected and responsible light. Moral breadth was called for. But in invoking the "way of life" of the Gulf Coast, and then making it, ultimately, about financial costs which must be paid, Obama made himself more narrowly into a smart, committed insurance actuary, rather than a leader trying to transform the debate.

Which is especially unfortunate, considering that the primary focus of the second (or actually third; talking about the mechanics of the clean-up came first) portion of this speech was exactly the aforementioned ruination which our society's oil addiction wrecks upon our lives. In that portion, he truly needed to holistically express the deeply entwined forces , expectations, worries and consequences which this disaster lays bear, not just for the Gulf Coast, but for the whole nation. But what I got from the second passage isn't much of this; what I got was mostly, again, technical determination and ambition, rather than a broad (encompassing both regrets and hopes) moral concern for what it really means to make wealthy, complicated, post-industrial society like our own capable of re-orienting its energy uses in profound ways. True, the president did talk about the "tragedy" in the Gulf of Mexico, and he did talk about the "costs" of transition. But mostly he was a booster, a calm and serious salesman of possibilities. Green communities, clean-energy jobs, American ingenuity, shaping our own destiny: all the usual highlights of America's famed self-confidence were there, expertly expressed. Ezra Klein and Bradford Plumer are far more conventional liberals than I, and even both of them listened to the president and heard mostly just the classic technical and managerial promises of pragmatic liberal governance: working hand-in-hand with business to make "clean energy profitable"; trusting that, with the right kind of public-private partnerships, "technology can come along and save us". Perhaps that's an unfair reading of Klein and Plumer, not to mention Obama. But the fact remains that, despite his very nice concluding words about the prayers being voiced for shrimping fleets throughout the Gulf region, Obama never demonstrated a conviction that his plans for an oil-spill free and less oil-addicted future might involve chastened rethinking, rather than just ambitious new thoughts.

I'm probably a broken record on this point, but at least I'm not alone. President Jimmy Carter, thirty-one years ago, took the high road, connecting the nation's at-that-time devastating energy crisis--a crisis which was generating profound despair and distrust about the fundamentals of the America's consumer economy, as well as opening a window to real rethinking of those fundamentals--to the need to struggle against a presumption of powerlessness, a presumption that the United States can't really govern itself, because the problems it faced were too complex and its people too selfish. It was a harsh speech, one that has been poorly (and unfairly) treated by history, one that had as it's most crucial element a degree of humility: specifically, a willingness to allow that America was doing some things wrong, and that resolving the crisis would have to involve change, not just going more or the same things in a more closely regulated, better funded, more determined way. If President Obama truly wants to change the debate, to introduce and reframe the many problems which this catastrophe as unveiled for the public at large, than he needed, I think, to show not just a mastery of all the ways in which people of good will and good ideas can come together to make business as usual a safer, fairer, better compensated and more trustworthy endeavor, as valuable as those things assuredly are. He needed to show, also, a recognition that "end[ing] America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels" really might involve altering, even repenting of, the way of life which sustains that addiction. But again, unfortunately, when Obama spoke last night of ways of life, he showed real compassion and devotion to repairing all the different compartments of it...but little vision of how it all comes together, and how the bad is dragged in along with the good. I wasn't looking for him to renounce or complain (Carter didn't either, at least not in his speech itself; I won't pretend to defend how he managed his affairs subsequently); I was hoping that he'd show some leadership in pointing out corrections which must be made, and not just repairs.

Wrong Lesson, Senator

Soon-to-be-former United States Senator from Utah, Bob Bennett, a three-term Republican senator who lost his party's nomination at the state GOP convention, has some thoughts for the Tea Party activists who beat the drums and brought out the delegates than ended his political career:

Jimmy Carter won the White House in 1976 by riding the wave of anger and disillusionment that followed Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. Carter tapped into that anger with the slogan "I will never lie to you."...Four years later, however, he was a political pariah. Voters embraced Ronald Reagan because he wasn't Jimmy Carter, proving that good slogans do not necessarily produce good government. Unlike Carter, Reagan had more than slogans. He came to Washington with a clear plan to revive the economy and overhaul the tax code, revitalize the military, and, most important, boost the national spirit....There's a profound lesson in this for the Tea Party movement.

Bennett compares the Tea Party movement to the same movement which Carter was able to tap into in the wake of the Nixon scandals. Like Carter (or as he presents Carter, anyway), Tea Party activists push their slogans--against government spending, against high unemployment, against a supposedly out-of-touch federal government--with a simplistic moral fervor. And Bennett doubts that such zealous slogans will add up to much when the time for governing comes...in the same way that, in his view, Carter's slogans didn't add up t much either.

[W]hen the new members of Congress whom these slogans elect in November take office, the question becomes: Will they be Carter or Reagan?...As president, Carter was downright depressing. His famous "malaise" speech warned us that America's best days were behind us and suggested that we are a country in irreversible decline. Too many Tea Party speeches sound the same note, even as they invoke Ronald Reagan's name. They are wrong to do so, in my view, because Reagan never lost his optimism and his hope for the future. He was elected because he was good at slogans, but he succeeded as president because he focused on solutions.

I urge all of the Tea Partyers to follow Reagan, not Carter. If they want their movement to be more than a wave that crashes on the beach and then recedes back into the ocean, leaving nothing behind but empty sand, they should stop the "gloom talk." These are not the worst times we have ever faced, nor is the Constitution under serious threat....After all, we survived Jimmy Carter, didn't we?

Ha! Nice last shot there, Senator! I think it completely misses the reality of the historical record, though.

Bennett refers to Carter's famous speech (in which the word "malaise" never appears, by the way); I wonder whether he's ever read it. Yes, it's almost certain too pious, too earnest, to be taken seriously as a piece of presidential rhetoric (though, as I and others have defended the speech before, the fact is it was taken seriously, for a short time at least). However, the larger point is that, even if it was the case (and I would argue that this is a debatable point, but let's assume it for now) that Carter's moralistic approach to leadership was shallow and simplistic, his speech wasn't; on the contrary, the speech reflected a historically sensitive and brave willingness to confront difficult intangibles effecting America's civic culture, and called upon Americans everywhere to confidently shoulder the responsibilities of truly pursuing a common good. He said:

I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might. The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence....The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America....Confidence in the future has supported everything else--public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations....

Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy....In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us....[T]here is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning....

We know the strength of America. We are strong. We can regain our unity. We can regain our confidence. We are the heirs of generations who survived threats much more powerful and awesome than those that challenge us now. Our fathers and mothers were strong men and women who shaped a new society during the Great Depression, who fought world wars, and who carved out a new charter of peace for the world. We ourselves and the same Americans who just 10 years ago put a man on the Moon. We are the generation that dedicated our society to the pursuit of human rights and equality. And we are the generation that will win the war on the energy problem and in that process rebuild the unity and confidence of America.

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure. All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our Nation and ourselves.

Frankly, I would be delighted if the Tea Party activists did talk like this; it would be wonderful to discover that, in fact, at least some of them really did talk like Carter spoke, rather than the equally simplistic, equally moralistic--even by "conservative" measurements!--slogans that Reagan himself used repeatedly. And perhaps there are many such activists out there. But instead, at least on the basis of those activists making their voices most clearly heard, what we see in the bulk of those involved in Tea Party protests--and those challenging decent, responsible, establishment Republicans like Bennett--is something very far from the earnest lessons of Carter's focused examination of America's character (however poorly he himself executed those lessons). Instead, it is a lesson which teaches the value of a context-free, tantrum-prone, angry confidence in individualism--and therefore, a rejection of the compromises inherent in responsible democratic government. Mark Lilla described this aimless libertarianism as representing "a new political type: the antipolitical Jacobin. The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—-and unwarranted—-confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers."

Surely, this isn't the gloom which Bennett (wrongly, I think) attributes to Carter; rather, it's downright...Reaganesque. If nothing else, it wasn't the spirit of Carter's moral seriousness which resulted in Bennett losing his job; it was the spirit of someone who was convinced, unreasonably, that anyone in government must be part of the problem. Bennett, far from encouraging those who come after him to adopt the attitude of his Republican hero, ought to be encouraging them to think twice about the insight of the man he beat.

Why Kick Carter?

Yesterday, The New Republic featured both Marty Peretz and Damon Linker dumping on Jimmy Carter's nortorious "Crisis of Confidence" speech (better known as the "Malaise" speech). It's an easy speech to pick on--just reading it, or watching it--makes it clear that Damon is only exaggerating slightly when he calls it "mawkish, hectoring, self-pitying, maudlin, self-righteous, undisciplined." So fine--he was a crummy speaker, with poor body language and a sermonizing mentality that never did, and probably never will, come across well for American television audiences. But why the insistence that said speech was Carter's "most pathetic moment"? Despite Peretz's and Linker's mocking of attempts to defend the speech by those who helped write it, the assessment of the speech by those who heard it actually received seems to counter their essential claims. Polls showed that majorities of the American people considered it a strong and brave speech, not a weak one. (The historical record makes it pretty clear, I think, that when pundits at the time started to write their epitaphs for the Carter presidency, they did it because Carter was--as ever--disorganized and judgmental in the wake of speech, asking his entire Cabinet to resign and issuing a barely concealed "loyalty oath" to those that remained, not because of the message of the speech itself.) Peretz seems particularly concerned that the speech--with its willingness to talk about crises, struggles, and the need for sacrifice--did nothing to arm America against the reign of ayatollahs which came to confront our foreign policy in the late 1970s (and still confront us today); while for Damon, the problem really just boils down to Carter making himself look dour and serious and Eeyore-ish, just in time for Reagan to come along to kick his butt. They're both talking about political power and influence, in other words--the ability to confront and sway political opponents and enemies, the ability to win political elections. President Carter gave a speech that wasn't about power and influence, but rather was about the "realities of responsibility, "the need for radical change," and a condemnation of "the debilitating effects of self-centered divisiveness," in former speechwriter Gordon Stewart's words. It was, in other words, as I've written before (in contrast to Obama's rhetoric), humble. And as humility rarely wins elections or brings one's adversaries pliantly to the negotiating table, what good is it for a president? Ergo, the speech was a terrible, joke-worthy failure. Carter's Sunday school moralism has brought out Damon's and Peretz's inner Machiavellis, that's all.

Well, they aren't alone, and I suppose they aren't necessarily wrong either, depending on how you look at it. Presidents are supposed to be effective leaders, not inspired prophets, and while I wouldn't necessarily claim Carter was entirely the later, he certainly wasn't the former. He shouldn't have run for president; he probably shouldn't have gone the political route at all, at least not beyond the smaller regional and cultural environment where his moralistic tendencies were better accepted. But like Rod Dreher and a few others whose conservatism is so radical that they're actually on the left rather than the right (whether they realize it or not), not to mention open-minded liberals like Ezra Klein, I think Carter, and this speech, can both be best understood in light of the effort to get Americans to think about thrift, conservation, and sacrifice--principles that we'll always need, even if we shouldn't be in the habit of expecting presidents to be able to give them to us.

Defending Malaise (or, Lenten Thoughts on Obamanomics)

The reaction I seem to be reading everywhere (try here and here and here) is that Obama's speech last night was, above all, "ambitious" and "serious" and all about "getting down to business." For myself, I confess I liked it--liked it very much. I liked the focus on job, energy, health care, and education, in that order. I liked that he began with a big slab of honesty:

[W]e have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.

I liked his smart, succinct description of why lending has become crucial to the modern capitalist society, and thus why the credit crisis matters to ordinary Americans who don't have a thing to do with the world of high finance:

The ability to get a loan is how you finance the purchase of everything from a home to a car to a college education; how stores stock their shelves, farms buy equipment, and businesses make payroll. But credit has stopped flowing the way it should. Too many bad loans from the housing crisis have made their way onto the books of too many banks. With so much debt and so little confidence, these banks are now fearful of lending out any more money to households, to businesses, or to each other. When there is no lending, families can't afford to buy homes or cars. So businesses are forced to make layoffs. Our economy suffers even more.

And most of all, I liked his short, powerful history lesson about the relationship between government and the common good of all:

I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves; that says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity. For history tells a different story. History reminds us that at every moment of economic upheaval and transformation, this nation has responded with bold action and big ideas. In the midst of civil war, we laid railroad tracks from one coast to another that spurred commerce and industry. From the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution came a system of public high schools that prepared our citizens for a new age. In the wake of war and depression, the GI Bill sent a generation to college and created the largest middle-class in history. And a twilight struggle for freedom led to a nation of highways, an American on the moon, and an explosion of technology that still shapes our world. In each case, government didn't supplant private enterprise; it catalyzed private enterprise. It created the conditions for thousands of entrepreneurs and new businesses to adapt and to thrive.

So all together I should be delighted with this near-comprehensive, thoughtful, and pretty straightforward and unapologetic defense of progressive political solutions to our problems. And certain I am delighted that this was the speech given by our president, and not the one given by Governor Jindal (about whose atrocious response to Obama I will say nothing, and just let Jindal's own fans tear him apart). Still, I'm little troubled, and I think it has to do with the day.

The complaints of various secularist and atheist malcontents aside, we're not a Constantinian nation--and even if we were, even moderately so, the civic religion around which American policies and holidays and expectations might be formulated probably wouldn't reflect the specifics of traditional Western Christian rites; we're too Protestant and evangelical for all that. But still, it struck me as incongruent that the morning after Obama's speech was Ash Wednesday and the beginnings, for many believers anyway, of Lent, a period of repentance, sacrifice, and humility, in preparation for Easter. Say what you want about Obama's speech, and its aims and its determination--one thing it definitely wasn't was humble.

Is humility something that we should want at the present moment? Strictly speaking, seeing as how modern finance and entrepreneur capitalism depends so much on investor confidence and a willingness to take risks, perhaps not. But I can only see that as unfortunate, because I think we could use a little bit more chastisement, a little bit more penitence, than Obama's expansive determination to see America recover and grow and achieve allows. In the end, his vision is not, despite what some may say, a particularly populist one, at least not if one takes populism seriously; condemning "CEOs [who]...use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks or buy fancy drapes or disappear on a private jet," does not translate into a focus on collective economic empowerment and local cultural enrichment. Rather, Obama's vision is a progressive one, one that insists that government investment and oversight can help individual Americans achieve--or get back to, depending on how you look at our economic history--full and equal "responsible" participation in the credit-driven world of opportunity which a healthy, diverse, technologically advanced economic environment makes possible. That's hardly a bad thing; as I've said before, the compromises with the power of capital and the individuating force of the market (both of which are arguably all the greater is a large, pluralistic, mobile country like our own) which the Progressives historically made are perhaps the most sensible kind of responses that can be made to our present socio-economic and political moment--assuming, that is, that you value the communitarian principles and virtues which a certain form of progressive, egalitarian participatory policies at least potentially seems to support. And I believe that Obama is, sometimes anyway, aware of and sympathetic to that point; hence his invocations of parental responsibility and charter schools and national service legislation. Still, I think I think the speech would have been bettered--I think we would have been bettered--if its ambitious progressivism acknowledged some real limits, and the value of humbling ourselves and sacrificing part of our ambitions to them.

As a speech or a program, of course, the route of "humility" and "limits" calls to mind President Carter's infamous "Malaise Speech"; the way that speech was--unfairly!--interpreted and responded to might seem to argue against any kind of humility in presidential rhetoric. And maybe so; humility, in the modern world, is mostly a personal, moral, and religious concept, and the modern presidency is not constructed to be a forum for therapists or prophets. But still, consider some of the language of Carter's speech, and how it might well have integrated with Obama's:

As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past. In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose....There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure. All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values.

Too subjective, too spiritual, too earnest? Perhaps. But Obama has already demonstrated his facility with the language of "service, sacrifice, duties, the common good, responsibility, citizenship"; why not extend his criticisms of bankers who lent money frivolously, of neighbors who bought homes they could never pay for, of corporations who pushed against any kind of regulation of their transactions, a further reflection on how American habits of consumption and self-interest make it hard for us to recognize the malaise and cynicism and uncharitableness that frequently, in good times as well as bad--but particularly during bad--takes hold of us all. Perhaps that would have undermined his ambitious tone, somewhat. But then again, a little Lenten humility, a little guilty and self-critical awareness, can go a long way to lifting one's seriousness of purpose into something more than determination--something that makes the goal into more than just getting back on track, but rather into an invocation of a different, better track. A steadier track, a less self-interested track. (For a national market economy, you ask? Well, it's not as though alternate models aren't available...)

But maybe this is all asking too much; maybe I'm letting the day and all sorts of other crisis-related thoughts get in the way of my thinking, making me wish that what was in essence a State of the Union address--and a very fine one at that--was something like Lincoln's Second Inaurgural. Which is silly, I suppose. Obama's a progressive politician, and on the basis of the past month or so, a very good one. I hope he keeps it up. Hoping for more than that may not be a bad thing, but it is, perhaps, a somewhat unreasonable...maybe even "ambitious" thing. In which case, perhaps I need to do some repenting myself.