I miss Bill Clinton
“The biggest long-term threat is that people are becoming and have become disheartened,” said Peggy Noonan in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal editorial (click here). On this point, I think she’s right. This economic disaster is more massive than anyone in modern history has ever dealt with; it is and will be hard. But economics is largely about psychology, and I don’t feel like our primary leader, President Obama, is much of a cheerleader.
Yesterday, Mr. Obama said, without cracking a smile in five minutes and twenty one seconds, “today, I’m pleased to offer some better news. While not a cause for celebration, it is certainly reason to believe that we are moving in the right direction.” Oh, wow. That sounds great. I can’t wait to break ground on that new factory I was thinking about. Mr. Obama didn’t stop there. He went on to give me a dry, boring explication of the gross domestic product and our economy with incessant reminders, qualifiers, and equivocations that times are going to be hard in the future.
I miss Bill Clinton. He made me feel good about America. He made me feel like we were going somewhere, and that I was playing on the winning team. He made me want to invest in the future, made me want to take a risk. Compared to Clinton, President Obama feels like he’s simply the Analyst in Chief.
Oh, I know he’s doing great work in the face of a massive disaster. I just want him to do it with a smile. I want him to remind me that America’s best days are still in front of it. I think it would make his job a lot easier.
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