There’s a story that went around Washington back in the early 1960s that President John F. Kennedy, shortly after his swearing in, was sitting in the Oval Office with brother Bobby. With the campaign, the election and the inauguration over, JFK looked at Bobby and said, “Now what do we do?”
Fast forward 48 years. The ceremony, the witness to history, the most celebrated presidential inauguration in recent memory is over. Now what does Barack Obama do?
That’s the dilemma facing President Obama this morning. And, so far, there are not a lot of specifics on the table.
There is a lot of symbolism connected with the Obama presidency; racial, generational, ideological. He’s the first African American president, a younger-than-usual president and one of the most left-leaning presidents ever.
We acknowledged the first two on Tuesday. But it’s the third characteristic that will truly shape his presidency and, by extension, the nation over the next four years and perhaps the next eight.
When he served in the Senate, Barack Obama was described as that body’s most liberal member. He has made no secret about how he will not hesitate to use the government to right what he sees as the wrongs of society.
To the more conservative among us, these are warning bells. Even Republicans have recently been lured into the big government trap; the temptation to be perceived as the savior of the nation by throwing tax dollars at problems.
The current economic crisis, made worse by the media Chicken Littles who insist that the financial sky is falling, is a perfect opportunity for the let’s-throw-tons-of-cash-up-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks crowd. A trillion dollars goes a long way when you try to make you and your allies the saviors of the nation. The fact that it’s our trillion dollars and there’s no guarantee that any of this economic stimulus spending will do much good doesn’t seem to make much difference to the big spenders.
After all, the patron saint of all liberals, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, took the same tactic with the mother of all economic disasters: The Great Depression. He was a hero to millions for throwing money at the problem.
Despite that, it didn’t work. After an initial drop in unemployment, the nation remained mired in the Depression. The only thing that pulled us out of it? World War II.
Locally the trillion-dollar cash grab has folks lining up at the federal trough. Niagara County Community College has put in for money to, among other things, reforesting its Sanborn campus. How that will stimulate the economy is beyond me. But when Uncle Sam solicits proposals to waste our tax dollars, you can bet there will be a whole lot of people and organizations willing to offer suggestions.
Obama’s election and ascendance to the presidency is the strongest signal that the pendulum of American politics has swung sharply to the left. It happens. People, for whatever reason, become disillusioned with the current status and vote for change.
But that doesn’t mean national opinion won’t swing the other way. How long it will take for disillusionment with Big Brother and Big Government to take hold is anyone’s guess. But, once it does, it won’t likely take long for the winds of change to push the political pendulum in the opposite direction.
Dick Lucinski is the managing editor of the Niagara Gazette.
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