Fox & Friends to Start the Next Bad Year.
Spoke several times with the pleasant hosts Clayton, Gretchen and Dave of FNC's Fox & Friends on Friday January 2 morning and chose my best and worst and best political decision of the year. The best move was PE Obama choosing HRC to be Secretary of State. Pure A. Lincoln picks E. Seward,
1860. No disagreement on the set. The worst was Hank Paulson's decision (or non-decision) to let Lehman Brothers fail on the weekend of September 13 and 14 without a plan to offer the panicked markets on Monday the 15th. No one disagreed. "That was the when we lost all of everything," I said. The other segments were less ponderous. I spoke of Mr. Blagojevich's pick of Roland Burris to the senator from Illinois, I opined that it is the governor's right, and that there is no precedent for the Senate or the Congress to refuse a member who has no criminal problem. I also spoke of Mr. Obama and celebrity. The question was, would it hurt him? I opined that
2009 was going to be such a bad year that we needed all the celebrity we could find. I observed that Mr. Obama is "only a president" and that the world-wide problem is so wretched that a success for Mr. Obama on the cover of People was "good for us." (I also discovered in the experience of discussing the Obama presidency that there is no negative partisanship to debate. It may be because there is no partisanship. Fox chose a cheerful young person, Jennifer, as a "Democratic strategist" -- which means a person who votes Democratic -- to offer opinions from Washington. Her debating points struck me as moot, or perhaps old-fashioned. I found no energy in speaking against the new president. He is pleasant and earnest and needful. The
Blago/Burris story is part of Mr. Obama's unresolved problems with his Illinois record; yet to speak of it now seemed to me as a tangent. The only explanation I can find for this sense of disinterest on Fox's part and of mine is that our American part in the global economy is the only story and that the story is a thriller and a tragedy. Any elected or appointed official, any commentator, is an atom in the vastness of the troubles. Mr. Obama is "only a president." What happens next is what is happening now. Politicians and treasury officials and central banks are powerless, are pushing on a string. The credit markets are frozen. In the 1930s, when governments pushed into the private sector with big empty deficit spending, private investors and private enterprise stayed away. There was money to lend; no one much wanted to borrow. I hear anecdotes of much the same today. Few customers in the auto showrooms, fewer customers at the local banks, hard to find customers at the IPO bar. Credit? No thanks. This isn't entirely the future. It also describes 1933-1940 under FDF, and what ended the global credit freeze was a global war.
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