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View: Equinox and paradox
William B Milam
Daily Times
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009%5C09%5C30%5Cstory_30-9-2009_pg3_5
William B Milam is a senior policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington and a former
It is important to recognise that the
Fall seems to have come again this year in
This year the equinox brought us cooler and cloudy weather, more of a harbinger of the coming season than usual. President Obama's mood appears to have cooled and clouded also, although that was probably not caused by the equinox, but one has to wonder if his mood shift also signals stormier political weather. He began his counteroffensive on healthcare with a big speech to Congress even before the equinox, and has continued it with a media blitz that began last Sunday when he appeared on five morning talk shows. This would be a physically impossible feat for us ordinary mortals (assuming any of us would ever get invited on these shows anyway), but for a President who stays in one place and lets the shows come to him, it is doable.
Last month, I described the pervasive mood of distrust, uncertainty, fear, and frustration that I had sensed when my brother and I drove across the
This mood has created stiff resistance to the President's agenda for change, especially because the opposition seemed to have removed all barriers to hyperbolic discourse in their effort to inflict political defeat upon him. Despite his strong counteroffensive and appeals to reason and fact, which may be beginning to turn the tide on some issues, the general mood of the public on the macro level, i.e. the ability of government to play a positive role in their lives, remains ugly and resistant.
This mood is fed by changes that the public generally fears. First, the US economy has been changing fast — too fast perhaps for people to understand the reasons or direction — and this has, of course, been exacerbated greatly by the double whammy recession that has hammered the US in the past 18 months. In addition, two wars that the public disapproves of (Iraq for sure, and a growing unease about Afghanistan), generally inept performances in disaster situations such as Hurricane Katrina's inundation of New Orleans, and the huge pile of debt accumulated in the effort to overcome the recession as well as fight those wars, frighten the public and promote intense and shrill anger.
Hostility is mainly directed at the federal government, which is blamed for all these problems, and primarily at Congress, which is thought to be hopelessly corrupted by corporate money and unable because of "politics" to resolve any of the important issues that affect people's lives. (Obama, thus, retains a much greater popularity than Congress, but this does not appear to help him achieve his political objectives.)
This hostility builds on the reservoir of anger and distrust of
There is among the pundits a certain nostalgia for the "good old days" when things worked better and Congress could put aside its partisanship when it came to major political issues. The liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently looked back fondly to the days of Richard Nixon's Presidency (at the time, Nixon was considered a villain by the liberals) as a time when, at least, things got done through the system of political compromise and corporate money was less influential in policy decisions.
Krugman also noted a paradox, however, "
By micro level, I mean non-government, mainly local, efforts to improve the daily life of the American people, meet the daily challenges that confront them, take care of those who can't take care of themselves, and importantly promote better understanding and empathy among individuals and groups in our country.
In
Yet other friends and acquaintances work for environmental causes, from cleaning up toxic spills to preserving our wetlands, grasslands, forests, and wilderness. The list of micro activities performed voluntarily by American citizens in this country is probably longer than the drive I made across it.
I have seen films of interfaith gatherings promoted to bring those of different faiths together and increase their mutual understanding. Recently I watched the video that, I believe, was carried on GEO TV of an Iftar in
The point here is not to paper over the serious macro faults that have brought sclerosis to a once-effective political process. But it is also important to recognise that the
IN MEMORIUM: I cannot end this piece without mention of the sad news of the death of the three-time former Finance Minister of
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