The Nobel Year of Hope

Barely escaping financial ruin this year, while millions of my fellow Americans have not,I have resolved this year to be optimistic about the state of our union.

Thousands of people standing in the bitter cold of an Oslo night cheered an American President as he stood at the window of the Grand Hotel. Previously that day, President Obama channeled the thoughts of my grandfather's friend and colleague Reinhold Neibuhr, the theologian and philosopher who influenced George Kennen and Arthur Schlesinger,Jr. among others. Gone was the pre-emptive war doctrine of the Bush Administration, which broke all American tradition and back came the Just War Doctrine, much to the dismay of the Left. Conservatives paid grudging respect to the President's speech with the exception of people like Liz Cheney, who felt the President slandered the CIA by mentioning torture and his decision to close Gitmo.

Like everything with the Cheneys' irony is rich. Dick Cheney spent alot of the last Administration slandering the CIA for its intelligence on Iraq and Al Qaeda, even standing over the Inspector General as he wrote the torture report.

But the Nobel day was a singular triumph for the man of color who won the Presidency in a land historically plagued by racism. The Nobel Prize Committee was too polite to mention this as a reason for the award but it hovered in their comments on Martin Luther King,Jr. prize in 1964. The President remarked that those struggling for human rights and democracy had history and justice on their side but most importantly he changed the text to read "have us on their side." Americans should take pride that the world does want and need a vibrant America committed to its ideals. Unfortunately for conservatives, President Obama gave a full-throated defense of our history and what we have meant to the history and security of the world.

A couple weeks in Africa obviously didn't tame the Crazy Town of American politics. I won my bet that I would receive anti-Obama e-mail on Thanskgiving--not 1 but 3 on a holiday. The distemper seems to be spreading from the Right to the Left as now progressives claim the President has sold out. What exactly isn't clear? He campaigned on escalating in Afghanistan and his health care reform closely follows where the bill is ending up. Despite the conservative smears against him, Obama has never been a pacifist, in fact campaigning on a tougher policy against terrorism than the Bush-Cheney Administration and has never been for a single-payer system for health care. He did promise reform of our financial system, which the House has passed and the Senate, if it overcomes its current strange interlude of morphing into the Senate that blocked civil rights reform, will deliberate early next year. As I wrote before Health Care Reform,Immigration Reform and Financial Reform are about all Obama is going to get in the first term. We have seen how well-funded the entrenched financial interests in the country are in preventing any reform whatsoever.

American corporations are now sitting on $7 trillion in cash, which is waiting to be invested. To their shame, GOP Senators are telling corporations to wait up until Republicans come back into power on the Hill. Frankly, I think the pressures of the economy are going to force the companies to break before then. In the next week, President Obama will lean on the banks to lend to small businesses who have been crushed by the drought in credit. His additional tax credits for small businesses who hire at welcomed but we've seen that tax cuts at this late stage of diminishing effect on the economy.

Republicans are raving that their policy of obstruction will pay off big-time in the 2010 mid-term elections. Since any out-party is supposed to pick up between 15-20 House seats and 3 Senate seats, some of this cheerleading might be to rally the troops. But there is some reason to feel that Republicans--if they were the party they once were--would do well. Mid-term elections have about a 37 percent turnout and the only demographic where republicans have a plurality--those 60 or over--tend to vote at 65% levels. Young people and minorities barely vote in a non-presidential year, which is what Republicans are banking on--the manufactured outrage of white senior citizens to fuel their comeback.

Republicans point to the Pew poll, which shows that 40% of Americans classify themselves as conservatives. But there is nothing conservative about teabaggers or people who liken the President to Adolf Hitler. I wonder whether these antics might turn off traditional Republican voters, who may be worried about the deficit but haven't seen any deficit cutters in Republican ranks for decades and don't think helping people out during a very severe recession is a sin. Ultimately, politics is very social. In some ways, it's about who you would like to hang out with. Can you imagine spending the night out with Senators Grassly, Coburn or the teabaggers Hoffman or even the Tan Man Bohner? To many that make one's skin crawl.

With Copenhagen upon us, the global climate change deniers are at full throttle. Even if man has little to do with the dramatic change in climate, it seems rather prudent to take all measures to lessen its damage on the planet. Conservatives claiming that these are natural historical changes miss the point that such dramatic changes in the past occurred when Planet Earth was inhabited by bllions of people less than today. Unless you want the entire American budget to be devoted to FEMA over the next decade, it seems sensible to cut back on CO2 emissions and adopt the new technologies of solar, wind, thermal and electrical energy generation. In the past, when protestant were rather dull and mainstream and didn't dream of Rapture, the religious duty was to be a good steward over Planet Earth and creation. Climate change is already putting pressure on water and food supplies as well as generating human migration which taxes the resources of host countries. At a smaller scale,these disruptions provoke local wars and conficts. Just from the point of view of national security, this phenomenon deserves political attention.

While people point to Oslo as one of President Obama's major speeches, I still bank on his MIT speech and the Brookings Institute's speech on the Economy and Jobs. Buried in the stimulus package was the largest financial commitment to scientific research and technology in the history of the world. From the current economic ruins, the seeds are being put in place for the development of a new economy. The Administration unfortunately calls it the Green Economy, which makes it sound all soft and ecologically political correct.

It is that but more importantly it is about unleashing again America's inventiveness--the Benjamin Franklin line of American ingenuity. No one likes to create gadgets and gizmos more than Americans and the various lines of research today indicate inventions that will re-grow the American manufacturing base. The squawks you hear are those who are clinging desparately to the old economy--which is dead at the moment and will only revive a little in the near-term. What is so peculiar is how Republicans who once embraced small business and entrepeneurs are so wedded to economic dinosaurs and entities, which never had or would act in the national interest. The Reagan years generated the burst of creation in Silicon Valley. It's strange to see how far the GOP has turned its back on that legacy.

The Obama Administration has hid major changes in our political economy in plain view. The emphasis on education in the stimulus bill,while preserving teachers' jobs, also complimented the significant investment in science and technology. Here is the tough road to hoe. Over 30% of Americans students drop out from high school and Washington Monthly reports that the young generation of Americans are the first to be less educated than their parents. While President Obama speaks like Americans will have to become like the South Koreans in their commitment to learning, it's doubtful that such a day will come to pass or that it is even desireable. What is most important is the expansion of the American imagination and rekindling the nation's commitment to science like the time just after the Sputnik launch triggered a national panic about America lagging behind the Soviet Union.

Obama's synthetic comprehension of the need for America to become grounded on a firmer foundation for progress may not lend itself to our current political system. The Senate's behavior on Health Care Reform shows how reactionary our system is and how America's owners--the large corporate entitles simply buy and sell politicians. However,we may be considered blessed by our nearest competitors. The Chinese, who have captured the globe's attention, suffer from serious problems of political stability and an authoritarian political structure, which conservatives have written about in envy, but which will be a major stumbling-block to solidifying their advance. Unfortunately for us, we're still the last best hope for Earth. We remain the only country capable of thinking and acting globally. And that is a burden we will have to bear--like it or not.

I expect support for Obama will flag during the first part of 2010 like it did for Reagan, who dropped to 35% at the height of the recession in the early 1980s. However, I expect the rest of the stimulus package to kick in over the next nine months and job generation to start again. However, the rate of job generation may not catch up with the number of jobs that need to be created. Even if unemployment remains high, it is hard for me personally to take the Republicans seriously when they claim their policies could create jobs. We have had the largest middle-class tax cut in history with the stimulus package, more tax cuts for small businesses are on the way, the FED has exhausted all its tools for stemming the decline in the economy and corporate tax cuts don't mean anything because only 26% of all American corporations pay any taxes at all. And maintaining the estate tax cuts would only cost the America taxpayer $250 billion, hardly an advertisement for deficit reduction. What I expect is that the economy will actually stabilize in the next six months and appear to improve the rest of the year. The real innovations in Obama's programs will start to flourish at the end of his first term and into a second.

The major political obstacle up ahead is the Obama plan to reduce the national deficit. Here he will be miles ahead of the Republicans since he started on this the first month of his Presidency. The problem lies in the reduction in the deficits caused by entitlement spending such as Medicare and Social Security. During the Reagan years, a bipartisan team with Bill Bradley reformulated Social Security to put it on firm footing for the next thirty years. But the Obama people need mature adults as co-partners in developing a bipartisan plan for reducing the deficits caused by the entitlement programs. My fear is that they will end up bargaining with themselves to appease the Republicans, who this time want to end the plans once and for all. The weight of these decisions will fall on the younger generation because there will be attampts to gut the social welfare net but preserve it for those 55 years and higher, who would revolt at any such reductions. It would be the ultimate in generation warfare.

But my New Year's Resolution is to enjoy our President since he's given me more pleasure than any President since Ronald Reagan. And I hope he succeeds because if he does, we all will.