Oh the stories we shared on Inauguration Day a little over a year ago, the feelings we had of the beginning of a brave new world, the sense of common purpose among the huddled masses on that cold, cold day-where did they all go? Why did the dream die so soon?
Today, we have a stalled Presidency and a stuck Congress leading a stalled economy of a stuck nation. We are waiting for respite from the recession more eagerly than we are waiting for our recent snow to melt. We are waiting for someone to tell us that this will get better, that there is way out of this mess and that we are indeed traveling in the right direction because frankly, more and more of us think we aren’t. What we are waiting for ultimately, is leadership and vision, the very things we thought we were expectantly celebrating on that freezing January day last year.
Promises have become excuses, mixed with Tea Party angst, a weird Palin-McCain redux, and people abandoning ship. Powerful Congressmen are resigning in frustration, citing a worn out election cliche “the system’s broken.” But this time, they mean it. The only response from the White House seems to be a Presidential make-over. If ever there was an ominous signal that they don’t get it, rehiring David Plouffe showed they saw the rumblings less in terms of the future of the country, and more in terms of the future of this Presidency. Plouffe is employed to stage a less ‘out of touch’ Obama, reaching out to the masses, at least one photo op a week. The Cinderella cycle that I wrote about in my book The Presidential Plot starts all over again. Government by fairytale does not work.
The system may be broken but the founders broke it, giving us a government of three independent parts. They designed a broken system in the first place. A king would have been much easier. Any Government divided over major issues is healthy. That is the way it was meant to operate, because the Constitution was created by thinkers who feared tyranny more than factionalism. If the President wanted one thing and the Congress another, and the Court decided that both were unconstitutional, the founders did not see that as broken so much as how the will of the majority finally got worked out in compromise. What they did not envisage was that government would become so contradictory as to be unintelligible, that it would make no sense, or that it would veer off into a dangerous lunacy.
Steve Pearlstein captured the contradictions in his insightful column today. (Washington Post Feb 17th 2010 A-8) “They want Wall Street to be reined in….but they are against regulation.” Affordable health care but no government role, more jobs but less spending to create them, a balanced budget but no spending cuts. It is insane, and that is what Obama as the leader has to stop complaining about and start confronting, to bring America back to some sanity. When Congressmen sponsor a bill only to cynically kill it, or when they dramatically oppose a stimulus package in Washington and then, shamelessly claim the credit in their electorate for federal projects, you realize that politics has taken the art of hypocrisy to a whole new level. Throw in a Supreme Court that flouts election reform in one huge precedent shattering decision, and you have it all.
Governments come and go. Some we like. Some we abhor. But the bottom line for goverment to work is that it makes sense. Some people thought Ronald Reagan was an heroic President, some that he was a disaster, but we knew what he stood for, we knew his vision for reviving Pax Americana. The vision that he was able to communicate so persuasively galvanized a nation into both support and opposition. Voters knew what they were supporting or rejecting. Candidate Obama like Reagan, used every rhetorical flourish he could to rally the voters to a vision that”Washington was indeed broken” and that ‘partisan bickering was eating away the people’s trust.’ He told us all of that, and we agreed, and many of us voted him in as Sheriff to clean up Dodge. But a year later, the headlines scream, “Washington is broken” and ‘partisan bickering is undermining trust, ‘ and it is President Obama himself who is telling us this in his first State of the Union address. At least Obama gets to reprise some of his best stump speeches. But he has had a year to start making it better, and it would appear to be getting worse.
Obama is not succeeding in precisely the area of reform he promised to come to Washington to achieve. His story as President is shifting beyond his control, fragmenting into disconnected and drawn out campaigns on energy and finance and health care and defense. There is no Big picture, no Big Story, no integrating vision of how this all fits, and where we are now in relation to the goal we need to reach. All we have is lots of little stories, competing and contradicting each other, and Obama acting as a White House drone plane, hovering over the halls of Congress, hoping to pick off votes and not get shot down, but never prepared to take courage, to get on the ground, to wrestle hand to hand with the obstructionists and the opportunists that seem to have infected the business of government.
President Obama let Congress lead where he should have led. He stirred up a vision of a brave new world in getting elected, and then choked on it, deciding that pragmatism is the safer bet. Audacity is only for selling books, it seems. The President needs to find his courage. He needs to re-read some of his best electioneering speeches and craft from them a more compelling vision. If we are going to Renew America’s Promise, as he says, what does that mean, other than a piece of puffy politicking. How come a President Kennedy could send Americans to the moon, and this administration can’t even replace the space shuttle and we will have to hitch a ride with the Russians? How come we are only planning some high speed rail corridors when Europe and Japan have over 40? What ever happened to Greater America, the land of dreams and opportunity? We are lacking meaningful government because we are lacking meaningful leadership. It is all playing out as predicted when, In my book written almost 18 months back, I wrote
The government can only work if the story works. If the story doesn’t work, then that signals a fundamental breakdown in meaning making, that things don’t make sense anymore because they are not going anywhere, and no matter what individual initiatives work, there is no center to the whole, and things fall apart, as Yeats predicted. We need the coherent story. We need the big story that inhabits and enlivens the little stories. As a manager friend from Lockheed Martin loves to quote to me, Leadership is meaning making in a community of practice. If the breakdown is at the level of meaning, then is it any wonder that we as citizens feel powerless and stuck. (The Presidential Plot P.255)