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Many Questions, Few Answers

My apologies for another long hiatus. Let’s just say that the academic life has been interesting. (Fun, too, on occasion, but budget cuts are too much with us right now for me to revel in the fun.)

But honestly, the big reason I have not been around isn’t my day job. It’s that I have had so little to say about the big issues. I have lots of questions and precious little that sounds like an answer.

I don’t know if the GM bankruptcy/bailout is going to work. This article suggests that GM could become chic, but this analysis of the new GM ad does not inspire optimism. Perhaps it is better live.

I don’t know if President Obama’s speech in Egypt will plant seeds of positive change though I would like to agree with Thomas Friedman that it’s possible.

I have deep concerns about his emerging policy in Afghanistan. I don’t see a resolution as possible without some deep changes in Pakistan, and I don’t see how his surge (or any surge) can accomplish that. I don’t have an easy out for him, either, at least not one that does not leave some pretty damaging chaos behind.

I am discomforted by many of Obama’s actions concerning enemy combatants. He is confirming my suspicion during the campaign that he would reject many G. W. Bush policies (a truly good thing) but not Bush’s claims of presidential power. In so doing, he is following the lead of perhaps all previous presidents regarding foreign policy and military conflict. They may have rejected a predecessor’s policies but they never rejected his claims of power. I voted for Obama in spite of that and not because of it, but still I hoped that I might be wrong.

Maybe I’m having second thoughts about Obama and don’t want to admit it, and that is keeping me quiet. I don’t think that is the case. Even if I knew in November what would have happened up until today, I would have been comfortable voting for him over John McCain. Right or wrong, Obama’s policies show a high degree of competence, and the more I look back at the campaign, the more the McCain of 2008 looks like a man who simply was not ready to be president.

For what it’s worth, I still think the McCain of 2000 might have been a good president, though far more conservative than I would have liked. Almost certainly he would have been a far better president than the man who won or than the man who McCain was eight years later. Sometimes age and experience don’t equal improvement.

Similarly, I have long wondered if the Richard Nixon of 1960 might have been a far more positive president than the Nixon of 1968. Perhaps the narrow and not-entirely-legitimate defeat of 1960 and the 1962 California campaign exacerbated the politics-is-war attitudes that were already part of his personality. If so, it might have been at the cost of what I think was a genuine desire to be a statesman in the better senses of the term.

Perhaps I am wrong and it is the day job stuff that has kept me from commenting, by limiting the time I have to focus what analytical powers that I have left on the current scene. And if someone want to suggest that my analytical powers were never all that hot, that’s OK, too.

I do hope to check in regularly now, with more to say. I’m curious about the emerging Obama/Democratic health care policy. There is a fine case to be made that the current system is not viable, and that a shift toward the public sector would have a powerful and positive impact on jobs. But the details, the details! Who knows what could actually pass at this point?

More questions than answers. So I end today as I began, but with a bit more hope that I can point toward an answer every once in a while.

Posted on Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 2:26 PM | Comments (25) | Return

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