Mr. President, We Expect More From You

Crossposted at crnc.org

Abc News reports that President Obama called Tim Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics board, last night to apologize for comparing his "notoriously bad bowling skills" to the Special Olympics. Not surprisingly, Shriver accepted the President's apology, calling it "very moving," and noted that the President will soon be entertaining Special Olympians at the White House. Standard gaffe procedure.

Time out here: did anybody actually think that the President was malicious in last night's megagaffe?? Let's take a second, regardless of your opinion on the President, and ask--could anyone actually entertain the thought that the President of the United States would intentionally demean the mentally challenged? Obviously, absolutely not.

But, that's not the point, now is it? And, once again, the media has missed what really matters.

To quote Toby Ziegler's insightful comment to Will Bailey before Bartlett's second inaugural address on The West Wing (yes, I'm a nerd, leave me alone), "The Dow plummets because of casual conversations with this man." Herein lies the point: For a number of reasons, the presidency demands discretion. This president has not provided it.

It demeans the Office to talk about how "cool" the jacket they gave him on Air Force One was, and it's beneath the Presidency to make derogatory comments about those with special needs. Although our former President was known to make an oddball comment or two, he was always compassionate, never offending such a special group of people with such a rash choice of words.

President Obama needs to learn, teleprompter excluded, that what he says matters. Regardless of apologies, post-hoc comments, or visits to the White House, the President of the United States will be on record for the remainder of history, in the White House archives and elsewhere, comparing his bowling skills to the Special Olympics (which, if it mattters, has a pretty amazing bowling program). Mr. Obama, grow up to the office that the people, however misguided, gave you.

As If They Had Never Known

America is buzzing today--coming from a thousand different angles, but I believe that today, and yesterday... and tomorrow... may signal the first pangs of buyers remorse for those who chose to elect President Obama.

Like most news, the story you get on AIGate (cute, right? came up with it myself) depends on the source. If you're listening to the Administration, Congressional Dems, or, even Congressional Republicans, the entire situation is a populist outrage-- someone's at fault, and they're going to pay. As a matter of common sense, failed corporations shouldn't be doling out bonuses, especially on the government's dime, right? Here is the situation as I see it:

1. The Democratic majority is focusing their anger at AIG, trying to figure out how they can conjure up the biggest amount of anti-corporation (read: anti-Republican) populism to aid them in their 2010 races, many of which aren't as safe as they looked four months ago.

2. Congressional Republicans see this as the first opportunity to cast the Administration and Congressional majority as sleeping on the job. In the past, they've had to contend with the shadow of President Bush, but, this time, this one is all Barry, Nancy, and Harry.

3. The Administration is caught in a state of disarray, trying to figure out what went wrong, where it went wrong, and how to fix it. The President has accepted blame for the situation trying to assert servant leadership and has, of late, adopted a Truman-esque "buck stops here" rhetorical style. In the end, though, Geithner is seeing the political fallout of what was actually a sound legal and philosophical decision to avoid canceling standing contracts by exempting them from the no-bonus rule.

There's been a ton written about this mess, so I don't want to be redundant, but I do want to comment on something very important that's been conspicuously missing throughout all of the literature up until this point: perspective.

At this point, I'm done with details and I'm not going to come to a conclusion on who is right in this (although you can guess who I'm siding with). What I will do, however, is point out that this entire scenario is merely an externality of the disastrous decisions that we, as a nation, have made to cast away capitalism and subsidize sub-standard companies on the taxpayer's dime. The term "to big to fail" has been thrown around a lot as a political standard-bearer for the concept that the market could not survive the collapse of many of these firms. I would suggest, far from being the first to suggest it, that we haven't given the market the opportunity to do its job.

Countless businesses, public and private, around the nation have failed in our time, whether being swallowed up by bigger firms, restructuring, undergoing massive downsizing, or even meeting their ultimate demise because of poor business practices, corruption, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. What makes AIG any different? Without exception, these failures drive innovation, give opportunity to those who can do better, and make our economy more competitive.

Since September, we have fallen victim as a nation to alarmist rhetoric that tells us that there is no other option than to continue to subsidize failed corporations rather than watch the market run its course, even ignoring options like Chapter 11 designed to soften the impact of failure and help companies get back on their feet by addressing the problems that got them there. Why are we surprised, then, that AIG is... paying their employees? Not to mention the fact that the Washington Post reports that the credit default swap crew is long gone, leaving people who had nothing to with the mess What did we think would happen? Like most things, it's a lot more complicated than it looks at surface level. The real lesson is that, by leaving AIG alone, we could have avoided even the pretense of wasting taxpayer money and leave them to spending shareholder money, the way that private business is supposed to work.

Don't think that this is the end. In the coming months, I predict that we will continue to see the externalities of corporate subsidization and out of control spending, and that it will turn out to be more of a pain in our President's ass than he could have ever predicted. Maybe, it will clue him in to stop the spending.

What is more likely, though, is that the American people will start to realize that they're not getting what they paid for.