From the latest New York Times/CBS News poll comes this robust statistic: four out of five Americans are "optimistic about the next four years under Mr. Obama."
A robust stat indeed, but not an astounding one, considering what we've just been through (actually, as I write this there are still 31 hours, four minutes left and I'm trying to hold my breath).
We do, however, enter the territory of the astounding when we also discover that nearly three out of five McCain supporters say they, as well, are optimistic about an Obama administration. The other two, I suppose, are still pining for Palin. There, there, it's OK; she'll be back -- as if she ever left?
What can we reliably predict from all this statistical hope and optimism? Just one thing: that in 31 hours and five minutes, Barack Obama's job approval rating will begin to slip.
The clock on Obama's ownership of inherited problems will start tomorrow at 12:01 pm. Now naturally the body politic won't begrudge him his inability to instantly secure domestic prosperity and global peace, but you get my figurative drift. No matter how we got here, no matter who bequeathed these problems, the electorate has a pitilessly short memory when it comes to long-term responsibility.
A reasonably fair guess is that within six months, maybe nine at the outside, the new president will hear the tick, tick, tick of native impatience. Most of it will emanate from our economic woes failing to turn the corner with unprecedented speed, but that's something Obama will simply have to helplessly outwait.
He could pump one trillion or five into the economy tomorrow and recovery would still rest at least a year away, because the psychological pathology of recession is now at least as morbid as the physical symptoms.
Hence after the opening and aggressive volleys of fiscal firepower, on the domestic front we will largely experience an economic Sitzkrieg. How long that "sitting war" will actually last is anybody's guess, but a year is probably a reasonable one.
Nevertheless Obama is priming more than the pump; he's priming public expectations -- and if he can continue to reconcile expectations with reality, he will have successfully outwaited the worst.
That, however, is only the domestic front. On the international stage, events move far more quickly and Obama's hourglass of domestic patience will empty itself accordingly.
Because foreign affairs he will own immediately -- and unforgivably, since his maneuverability in that field is far greater than in turning around the economy.
And of all the dark clouds on Obama's horizon, it's Afghanistan (and its concomitant Pakistan problems) that is most ominous.
Will Obama's Afghanistan -- that ceaseless cauldron of tribal and ethnic and religious warfare -- be Johnson's Vietnam? or, please tell me it's so, Kennedy's Vietnam?
Both of the latter presidents inherited an insoluble geopolitical mess, just as Obama is inheriting his, while only one foresaw its profound insolubility and took measured steps to get the hell out before the getting out was too late.
What Kennedy did was to stall, to temporize, to pussyfoot until, or so he envisioned, his reelection was behind him. Because both he and Johnson operated from the same historical perspective: both remembered the bruising assaults leveled by Republicans on Democrats for having "lost" China and having failed to competently prosecute the Korean War.
Yet following the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy simply did not trust the rosy neoconservatives, so to speak, who besieged him with advice and encouraged him to get tougher in his perceived game of dominoes. The historically documented record is still somewhat ambiguous, but my sense of it indicates a Kennedy withdrawal from South Vietnam in duly rapid course -- or at minimum, definite and definable limits of engagement.
Kennedy wanted no albatross, and that's all he saw in Southeast Asia. Johnson wasn't as sage, being a man possessed by a veritable army of his own demons.
Happily it appears Obama is absent similar demons, but his confidence in -- and ability to reject -- his crew of largely traditional foreign policy advisers remains to be seen. I just hope that he, like Kennedy, can independently recognize a hovering albatross when he sees one.
That, and that alone, is all that is genuinely in his power.
Buzz this on Buzzflash.net
LBJ All The Way
Obama's lack of military experience puts him in the Lyndon Johnson category. Kennedy had actively gone to war and had been under fire as a daily service while Johnson only faced enemy fire during a single political junket aboard an Army bomber. The differences in experience were telling. Kennedy knew what was involved when his war hawks came to him with wild-eyed tales of glory and victory and could keep them in line while Johnson felt that he was a lesser man if he didn't release these dogs of war. Over 59,000 Americans paid for his foolishness.
Obama is following the worst fool in presidential history. Almost 5,000 American have already died in Iraq and Afghanistan avenging nearly 3,000 New York civilians - a bad trade in every case - due to this dunce. All we can do now is hope that Obama really is as much smarter in reality as he appears and he brings these Texas gang fights to an end.
Afghanistan
You likely are correct, yet it is odd that a country of scant importance to anyone but itself ought play so grand a role on the world stage.
Maybe we misoverestimate our concern?