Obama and the Big Vision thing

According to virtually all the available polling, the American public does not (yet) blame President Obama for Republicans’ epic irresponsibility that led to our accelerating deficits and massive debt. The latter’s jackhammering surrealism is now humming along in hyperdrive, however, so expect a reversal of reproach and misfortune.

“More spending, more taxes and more debt,” snarled Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell about Obama’s 10-year budget proposal, which, because McConnell while in the majority never applied less of the first and more of the second has resulted inexorably in the third.

We should not, however, blame McConnell & Co. for lack of foresight. The GOP’s metronomic ratcheting up of spending and whacking away at revenue was a carefully orchestrated train wreck, leading just as inevitably to what the Times’ David Sanger noted yesterday:

“For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of [his budget] projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors.”

What would the GOP have Obama do now, in the grips of this GOP-inflicted Great Recession? Why of course: cut spending, whose macroeconomic effects would only prime the pump of total collapse.

That the current deficit figures are breathtaking, there is no question. Yet both perspective and a prescriptive sense are needed.

To wit, as deficit-historian Iwan Morgan observed late last year, Fiscal Year 2009’s staggering shortfall of $1.4 trillion indeed amounted to an unsustainable 10 percent of GDP, yet that figure “dwarfed” our WWII deficits, which averaged well more than twice that percentage.

Furthermore, wrote Morgan, this understandably may be a time to take a deep breath, but it absolutely is no time for penny-pinching panic:

“The United States operated deficits averaging 4.8 percent of GDP during the worst Depression years of FY1932-1936, but the imbalance only averaged 2.2 percent in FDR’s second term. What the experience of the 1930s teaches above all … is not how to bring recession deficits under control but the need to ensure that deficits are sufficiently large to stimulate economic recovery during a serious downturn.

“Roosevelt’s reluctance to run up bigger imbalances contributed to the longevity of the Depression and his effort to balance the FY1938 budget in the belief that recovery was at hand only generated a new recession. The lesson for today is not to turn off the stimulus spigot too soon….”

Because of the unavoidable intersection of economics and politics, that spigot is flowing at a compromised trickle rather than an advisable gush. Perhaps, though, it will be enough; at this point, given political constraints, we can only hope. 

Looking forward, however, one sees an opportunity for Obama, in terms of the really, really Big Vision thing, which so far, as president, he has neglected. And the opportunity comes in answering this simple question: Just what the hell are we doing?

Several weeks ago, the Times’ Tom Friedman interviewed Michael Sandel, the Harvard-theorizing author of Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? And in words that have haunted ever since, Prof. Sandel had this to say: 

“Obama’s election marked a shift -- from a politics that celebrated privatized concerns to a politics that recognized the need for effective government and larger public purposes. Across the political spectrum, people understood that national renewal requires big ambition, and a better kind of politics.” But you can’t get there from here “without shared sacrifice,” Sandel added. “And you cannot inspire shared sacrifice without a narrative that appeals to the common good -- a narrative that challenges us to be citizens engaged in a common endeavor, not just consumers seeking the best deal for ourselves.”

That, as both Sandel and Friedman noted, is what’s lacking from Obama’s presidential leadership: a comprehensible Grand Narrative – What should we be doing, and why should we be doing it?

They didn’t mean the comparatively little stuff – maybe a few billion more for jobs creation, or, say, yet another few billion to entice teachers to teach or stop polluters from polluting. Nor were they necessarily referencing just fiscal designs, however intrinsic those are.

They were instead more largely referencing some recalibration – voiced from the top – of just what it means to be an American, for we Americans have, indisputably, lost our way.

In time, should Obama choose to be a great president, he must of course propose monumental fiscal remedies, such as tax increases, so that we can dig our way out of this mess. But such proposals must come within a far larger framework of just who, as a people, we are, what we’re doing, and above all where we’re going: to greater socioeconomic justice, a gentler global “footprint,” that sort of thing – but the “thing” has got to be Big. Really Big.