Our Herbert Hoover

In the waning days of his administration, it is said that Herbert Hoover sat in the White House and literally didn't know what to do. The nation had slipped into a depression and the best he could say was that the economy would have to take it's course. This was after the famous, Prosperity is right around the corner speech. Hoover was a rich man who didn't understand struggle and the nations woes just seemed like a distasteful mess that was beyond repair. He did not like Roosevelt. He did not understand a man who had become a cripple and seemed to exude a confidence and enthusiasm that should have been his. Riding to the inauguration, neither man looked at each other.
Now we have our Hoover. The automakers are closing. Interest rates are at zero. Credit is frozen, people are losing their jobs in a tidal wave of corporate panic. Yet our Hoover sits in the White House and does nothing. After the firecracker of the Great Bailout, we are left with a man who just wants to go back to his ranch. You can see it in his face. I didn't make this mess fairly screams out at you. He is busy giving oil companies their last shots at Federal Land out west and pardoning cronies and putting his boots by the door. Time to go back to Texas and live like a rich oil baron again. Maybe it is his due. But the truth is he doesn't know what to do. Like Hoover, Bush is a duck hit on the head with the concussive effects of nuclear force bad news. The waves just keep coming and he is not a man for this type of crisis. Like Hoover, Bush has always been a rich man comfortable with steering the ship, not charting new courses. Like Hoover, his best effort was to reassure the American public the economy was fundamentally strong before handing over the keys to the bankers to keep their own respective ships afloat.
Now the car manufacturers are dying. They are looking to Washington for help, but Hoover is not thinking about that anymore. He is thinking about that final ride into the sunset where the world is right and let's leave it to that new guy. While not a cripple, Obama climbed out of obscurity and he knows how to fight. The ride to the inauguration will be a repeat of two fundamentally different men sharing a common space. Then they will both be on their own.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Jacksonian Democracy and Palins Demise

When Sara Palin imploded in the Katie Couric interview it brougth up a painful question: Do we, as Americans want someone smart or dumb to run our country? We picked someone dumb for the last eight years. He made us feel safe. He made us feel like he was one of us. No one felt left out with Bush. The moron vote as it came to be known. Actually, this all goes back much further, back to Andrew Jackson. He was just a solider who became President, but what he did was he took the spoils system one step futher and put all his friends in his cabinet. Quite literally there were no politicians in Jackson's admistration and Jacksonian democracy came to be called rule by the common people. So what do we have in Palin? When Couric asked her what Supreme Court decisions did she not agree with, she had no answer. She stumbled. She talked nonsense. Suddenly the hockey mom was in the car telling junior not to forget his skates and his mouth guard and oh, you forgot your bottled water. Sara Palin had suddenly reached her level of incompentence and it was painful. It wasnt' so much that she couldnt' answer the question, it was that she didn't have the authority to say, you know what, I'm not that familiar with Supreme Court decisions, except for Roe V Wade. Instead she stumbled around because of intellectual insecurity. It was painful to watch. Now she is going to debate and maybe she will pull it out, but the cat is out of the bag and the hockey mom just can't quite get by with her sassy mouth and good looks. At the national level people dont get points for just looking good or being witty--you have to deliver something. And like the Jackson administration, people are horrified. We prattle on about rule of the common man, but we have Congress now staying up all night to pass a bailout because rule of the common man did not work out. George Bush is common in that he is not a smart man and we had decided somewhere as a nation we didn't like smart people anymore. Unfortunately for Sara Palin, the country just changed its mind and decided maybe smart people arent such a bad thing. Democracy is good in theory, but let's not get carried away. Let the hockey moms be hockey moms, and let's leave politics to someone who at least can face down Katie Couric.