By Wes Pedersen
What happens after the midterms?
We'll start immediately sizing up presidential potentials – anyone who can guarantee that there will be no second term for Barack Obama.
Democrats as well as Republicans will be playing the game. A new third party, more rational but no less livid than the Teas, will be forming to join in the 2012 campaigns.
It's sad to think that a man of such promise as Obama could generate so much rage in so short a time, and it's unfair because he is a man of great intelligence, huge ambition and check-list accomplishments. At this time, however, his only hope of winning back a measurable degree of public support is to rid himself of the deadweight policies he has imposed on the nation.
He must redesign his agenda immediately. He must divest the nation at last of the burden of two wars, costly in lives as well as money – something he should have done when he took office. He must face up to the reality that we have already lost both wars. In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, the forces we moved in to stop are growing stronger.
He is in no position now to insist on sending more troops to suppress insurgents. He has got to accept that fact, already obvious to our gossiping enemies around the world. And, yes, we do have them in large numbers and they have seen our weaknesses exposed to all. China tops the list.
The creation of jobs tops the list of domestic urgencies. Somehow the president must find a way to work toward that goal with the Republicans he has been excoriating throughout these midterm days.
Obama must look anew at the economy and see it as the tough nut it really is, not as the recovering miracle he has pretended it to be. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has stewed about the reality of our recovery efforts. He demonstrated no economic acumen when the great recession was creating itself, but he is right this time. We are on the verge of disaster again.
Bernanke will act to avoid deflation and increase jobs. In doing so, however, he is almost certain to spur inflation, which is very real and is eating into American homes with unrestrained vigor. The Fed official is leaning toward a new monetary stimulus, which would lead to the purchase of hundreds of billions of new assets, weaken the dollar more and heighten tensions in international currency markets.
Obama made sweepingly expensive health care his first priority. He will now have to yield on that error as Republicans and fiscally responsible Democrats attempt to chisel it down. He has got to give on it. We can't afford it any more than we can afford any more or prolonged wars.
Business, big and little, will be courted by the White House for real after the midterms. Corporate executives have felt from the start that Obama was ignoring their needs out of contempt for their line of work. Small business owners have felt their plight all but ignored by the president.
Obama will have to eat his words. He has been blaming business for many of the nation's problems, but with so many of his own failings showing up in neon, he has got to recognize that it is business, far more so than government, that is the employer of the masses.
The Chamber of Commerce has demonstrated a remarkable ability to fund the elections of Republicans this year, sometimes with mystery money. It will be backing conservative candidates with a vengeance in the final two years of the Obama administration.
Tom Donohue, the Chamber president, is now, and will be for at least the next two years, the go-to man for contributions to conservative and Republican causes.
More investigations into the banking and mortgage scandals will be proposed. Republican members of Congress will be hard put to keep from looking as though they entered the fray with clean hands.
Here, some words from the Financial Times seem to put the housing mess in true perspective:
“The Fed and U.S. government's entwinement with the housing market is one of the greatest economic distortions on earth. From mortgage interest relief, and asymmetrically adjustable fixed-rate loans, to state insurance loans and quantitative easing, America has created a monster. The Fed now has over a trillion dollars of mortgage-backed securities on its balance sheet. No one wants to address those problems.”
It is time, as the Financial Times puts it, that someone does.
That is true, too, of the states' need for strenuous efforts to repair their pension plans without doing grave damage to millions of worthy state employees. It is true, too, of course, of the need to actually make the repair of the nation's highways and bridges promised originally by Obama. New federal infusions of money are demanded.
One of the first tasks the president should undertake after the midterms is to call the nation's governors together to see what federal efforts are feasible to support their states in critical, meaningful ways, He will most certainly get a bipartisan reading, and the powerful Republicans in Congress will have programs they can, and should, support.
Plans to save the nation's school system ought to be high on the governors' agenda, too. The nation needs to get smart, and the schools are the only way.
On the international affairs front, Obama needs to do everything he possibly can to ensure that Hillary Clinton stays with him in some role. As secretary of state, she has kept the ship of state on a relatively steady course in very tough times.
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Wes Pedersen is a retired Foreign Service Officer and principal at Wes Pedersen Communications and Public Relations Washington, D.C. |