By Wes Pedersen
Bill Clinton says capitalism will save the world.
The world? Get real, Bill. Capitalism is in deep trouble everywhere -- “in crisis,” as Martin Wolf puts it in the Financial Times.
Under capitalism, as practiced here in recent years, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. That is the literal, factual truth, acknowledged by President Obama in his State of the Union address. The economic and social structures are so bitterly fragile that he wants to remake them via “a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last” this time.
His speech was in part a denial of reality (the country’s isn’t in as precarious a condition as some commentators and candidates insist it is) and a presentation of a sweeping plan for resuscitation.
It was all largely for show, of course. His plan is not going anywhere in this election year.
His address, however, was a rouser and history will place it at the peak of the list of presidential speeches given over the years. There is no one among his GOP opponents who could conceivably come close to matching it on the stump or on TV.
In a pre-State of the Union briefing, however, the president did give his opponents a huge helping of grist for their told-you-so anti-Obama mills.
His goal, he said, is to rebuild “an economy where hard work pays off and responsibility is rewarded – and an America where everybody gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share and everybody plays by the same set of rules.”
Those words, unfortunately, are eerily similar in message to Karl Marx’s credo: “From each according to his ability, to each according his needs.”
You do not have to be an historian like Newt Gingrich to recognize the kinship.
The Obama blueprint is a call-back to the days when socialism emerged in different guises under plans offered up under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society. Both of those salvage missions, like Mr. Obama’s blueprint, emphasized critical missions such as a restoration of the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and an expansion of educational opportunities for the lower classes. Both earlier plans underscored the need for programs to help the needy. Both were calculated to appeal to the working man and woman.
(Newt Gingrich proposed an “Opportunity Society” in 1984. Rock-hard in conservatism, it caught enough of Ronald Reagan’s attention for him to reference it in his 1985 State of the Union message. It’s around today in Gingrich’s campaign talks, and is reflected in knock-off statements by Mitt Romney.)
The president’s blueprint is an in your face challenge to the GOP, whose members in Congress have worked to block his economic-social agenda, stalling most of the provisions of his $447 billion American Jobs Act.
Just days before the president’s State of the Union speech, the Wall Street Journal published a major study by Charles Murray, the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. It confirms the need for action to correct the gross inequities that bestride our failing system.
Murray begins his analysis with a simple sentence: “America is falling apart.” (Readers of this column may recall my commentary of last April 27 that began: “The world is falling apart.”) His major point: “The ideal of an ‘American way life’ is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated.”
A separate story on page 1 of the same Journal emphasizes the plight of the older worker: More and more of them are finding that they cannot afford not to work.
Against that dismal background, the bickering among nation’s politicians grows ever more frustrating for the citizen and the voter.
The core lesson: Most politicians don’t really give a damn about any sort of economic and social remedies in this election year. And, some might say, in any other year, judging from the recent past.
Sorry, Mr. President. You have raised vital points and posit possible solutions, and you have raised the bar on excellence in public speaking beyond any point thought possible a few weeks ago, but your State of the Union speech, dramatic and stirring as it was, will within a few weeks but just one of the hundreds of political promissory notes that will be heard in the coming months.
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Wes Pedersen is a retired Foreign Service Officer and principal at Wes Pedersen Communications and Public Relations Washington, D.C.
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