“The time has come to set aside childish things.”
Those words were from Obama’s inaugural. The 44th President is not a sound-bite man. It’s not how he ‘does’ rhetoric. This quote is perhaps the exception. It was, I thought when he said it and still do now, the most important line of his inaugural address.
Reasonable people can (and should) disagree about Obama’s politics, about his approach to the Presidency, about the stimulus package, or about the wider response to this international financial moment. Interested watchers — myself included — will likely have gripes about how exactly these first days of the Obama administration have panned out.
But few, I judge, can disagree with the essential argument the President made in his first address: that these are serious times, and they require us to approach our affairs with renewed seriousness and focus.
It is for that reason I’m a little dismayed. What we have seen these past weeks is the mainstream press, the political class, and (as a result) the public being distracted from much bigger fish.
This mess at AIG is interesting. It’s wrong, I think, for a firm bailed out to the tune of $170 billion, to pay $218 million in bonuses to executives. It shouldn’t happen; these people haven’t performed well, and apart from that, it’s completely tone-deaf. The American government must work to get the money back, to send a clear message.
There is ample justification for reasoned strong disapproval and for every effort to rectify the situation. But what we’ve seen has been almost entirely daft. Congressman and pundits have scrambled to out-do each other in the indignation stakes, often, I think, for their own purposes. To take just one example from a field of many: Barney Frank, the chair of the House Banking Committee, leads the chorus calling for the names of the bonus recipients to be released. That probably isn’t smart — those guys will be put in danger, and the government shouldn’t get into the business of offering up perfectly lawful recipients of remuneration to the populace as targets for hate. But Frank gets a big press day, and a ten-point bump in his approval ratings, and so it works for him.
A great witch-hunt has ensued to find the people within the Treasury and Congress who were responsible for guaranteeing the legality of the bonuses. All the while, we ignore the more important questions about the gross under-regulation in the system these past five years (which is very convenient for many in Congress who presided over a raft of deregulation), and about how we fix it, instead diverting the public onto a new target. The outrage is largely a product of the desire of some in Congress to promote their own reelection in a very easy, catch-all manner — by pointing the finger at somebody else.
Simply, it’s naked populism. That’s not always a bad thing — the public is important, its members need to feel as if their politicians understand what they’re feeling. But this is different — it’s exploiting and inflaming the public mood, in a way that distracts from what really matters. Flitting from one target of populist outrage to another is no way for Congress to go about doing business long-term, especially when the ‘indignation method’ is being followed because to do so is in the interests of those who are following it.
This single issue — the AIG bonuses — has completely saturated American political life for nearly two weeks. That’s significant because there’s so much else to pay attention to. Secretary Geithner unveiled his toxic assets plan this week, and the lead story for most of the day on all but a few news networks was ‘AIG outrage, day five’. It was the most important economic announcement for a month. The public needed to hear, needed the chance to form an opinion. Geithner needed the airtime to sell it, his critics the time to critique it. There was none. The AIG thing used up all the oxygen.
President Obama has lots to talk to the public about. Frankly, he needs to explain perspicuously his plan — what he’s doing and why people should support him — and he needs to do it better than he has so far. And yet he’s being counselled — rightly so amidst the current stupid context of competitive outrage — to subvert his planned messages in favour of “I’m angry about AIG”. That, it seems to me, was half the reason for the Jay Leno appearance — to tell a huge, primetime audience, in a straight-to-the-point, direct manner that he shared their outrage, that he would not play second fiddle in the indignation war.
Here’s the rub: The AIG matter is not unimportant, but it’s not as important as this madness suggests. The US economic system is not in the state it’s in because of a handful of people getting large bonuses this quarter at one bailed-out firm, wrong though that may be. And the problems will not be solved by stoking those fires of outrage. They will be solved with intelligent debate, good strategy on the part of the government, the sort of economic oversight from Congress and the press we have so sorely missed these past couple of years, and, once an approach has been settled upon, an intense and compelling pitch to the public at large.
All that other stuff, frankly, is trivial. Let’s not lose focus.
