Now I ask you, can it get any more bizarre?
As the New York Times reports this morning: "On the morning after the sell-off on Wall Street, Congressional offices reported a shift in angry calls from constituents, with some now demanding that lawmakers take some corrective action -- a distinct change from the outpouring of public opposition that contributed to the defeat of the plan."
What a difference a day makes, since the crisis required a gut-wrenching and instant deepening in the form of a one-day evaporation of $1.2 trillion in constituents' equity assets -- not "fat cat" coin, mind you, but mostly middle-class pensions, 401(k)s, IRAs, etc. -- before the conspicuity of brutal reality started slapping Congress' ideological stubbornness in the face.
Much of that record loss was made up yesterday. But without remedial action, more record losses are in the works. And even worse than what was going down on Wall Street Monday was that, as of Tuesday, the credit markets -- those recondite contraptions that permit the working class to buy, for example, homes and automobiles (the production and sale of which mean jobs, jobs, jobs) -- went into the deepest of freezes. Houston, Seattle and Boston: We have a problem.
In an accompanying piece the NYT's financial columnist, David Leonhardt, tells a noteworthy story:
In 1929, Meyer Mishkin owned a shop in New York that sold silk shirts to workingmen. When the stock market crashed that October, he turned to his son, then a student at City College, and offered a version of this sentiment: It serves those rich scoundrels right.
A year later, as Wall Street’s problems were starting to spill into the broader economy, Mr. Mishkin’s store went out of business. He no longer had enough customers. His son had to go to work to support the family, and Mr. Mishkin never held a steady job again.
Served "them" right. Right?
At any rate, for three years President Herbert Hoover's purest of motives and ideological stubbornness held firm: We simply can't tamper much with the free market. Besides, he assured us, this will all turn around, just you wait and see.
We did. It didn't.
Hoover's successor, Franklin Roosevelt, indeed had mountainously troubling encounters with the preceding conservative mindset; but what many don't recall today, because they don't read history, is that he also suffered repeated headaches from the left.
FDR wasn't interested in a revolutionary tearing down of an economic system that had, until the unbridled greedmongers got hold of it, worked reasonably well by global standards. So he worked within the system, pragmatically focusing and fine-tuning, until some and usually small gains were achieved. He intuitively understood that gradual, constructive gains were preferable to sudden and satisfying ruptures incubated in revenge, which have a nasty tendency to boomerang.
It's one of those splendid paradoxes of history that FDR has been rightly sainted by progressives, although, in action, he was one of the more temperamentally conservative presidents we've ever had. But what made him great -- truly, toweringly great; none of this latter-day Reaganesque-greatness crappola -- had nothing to do with left or right. He possessed instead an exquisitely pragmatic mind. He was, that is, profoundly non-ideological.
And therein lies the key to Barack Obama's future, possible greatness. He reads history. He has studied what works. He cares not one whit if the hidebound ideological left or right wishes to take issue with what are, indeed, his pragmatic positions.
And his latest, most notable position, of course, is that the bailout-loan-investment-rescue-recovery package coming up for a Senate vote tonight and a later retry in the House, with both the reactionary right and reactionary left screaming and kicking, must pass -- must, to avert some future retelling of Mr. Leonhardt's story. For this looming depression can in fact be, in the words of that immortal philosopher Barney Fife, nipped in the bud.
Like FDR, Obama understands that problems are best addressed by actual tools that might work -- not by fixed, one-size-fits-all, preconceived ideas that float about abstractly in the empyrean. Also like FDR, Obama will be faced with leading an administration that's mired in chronic economic difficulties, which tangibly arose, of course, from ruinous abstractions of ideology. And finally, if Obama sticks to his pragmatic guns and ultimately triumphs, he, again, like FDR, will someday be sainted by ideological progressives, even though his success stemmed from taking a profoundly non-ideological course.
None of this should get doctrinaire progressives down in the dumps. Because it just so happens that intelligent pragmatic measures usually square with advertised progressive ones -- which, despite occasionally heated confrontations with the left, was usually the case with FDR's administration as well.
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