Greetings, salutations and exaltations

‘mornin’, all

Good to be here, and thanks to my friends for the honor and privilege of joining them.  Anything I can do for anybody, please let me know.  All enlargements, corrections as to fact or honest disputations are welcome.  As with anything I write, anywhere, anybody can use it for whatever they wish; just let me know.  And I will engage anybody who disagrees with me, to the extent that there’s something to engage.  I will not respond to ad hominem name-calling, addressed to me or anybody else, and reserve the right to ignore anybody who behaves in a manner that would have been unacceptable to me in a middle school yard.   I hope everyone enjoyed the weekend, and is bright, shiny and full of whatever it is one should be full of on Monday morning.  The week’s shipment of shiny, new semicolons and ellipses has arrived…

I spent part of the weekend arguing (amicably) with the lovely and talented Dr. Mrs. W about a possible auto industry bailout.  She’s outraged at the prospect.  She considers it throwing good money after bad,  rewarding corporate negligence and malfeasance, and creating a moral hazard.   She wants the management out, the assets run by people like those who run Honda and Toyota, and doesn’t trust government to do a good job.  I, while not as sure as I’d like to be–I’m not much of an economist, and don’t think I have enough information–err on the side of a sort of Keynesian stimulus for a sorely depressed region, thinking of the millions of jobs at stake.  Not just the Big Three and their suppliers’ jobs; think, for instance, of all those auto ads you see in dead-tree newspapers.  I, too, have little patience with the management at GM and Chrysler; one can make a case for Ford.

But it occurs to me, as I think of it, that we’ve gotten rather used to government incompetence and malfeasance as the default expectation over the past eight years.  It hasn’t been merely ineffective or wasteful; it hasn’t been, say, the spending of tax dollars for the Lawrence Welk Museum or National Fried Twinkie Day festivities tucked into a defense appropriation.  My good wife has no faith, none whatever, in government’s ability to do the right thing.  Her so holding arises not from ideology, as you’d find on the right, where they think the very nature of government requires it to be ineffective, or worse; it reflects what she’s seen, over and over again.

Not the least of what might happen in a competently run, thoughtful, and perhaps lucky Obama administration could be a new demonstration–the first in a long while, the first many have ever seen in this country–that government can be effective in dealing with the nation’s and world’s problems, even a little bit.  This was true of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal; the country voted Roosevelt four terms in response.  The country would benefit out of proportion to the actual work the government did; it would start reknitting a social contract.  And the like of Dr Mrs W would rethink their reflexive disdain for government action, should they see it, y’know, work once in a while.

It would also strike a serious blow to the heart of the Republican party, which would be seen as having had nothing, or considerably worse than nothing, to offer when in power, and, out of power, constituting an opposition so mean-spirited and reality-challenged as to threaten them with political irrelevance.  Unlike Clinton, who became president after a lackluster but not diastrous Republican president, Obama will assume office with Bush’s disasters evident wherever you look.  They need Obama to fail, even more than they needed Clinton to fail.  They must be fought.