Promises, Promises

Promises, promises, as the Burt Bachrach song had it; unkept, they come back to bite a man. Obama's promise of a new bipartisanship hit heavy water as soon as his stimulus-package debate was set adrift. For one thing, only the idea for a stimulus package—but not the package itself—ever felt as if it were really his. From the outset it was instead the work of that fun couple, maestros Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the Frick and Frack of heavy federal spending. And those two are as interested in bipartisan participation as Lord Byron was in marriage counseling. When the going on the package got rough, Obama said, in effect: "Well, I won the damned election, so we'll do things my way, though of course I still invite bipartisan participation."

Such has been the steamroller effect of it all that Obama lost another cabinet officer, the Republican Sen. Judd Gregg, who was to fill the job of secretary of commerce left unfilled by Bill Richardson. Secretary of commerce begins to look like a job that may need to be advertised in the classified section.

Meanwhile, Secretary of the Treasury Geithner, after laying out a plan to save the banks that satisfied no one, a plan that has been judged vague where not vapid, appears to be going the way of all geniuses. Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke—economic geniuses are falling like cats on the rack at the county fair in Texas. Enough of geniuses; a simple expert would come in handy. But not many of those are around, either, or at least not credible ones, which makes the new Obama presidency feel wobbly, weak, if not inept on the major crisis of the era.

Victims of the general ineptitude that the Obama administration has so quickly shown are transparency in government and the new (we hardly knew ye) bipartisanship. The stimulus package itself is felt to be suspect.

Which brings us back to disappointment and politics. It is in the nature of politicians to make promises; it is what they do. Some do so without the least intention of delivering on their promises. Some fully intend to deliver, but find the world obdurate, unwilling to go along with their fine intentions. Barack Obama now finds himself among the latter. With loony jihadists threatening from without, a crumbling economy terrorizing its citizens from within, Obama knew he needed straightaway to demonstrate utmost competence to stem fear and instill confidence. The reason for his wanting to assemble an able cabinet more quickly than any other administration in recent history was to show that, though the nation had major problems, they were under study and would soon be attacked by the most capable minds of our time. He needed to calm the country down, and show, in a measured but forceful way, that a strong hand was at the wheel.

This he has thus far failed abysmally to do. Very disappointing, to the country at large, and not least, I have no doubt, to Barack Obama himself. Viewed from Chicago, up whose greasy political pole the president has himself climbed, the jolt is a lot less jarring. "Them guys in the black suits and narrow ties, them Ivy League types, them goo-goos," the Chicago alderman Mathias (Paddy) Bauler long ago said, "they think the whole thing is on the square." Old Paddy, of unblessed memory, also said that "Chicago ain't ready for reform." Were he alive today to witness the sad early beginnings of the Obama presidency, he might add: "And maybe the rest of the country ain't either."

Epstein is the author, most recently, of “Fred Astaire” (Yale University Press).

© 2009