Act

Bipartisanship is a nice thought, and coming from Barack Obama it actually means something: trying to restore civil terms to political discourse, getting us away from the eight-second-soundbite, dagger-in-the-face style of shouter cable TV, the vile antics of the self-appointed wanker-experts.

But Obama’s instincts for calm, reasoned debate and finding common ground isn’t what we need right now as the financial system lurches from one precipice to another, and the disloyal opposition openly hopes for chaos to erase the collective memory of its own massive incompetence. Time is short; compromise is a luxury. Martin Wolf writes in the Financial Times:

[The Obama Administration] has set itself the wrong question. It has not asked what needs to be done to be sure of a solution. It has asked itself, instead, what is the best it can do given three arbitrary, self-imposed constraints: no nationalisation; no losses for bondholders; and no more money from Congress. Yet why does a new administration, confronting a huge crisis, not try to change the terms of debate? This timidity is depressing.

At the same time, instead of bold action we have bold grandstanding by Congress which today is indulging itself by holding up bankers to public scorn as a substitute for taking away their power, toys and ill-gotten loot. It is patronizing and insulting to be expected to enjoy a televised flogging of executives (who surely know how to put up with—and even enjoy—S&M routines in their cutthroat world) while the White House buckles on tax cuts, mass transit investment, and health and education spending only to get three votes from undistinguished Republican ‘moderates’.

We don’t need O to prove his reasonableness; we need him to save our ass.

Many of the largest banks in the U.S. are out of money and cannot be saved. The IMF director said as much this week, and if we were Brazil or Russia or Bangladesh, the hemlock would have been force-fed them months ago. Where are the independent, realistic, radical voices of alarm and rationality inside the Obama camp? The guy says he will change course when necessary, but under these conditions he cannot wait too long to do so.