Powerless over Stephanopoulos

It’s quite wonderful to see one’s lay intuitions endorsed at the top, such as the growing consensus by the Great and Mighty that the mortally wounded banks should be taken over, the terrible ‘N’-world—nationalization. Some commentators add that the biggest and guiltiest like Bank of America and Citigroup should be broken into smaller pieces in any case so that no one of them can do this much damage ever again. To avoid even the appearance of false modesty, I will point out that I had reached this conclusion exactly eight days ago.

Financial markets continue to tank to lower and lower levels, but despite the egg Geithner laid on Capitol Hill last week, I can’t help feeling optimistic about Obama’s team and their eventual hitting on the right approach. Not that all those Ivy League degrees should impress anybody at this stage, but Obama himself simply continues to reassure.

I caught his Denver signing ceremony for the stimulus package last night, rerun late on C-SPAN, and I’m sorry but all that slavish Beltway attention to the soundbite wars simply cannot be more important than the people whose jobs are going to be saved or created by companies like Namaste that was featured in the event. Its CEO shared the podium, and man did they find the right guy for scoring points—youthful, confident, articulate, serious, utterly convincing.

Obama hinted that his approach is based on the long view, that his administration is going to steadily and relentlessly do what he was elected to do by focusing first on job-creation and well-being from below. He was circumspect, but he subtly signaled to the Capitol Gangsters that they can work themselves up into a lather every day of the week if they so choose, but he’s going to stick to the plan.

I gotta say there’s something 12-step-y about Obama’s inner gyroscope, as if he has absorbed the lessons of the addiction and treatment world wherein family members and friends constantly in upheaval around the addictive scene slowly learn to just decide what they’re going to do and calmly go about doing it whether the addict—in this case the establishment bloviocracy—likes it or not. As Bill and Lois W discovered, it’s a winning formula.