Has a ‘Katrina Moment’ Arrived?
A CHARMING visit with Jay Leno won’t fix it. A 90 percent tax on bankers’ bonuses won’t fix it. Firing Timothy Geithner won’t fix it. Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editor published by The Times last week: “President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.”
I’m not in favor of comparing anything with Katrina, and I hope we haven’t reached a point where it becomes shorthand for the negative turning point in a Presidency. Katrina was a singular disaster that cost lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. But Altmaier and Rich have a narrow point, the financial crisis could very well effectively end Obama’s Presidency. It’s starting to appear that Obama is in much the same bubble that Bush was. Despite all the stories about how he wouldn’t give up his precious Blackberry because he needed to be in contact with more people, he is apparently only listening to people who are massively out of touch with popular sentiment. Geithner and Summers are doing everything they can to protect the wealth and position of their cronies on Wall Street. Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and chief political advisor David Axelrod both went on the record last week calling the AIG bonus story a “big distraction” and that Americans are “not sitting around their kitchen tables thinking about” it.
The squishy middle gave Obama the election because they saw Bush and Paulson trying to loot the Treasury for Goldman and Citi, and they saw McCain as totally clueless on how to fix the damage. So you tell me how Obama plans to hold the House in 2010 and the Presidency two years later. Unless he moves very quickly on the optics and only slightly less quickly on the substance, this will all be over before it starts. And based on advance information, the plan is probably going to leave us considerably worse off than doing nothing at all. Is this what you voted for?