Are You There Adam Smith? It's Me, The Economy...

I give up. For 8 years, I have been hoping and praying that the Democrats would get back into power so they could clean up the mess the Republicans were making of things. I didn't hope for that out of any particular fondness for the Democratic Party- quite the contrary. I hoped that by throwing the first group of bums out, the second group of bums could not possible screw things up anymore than they already were.

Oops. Silly me. Congress is about to pass a stimulus bill that is going to make things worse before it'll make them better. One Democratic Senator is on the record saying that most of his colleagues aren't even going to get a chance to read the damn thing before it passes. And Nancy Pelosi apparently wants things done in a hurry so she can go to Rome. Rahm Emmanuel, White House Chief of Staff is saying that Obama lost control of the stimulus bill when he put too much focus on bipartisan outreach.

This quote, however is my favorite:
“There is plenty to complain about for everyone, and perhaps that’s the sign of a good compromise,” said U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Missouri Democrat. “Regardless of party, we all cast our votes with one hand and crossed our fingers with the other.”
Wow. Things are obviously going really, really well in our nation's capitol. And the Democratic Party, having climbed back into power is obviously hell bent on handing it right back again. If this Bill goes wrong, then it's going to be the Albatross that hangs around the necks of the Democratic Party and it will devastate them in the 2010 elections. People remember incompetence- they might forgive Presidents for it, but they won't forgive Congress for it. So things need to turn around right now. We were promised a chance to view the bill at least 48 hours before any vote. That ain't gonna happen. Recovery.gov is a barren, empty wasteland of a website- sure, it's supposed to track the bill and how the money is spent AFTER its passed, but why not before? And will it happen at all?

I'll believe it when I see it. So what happens now? Well, for the sake of his presidency, I hope President Obama decides to bitch-slap the legislative branch by vetoing this festering turd of a stimulus bill and telling Congress to send him a bill that has the actual, honest-to-goodness support of BOTH parties. He needs political cover and we need an economic action plan that's going to be supported by everyone and not picked and bloated to death by lobbyists and Washington Fat Cats. This is a National Emergency and people need to act like it.

Emmanuel wasn't wrong, exactly- Obama did lose control of the message by focusing on bipartisan support for the bill- but he also failed in that he went to Congress as a supplicant, not a President. He should have sat Congress down and said, 'look people- this is what I want- you tell me what you want, get me a bill with real, live bipartisan support and we'll go from there.' He should have made perfectly clear what he wanted in terms of bipartisan support and also made it clear that he would veto any bill that didn't meet his expectations.

I don't think he's in a position to do that now- but I wish he would. It might give him a chance to get the ball back and actually start acting like a President. Everything is not about political parties- Disraeli did say 'damn your principles- stick to your party' but in America we do have checks and balances. There was an episode of The West Wing where Leo relates a story about how a young freshman congressman comes to town and says 'Where's the Republicans- I want to meet the enemy." And the old, grizzled Speaker says to the kid- "The Republicans are just the opposition. The Senate's the enemy."

People forget that. Obama is the head of the Executive Branch, Congress is the Legislative Branch- those may seem like fairly self-evident points, but the fact remains that usually, the twain never meet- and when they do, it doesn't end all that well. Obama is the Commander in Chief- so he commands- or he leads with what he wants and he gets Congress behind HIS bill. He doesn't get sucked into the gigantic partisan lovefest of whatever it is Reid, Pelosi and company want.

That's the play I would have called- and that's the play I'd still call. But today, with what's going on in Washington D.C. right now I don't have a lot of faith in my government and I don't have a lot of faith in the idea that things are going to turn around in a hurry- in fact, I think six months from now, we're going to see Congress digging out the nation's checkbook and doing this all over again- hoping like hell 'the check' doesn't bounce or send us into an overdraft.

But come to think of it, I've never had a lot of faith in our government to begin with. All this crap just brings the amount of my faith down crazily microscopic levels.