Colors of power and money

Frank Rich delivers a wonderfully circuitous warning to the new president -- who by all measures is currently winning friends and influencing people.  Rich is not the first to notice the growing (and scary) gap between false Republican "populism" and genuine, growing populist fury in the center and on the left.  Citing Obama's campaign speech on race as the only rival to his address before Congress the other night, Rich warns that although Obama holds all the cards, he may be on the edge of trouble.

But not yet.  For now the Republicans' obsession with shades of color has gotten them into real trouble.  Obama is (confusingly) both a person of color and a member of what Republicans scathingly call the "elite".  Republicans are falling over themselves in their effort to come up with a colorful rival.  And they have failed badly.  From John Boehner's slick, elitist tan to Bobby Jindal's refusal to accept federal stimulus funds for a bankrupt school system which serves the Louisiana underclass (majority black) very badly, the right's effort to create an impression of inclusiveness has bombed.

If you’re baffled why the G.O.P. would thrust Jindal into prime time, the answer is desperation. Eager to update its image without changing its antediluvian (or antebellum) substance, the party is trying to lock down its white country-club blowhards. The only other nonwhite face on tap, alas, is the unguided missile Michael Steele, its new national chairman. Steele has of late been busy promising to revive his party with an “off-the-hook” hip-hop P.R. campaign, presumably with the perennially tan House leader John Boehner leading the posse.

There's the other "rising star" on the Republican side: Mark Sanford.  Maybe he should have given the opposition's response to Obama, not Jindal.  Oops, maybe  not.

That would have been an even bigger fiasco, for Sanford is from the same state as Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the junior high school student who sat in Michelle Obama’s box on Tuesday night and whose impassioned letter to Congress was quoted by the president.

In her plea, the teenager begged for aid to her substandard rural school. Without basic tools, she poignantly wrote, she and her peers cannot “prove to the world” that they too might succeed at becoming “lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president.”

Her school is in Dillon, where the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, grew up. The school’s auditorium, now condemned, was the site of Bernanke’s high school graduation. Dillon is now so destitute that Bernanke’s middle-class childhood home was just auctioned off in a foreclosure sale. Unemployment is at 14.2 percent.

Sanford is another of those stimulus money refusniks for whom "principle" (rightwing politics + selfish social attitudes) comes before reality.

Governor Sanford’s response to such hardship — his state over all has the nation’s third-highest unemployment rate — was not merely a threat to turn down federal funds but a trip to Washington to actively lobby against the stimulus bill. He accused the three Republican senators who voted for it of sabotaging “the future of our civilization.” In his mind the future of civilization has little to do with the future of students like Ty’Sheoma Bethea.

After Obama spoke last Tuesday evening, Rich reports, "CBS News found that support for his economic plans spiked from 63 percent to 80."  So what's with the pessimism?  It feeds on Obama's ties to Wall Street supporters since his Senate days and his unwillingness to punish the banks publicly.

Among the highlights of Obama’s triumphant speech was his own populist jeremiad about the “fancy drapes” and private jets of Wall Street. But talk is not action. Two days later, as ABC News reported, the president of taxpayer- supported Bank of America took a private jet to New York to stonewall Andrew Cuomo’s inquest into $3.6 billion of suspect bonuses.

Handing more public money to the reckless banks that invented this culture and stuck us with the wreckage is the new third rail of American politics. If Obama doesn’t forge a better plan, neither his immense popularity nor even political foes as laughable as Jindal can insulate him from getting burned.

Wait.  Most economists agree that the banks alone didn't bring the economy down.  From government through media to the debt-accumulating "common  man," we all had a hand in creating the financial mess.  So the populist rage at banks is neither entirely off-base nor altogether logical.  How to temper that rage?  With a president as articulate and well-regarded as Obama, a politician who has the biggest megaphone in the world, it shouldn't be that difficult. 

Certainly one measure that would help stem the fury would be to oblige banks to reset consumer credit interest rates at a low number, cap consumer credit limits, and provide incentives for paying off consumer loads a.s.a.p.  Wouldn't getting the huge, GDP-surpassing, consumer debt load off our backs solve a lot of problems, practical as well as political?  Or are many Americans stuck with watching their tax dollars support lending practices which are already costing them everything they've got?