Off the charts

During the speech, CNN equipped a roomful of Democrats and Republicans with dials to turn this way or that. Though sometimes the red and blue lines crowded each other at the top of the resulting graph, at other times no lines at all were visible. They were literally off the charts. In a followup CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, ninety-two per cent of viewers had a positive reaction to the speech; eighty-two per cent said they supported its proposals. The science of this sort of thing may be doubted, especially as a predictor of future opinion. But politicians tend to take notice.

At least one Obama watcher believes the new president came into his own with his address to Congress last week.  Hendrik Hertzberg summarizes the reaction to the speech and its reverberations.  What seems to interest him most is Obama's refusal to blame the Bush administration.  I think that's the core of Obama's appeal, even to those of us who would haved liked to witness Bush and Cheney being drawn and quartered on the Mall. 

There's something comforting about returning to the notion of common responsibility for our ills.  After all, it means a return to power -- over our choices, over our future and over "the commons."  We take back our self-respect as we return to self-government.  Isn't that what Bush and Cheney wrenched out of our hands for eight years?  Finally, Hertzberg writes, "we have a plan, and a President."

Power, self-respect and self government?  Go on!  How are we going to do that in the face of such extensive corruption and partisan mayhem?  Huh?   Even the Securities and Exchange Commission can't follow through on more than 16% of company reviews, not to mention investigations into clear fraud.  Thing is, Daniel Roth writes in Wired (h/t "The Daily Dish"), you and I can do the job ourselves and do it better rather than depend on a politically driven SEC.  Roth campaigns for "radical transparency."

It's not enough to simply give the SEC—or any of its sister regulators—more authority; we need to rethink our entire philosophy of regulation. Instead of assigning oversight responsibility to a finite group of bureaucrats, we should enable every investor to act as a citizen-regulator. We should tap into the massive parallel processing power of people around the world by giving everyone the tools to track, analyze, and publicize financial machinations. The result would be a wave of decentralized innovation that can keep pace with Wall Street and allow the market to regulate itself—naturally punishing companies and investments that don't measure up—more efficiently than the regulators ever could. The revolution will be powered by data, which should be unshackled from the pages of regulatory filings and made more flexible and useful. We must require public companies and all financial firms to report more granular data online—and in real time, not just quarterly—uniformly tagged and exportable into any spreadsheet, database, widget, or Web page.