Let’s start with leadership. Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee and Mitch Daniels have the intelligence, knowledge, political sophistication and success at governing to qualify them as serious presidential candidates. That all three have taken themselves out of the running for 2012 speaks not only to the stranglehold that special interests and ideological extremists have over the party primaries and caucuses, but also to a campaign process that has become so grueling and distasteful that only charlatans and egomaniacs are willing to put themselves through it.
Fickle voters, of course, deserve a good part of the blame for this leadership vacuum. Whatever you think of President Obama’s agenda during the past two years, it was pretty much what he had promised. Two years on, his reward was a new Republican majority determined to reverse and delegitimize everything he had done. Now six months after that, the public has decided it doesn’t like the Republican program any better.
The air of unreality that now permeates the political discussion is truly mind-boggling.
I wonder how many more natural disasters it will take, or how much more data about rising temperatures and falling crop yields, or how many maps showing the melting of the polar ice caps, before we can pick up again with a serious conversation about what to do about global warming.
How much more of the nation’s wealth will have to be transferred to senior citizens with six-figure incomes before it will be politically acceptable to hold their future Social Security benefit increases to the rate of inflation?
Does anyone seriously believe you can’t cut 15 percent from weapons spending at the Pentagon, or 15 percent from the least-effective programs at the departments of Commerce, Labor, Education and Homeland Security, without endangering the national defense or the economy?
How much bigger would the federal government debt have to get before the industrial country with the lowest tax burden might decide to raise taxes on the 10 percent of households that earn half of the nation’s income?
Can anyone watch the instant replay from the recent financial crisis — the new movie of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Too Big to Fail” — and come away thinking that the real problem in this country is that government has put too tight a leash on Wall Street and the banks?
Do federal workers expect that they can continue to receive pensions and health benefits nearly double those of the average private-sector employee?
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