The White House has Failed

by Tom Limongello    November 02, 2008

This Halloween there are many issues that haunt the White House, failed foreign policy, failed responses to natural disasters, and more, but the overall malaise in our economy is what really warrants the Failwhale. As the candidates make their final cases, they stand ready to inherit the White House at one of its worst moments.

In 1987 Gordon Gekko's speech in Wall Street called the US a malfunctioning corporation. Cue up to eight years ago, that corporate ethos was galvanized when we elected our first president who went to business school, George W. Bush. Today Oliver Stone has another movie in the theaters that points to the White House rather than Wall Street as an institution that has failed. Our progression toward looking at the presidency like a CEO of a corporation makes our politics revolve around quarterly earnings. Both the White House and our stock market would do better with less frequent gawking at current performance. When Obama says we should measure how well we are doing ‘if parents can afford to send their kids to college’ he is saying that a healthy bottom line does not always mean that a company or nation is healthy. The White House has failed us because it has not steered our nation in a direction that will keep us the world's most productive country. We need an administration in the White House that creates growth that's sustainable for all Americans and one that does not damage the rest of the world. But if we keep looking at performance on a shorter time horizon then we are going to be maximizing revenues on failing strategies.

A short term look at politics based on economic performance is dangerous. The United States must at the very least be judged like a big corporation, and even those, like Coca Cola, often ask for the ability to report earnings less frequently to foster a shareholder attitude of a long term relationship. So before we change the president’s email address from .gov to .com and before we ask for the president's monthly expense reports we have to remember we are a nation before we are an economy. FDR, Obama’s favorite president, was the type of leader who synthesized ideologies, strategies and tactics to get things done in a crisis, but also had the agility to change if he had made a mistake. Right now I see it as better for a president to fail in adherence to free market principles than to fail to strengthen the sustainability of our economy.

Also, I think we have failed the White House as voters because we have not been agile enough to make changes. We have not given the executive branch the mandate to do better. We have been seduced into voting for short-sighted administrations. Since the end of the Cold War we measure all presidents against Reagan, a strong president that presided over the benefits of Fed Chairman Volcker’s tightening of the money supply. He did not, however, offer the type of leadership that improved our nation's infrastructure, such as Eisenhower, FDR, TR or any president that had to expand our capabilities for economic growth. In fact, Reagan’s administration started a belief that the only good way to spend tax dollars was on the military. What's silly to me is that if we waste money building infrastructure and building schools and hospitals in Iraq that is fine, but if we spend money on public transit, schools and healthcare in the US we dismiss it as socialism. We have limited the definition of the White House to be the place where the guy who lowers our taxes and bombs terrorist-leaning nations lives.

What I have seen in this election is that we have someone with a longer view of history, and who is not worried about how the market will react to his quarterly results. Obama has the ability to change the conversation, which has been best displayed in the way he reframed the energy debate from the here and now to drill or not to drill nonsense into a discussion of longer term job creation. Since my childhood in the 1980s, Americans have known that our auto manufacturing was on the decline, and since the dawn of the Chrysler minivan and it's successor, the SUV, we have had to deal with the fact that we needed to engineer a better way to power our transportation to fit our growing energy needs. In fact, what was less apparent but just as clear was that we needed a better way to power our homes and businesses, too. But if we think of the US as a malfunctioning corporation that needs to pump up its earnings for next quarter then there is no viable solution to the energy problem because we must wait for a market clearing event before sustainable energy sources are mandated by the market. So unless all of our car and energy companies are ready to fold and it becomes preposterously unprofitable to continue the current business models, then there will be no good reason to move toward renewable energy. And if we just give un-differentiated tax breaks to the corporations who are not innovating toward sustainable models then we have no idea when those market conditions will come. In that scenario, the United States may not be the country to create the new market for energy.

The White House should represent a vision of how our government can work for us, and a message of what we can do for our country. Hopefully as the clocks turned back an hour for daylight savings, those who would rather look to the stock market for that leadership will be reminded that darkness comes an hour earlier today.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

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