"Change has come to America" US president-elect Barack Obama called out to hundreds of thousands in Chicago's Grant Park on election night, and to hundreds of millions watching on TV sets around the world, but just what does that mean?
For Mike Steinberger, wine columnist for the online magazine Slate.com, the change he hopes is coming to America is a better getting-wasted experience for those attending official White House state dinners.
"The White House needs a new wine policy ... During the [George W] Bush era, wine service at the executive mansion has been hostage to a profoundly misguided strategy that has turned this most civilized of beverages into an unnecessarily crude instrument of statecraft ... As with so much else, the Bush administration has given Obama the opening he needs to act swiftly and boldly on the wine front ... the White House currently stocks around 500-600 bottles. That is pathetic and another example of how America's infrastructure has been allowed to deteriorate. "
Some critics say that the infrastructure spending in the upcoming stimulus bill will be just thinly disguised appropriations to support congressional members' re-election efforts, pejoratively called pork. This will obviously not be the case here, this is the chardonnay to be served with the pork.
It is now a fairly commonplace assertion that during the past eight years the Bush administration has denigrated diplomacy in favor of neo-conservative swagger and braggadocio, but, according to Steinberger, the problem is less Paul Wolfowitz, more putrid wine.
Both the US Air Force and US wine force are said to have become far too enamored with shock and awe, with wines that Steinberger dismisses as "slam dunks" ( an obvious reference to former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet's pre-Iraq War assertion that it was a "slam dunk" that Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons of mass destruction) and "bruisers".
At a state dinner for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a cabernet sauvignon was served that, according to Steinberger, tasted "like sucking on tree bark - it was obnoxiously oaky".
When I was in graduate school, I knew people who were studying for the US Department of State's Foreign Service Officer exam. Bet this foreign relations advice from Steinberger wasn't one of the questions.
"Diplomacy is a subtle art, and when it is conducted [at the table], it requires subtle libations. Mellow wines promote conviviality, encourage reflection, and create goodwill - the very things state dinners are presumably meant to foster. A hulking cabernet that assaults the senses and flattens any food that gets in its way hardly lubricates the path to world peace. Indeed, serving such a wine might even be construed as a sign of hostile intent: Tonight we smash your palate; tomorrow your palace."
During the campaign, Obama rivals such as Senator Hillary Clinton charged that the Illinois senator was insufficiently detailed about his plans for changing the country. Not Steinberger - he's very detailed on what must be done in this time of crisis.
"So, what must Obama do? He can start by replenishing the White House cellar. He's pledged to create or save 3 million jobs over the next two years; he should set a goal of having 3,000 bottles laid away by the end of his first term. An executive branch buying spree will once again give the presidency a wine stash worthy of the office while also making a small but meaningful contribution to the ailing economy. "
You should not think that all Americans have on their minds at this historic time is the subprime merlot crisis. Over the past few weeks, on a call-in radio program whose host and callers are usually very supportive of the new president, spirited and heated criticisms were voiced on an issue now at the front of the nation's attention.
Was Obama being raked over the coals for keeping Bush holdover Robert Gates on as secretary of defense, or for trying to placate the Republican minority in Congress by making tax cuts the single-largest line item in the upcoming stimulus plan?
Not a chance, because few Americans actually care, or even know, about these controversies. What's got America really interested and engaged these days is what kind of puppy, coming from where, will soon be residing at the White House.
At his Grant Park victory speech, Obama endeared himself to the hundreds of millions of Americans who wouldn't know Tier 1 Capital from teardrop in-ground swimming pools by promising his daughters Sasha and Malia a new puppy for going through the travails of the campaign.
Instantly, the nation became obsessed with this issue; "Obama" and "puppy" return 11.5 million hits on a Google web search, 12 times more than "Obama" and "economic plan". But, as the Roman emperor Commodus' sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) said in the year 2000 movie Gladiator, "The mob is fickle, brother." Lately, the new US president has been feeling its sting.
Due to Malia's allergies, the Obamas are said to be seeking a pure-bred pup, not an abandoned mutt from one of the country's animal shelters. This immediately raised hackles from the nation's animal welfare and rights advocates, who said that, what with over half the dogs in shelters eventually being euthanized, the new first family should just let their oldest daughter sneeze and sniffle through her residence at the White House to set a good example.
On a bulletin board, a poster elaborated the argument: "Even with a child with allergies, there are plenty of pure-breed dogs (including poodles and other breeds that are non-allergenic) waiting in shelters. Hundreds of thousand (maybe more???) perfectly adoptable cats and dogs get euthanized (killed) each year because there is no where to place them."
But that was not the end of the contribution by this poster, self-identified as "maidawg", to the public policy debate. As the first family's house was getting a dog, the nation should use this historic moment to ensure that all houses, or, in maidawg's case, all South Florida condominium owners, have the right to have a dog as well.
The Obama family choice to get a dog also reflects the current culture in which 63% of US households have at least one companion animal. This younger overall culture is in conflict with the average resident of the 55+ housing complexes where no pets are allowed. What I am trying to say is that the whole country is moving toward acceptance of pets and our time will come when pets are allowed everywhere… Citizens FOR Pets in Condos www.petsincondos.org is a 501-c3 tax exempt private operating foundation dedicated to increasing acceptance of companion animals in condos and other types of association-run housing. We educate the public about the health benefits of having animal companions and also advocate for responsible pet ownership/guardianship. Our motto: "creating a win-win situation for both people and pets" ... Citizens for Pets in Condos insists that pet owners/guardians must be responsible and must do all they can to keep their animals from being a true nuisance to others living in their communities!
As Obama prepares to take the oath of office as America's 44th president, 300 million Americans are filled with hope and anticipation, hoping that he can restore the legendary American dream. That would be hard enough, but what really makes the job tough is the fact that there is no single, unified American dream actually still left - just 300 million individual American dreams, apparently spanning the spectrum from beaujolais to beagles, all looking for Washington for fulfillment.
Unlike most, I didn't age into cynicism; people said I was a cynic when I still was in my teens. Still, even with my long years of scoff and sneer coloring my view of everything from politics to pizza, it's hard not to be impressed, even exhilarated, at the feelings of rebirth and regeneration now sweeping across America. Everybody I see, from the blowsy, logorreic Manhattan intellectuals blabbing on into the wee hours of the night on the Public Broadcasting System's Charlie Rose Show to the guy who changes my motor oil, seems to be now hopeful and optimistic about the future.
Part of this is the extraordinarily dignified and admirable manner that Obama carried himself during the campaign and its aftermath, but a lot more of it is just the complete and utter revulsion with which Bush is now viewed by the country. Early on, Bush fell under the Mephistophelean influence of his political advisor Karl Rove, who advised that the country's political structure should be trifurcated into a Democratic Party base, which at best should be ignored, at worst sent for internment at Guantanamo; a middle ground which could be placated with bread and circuses such as real-estate speculation and Fox TV's American Idol, and a conservative, fundamentalist base, whose every quirk and whim was to be immediately satisfied with the full force of government.
After eight years, Bush's record low approval ratings and two successive Republican Party electoral drubbings prove that things haven't gone quite the way Rove, whom Fox News still admiringly calls "The Architect" (well, maybe it's still true, since it was his folly that drove almost 70 million people to vote for Obama), had planned.
The uninvolved middle got fed up and threw their lot in with the Democratic left; even much of the Republican base, what with its members being foreclosed out of their McMansions and their children coming back from Iraq in flag-draped coffins, eventually turned against Bush. Indeed, to an extent I can never recall, Bush has united the country - from Maine to California, from the northern border with Canada on the 49th parallel to the border with Mexico on the Rio Grande river, America couldn't wait to see him go back to Texas.
Of course, the first issue that must be addressed is the pathetic state of the US economy, digging a deeper and deeper hole, from severe recession towards depression, with each successive worse-than-expected economic report.
For most of the time from his victories in the Super Tuesday primaries last February 4 to election day, Obama carried between a 6% and 12% lead in the opinion polls, eventually winning by 7.2%, or 9.5 million votes. Still, it was the rapid and shocking decline in the economy following on the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15 (see Silences say it all Asia Times Online, September 16, 2008) that rendered the vicious Republican attacks of the autumn, on issues such as former 1960s' radical Bill Ayres, the incendiary Reverend Jeremiah Wright and every other irrelevancy they could find, impotent. Previous Democratic nominees Michael Dukakis in 1988, Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, who all came out of their nominating conventions with substantial polling leads that soon evaporated in the face of the gales of Republican smear, were not so fortunate.
Obama's immense current popularity is changing the political calculus for the fiscal spending stimulus package that will be introduced to counter the downturn.
With 41 votes in the Senate (once Minnesota Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty stops holding his breath until his face turns blue and allows Al Franken to be seated) the opposition Republicans in the US Senate have, if their party stays unified, enough votes to prevent passage of any legislation not to their liking. That was the strategy that worked well in the first two years of Bill Clinton's administration from 1993-94, when the Republicans were also still in the minority before their electoral landslide in 1994.
Then, the Republicans stopped any and all legislation that Clinton and the Democrats could possibly take credit for; maybe bills commemorating the victors in Little League baseball could get through, not much else. The Republicans reverted to much the same strategy after the Democrats re-took the Senate in 2006, but this time they were not rewarded with an electoral victory in the next election, but with a drubbing, losing eight seats.
The country now wants action, not talk.
This presents the Republicans in the Senate with a huge dilemma (in the House of Representatives, anything that speaker Nancy Pelosi wants is going to get passed, with her Democratic Party sitting on top of a huge, 79-seat majority), especially considering Obama's recent extraordinary magnanimity in reaching across the aisle to try to establish bi-partisan consensus and comity.
Obviously, whatever their protestations about only wanting "what's best for the country", what the Republicans really want is for the new president's tenure to collapse in a fantabulous fanfare of failure. Still, with Obama's popularity, they have become hesitant about the re-employment of the no-never-negative strategy used with so much success against Bill Clinton. They have learned the lesson that Hamas is only painfully learning against Israel in the rubble of Gaza - you can't directly attack a vastly more powerful foe.
But the Republicans also don't want to go along with Obama's near trillion-dollar big-government stimulus program; they're desperately hoping to recapture their brand identity as the small government party after eight years of Bush's fiscal profligacy. Also, with the next election, the mid-term contests of 2010, still 22 months away, they don't want to be relegated to being irrelevant and ignored for the next two years.
In other words, they want a place at the adults' table where the big issues are being determined, but a place near enough to the door so they can still exit quickly and blame the Democrats if, as they hope, the stimulus doesn't work and the economy is still in tatters by the time of the 2010 mid-term Congressional or 2012 presidential elections.
It is now apparently the question of tax cuts that will decide the issue. Two weeks ago, Democrats and left-wing bloggers were surprised to read reports that the Obama administration was planning to have a significant amount of the stimulus package, some say up to 40%, in the form of tax cuts, the Republicans' preferred policy prescription from everything from recession to rectal itch.
This did not please many in the Democratic base, for it implied a continuation of the core conservative ideology that the best thing that the government can do for the nation is for it to give the people their taxes back. In the January 15 Financial Times, Joseph Stiglitz, a former Clinton economic advisor and 2001 winner of the Nobel prize in economics, had this to say on the issue:
What is clear is that tax cuts will not help much. When Barack Obama, president-elect, last week proposed to use nearly 40% of the stimulus for tax cuts, he was rightly told this would be less effective than, say, spending on infrastructure. It has been surprising, then, to see President George W Bush's former economic advisers, including Greg Mankiw, argue that tax cuts are the way forward. Tax breaks for business may prove to be a sink-hole as bad as the troubled assets relief programme. Particularly worrisome are rumors that companies will be allowed to set off their losses against profits made in the past five years to get tax rebates - a big gift to those who mismanaged risk, including banks such as Citibank.
Still, middle-class tax cuts were a key part of the Obama electoral platform, and the tax cuts being proposed, targeted overwhelmingly to working and middle-class taxpayers, are far different than the usual Republican tax cuts overwhelmingly directed towards the indolent rich, the so-called "Paris Hilton tax cuts". Also, tax cuts of any nature would get now desperately needed money into the economy much faster than the other main focus of the stimulus program, infrastructure spending, with its potential multi-year implementation lag times.
Like everything else in Congress, this matter will probably come down to a matter of negotiation. A preliminary stimulus bill draft released last week from the liberal House Appropriations Committee called for one-third, US$275 billion, of tax cuts from as part of a total $825 billion package. This will essentially become the lowball point in the negotiations with the Senate; in that chamber, majority leader Harry Reid will have to agree to something closer to 40% of the package being tax cuts in order to forestall a Republican filibuster, and to also placate Obama's desire to have the stimulus package pass the upper chamber with 70 votes or more. This would be the fulfillment of Obama's pledge to unite the nation and turn a page on the bitter, polarized political battles of the past.
That is, unless the Republicans, seeing Obama quickly agree to 40% of the package being tax cuts, decide to not take "yes" for an answer and move the goalposts further back. This they could do by demanding what they know Obama and the congressional Democrats would never accept, such as tax cuts as more than 40% of the total package, or insisting on tax cuts more directed towards their patrons among the rich, maybe even pushing the envelope to see if Obama was willing to gut or totally scrap the infrastructure stimulus part of the proposal in the name of unity.
How much of his principles is Obama willing to trade away for those nebulous Republican votes in the Senate? Is it possible that, in the final analysis, getting the economy moving and bi-partisan consensus are two, mutually exclusive goals, and that he'll eventually have to choose one over the other?
Perhaps most importantly, are there fangs behind the smile, a hard fist under the velvet glove?
The Republicans dilemma is how to say "no" when they're getting a lot of what they want - how much can they sign onto this and still credibly say they were not involved if it goes badly?
The Democrats in Congress are behaving very similar to how the party reacted to the first two years of Bill Clinton's tenure, and that could be a major problem for Obama. Just like 16 years ago, party leaders in both chambers are slowing the legislative process to a crawl, haughtily insisting that the new president genuflect to the legislative body's perpetually preening petty potentates and pokey processes. The American people elected Obama on a platform of change; getting Congress to put the people's welfare as a priority above its own self-defined institutional privilege would be considered a fine start to the polity's metamorphosis.
Originally, Obama had hoped to have the stimulus bill passed and ready for signing as he came back from the inauguration; now, some commentators are claiming that he'll be lucky if he sees it by St Patrick's Day on March 17. The equity markets, currently seeing the stimulus package as the only sign of hope in an economic landscape of now unforgiving bleakness, would take that very badly, selling off, shearing away much of Obama's now substantial popularity; that would only then embolden the Senate Republicans to enhanced recalcitrance.
For the sake of both the economy and his presidency, Obama must get the stimulus package out of Congress much quicker than the Congress is prepared to let it go. He can do that by using his high levels of popularity to light a fire under both the Democrats and Republicans in the Congress.
How can he keep the country madly in love with him? Well, adopting a cute puppy that America falls in love with, then having the new president photographed walking it, playing Frisbee with it, maybe helping his daughters give it a bath, would help maintain and bolster his popularity with the public, pressure the Congress to do his (Obama's, not the dog's) bidding, and, in doing so, give immeasurable near-term assistance to the world economy.
Back in December, Obama said that, after New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson withdrew his name from consideration under an ethics cloud, a new puppy was proving harder to find than a new commerce secretary. Considering how much more important the puppy choice is proving to be for the new administration than that of commerce secretary, perhaps the relative difficulties in the two staffing decisions is nothing but a real illustration of the current state of the government's relationship to the governed.
But allow just a bit more from the cynic.
Early in the campaign, Republicans produced TV advertisements that called Obama "the Messiah", an obvious attempt to link the then still mostly unknown candidate to the hayseed backwoods millenarianism of the "Left Behind" theology, which, among other things, prophesized that the Antichrist would one day walk the Earth proclaiming ( "oh no! how evil! ") a message of peace.
In a certain manner, Americans are treating Obama as the Messiah, albeit as a secular, benevolent savior. Millions seem to think that all they have to do is vote for him, maybe watch him dance with his wife at the inaugural ball, perhaps even pick up a cheap commemorative inaugural dish towel holder, and all will be right with the nation.
It won't. America's problems are now far too grave to think that the country can be healed with how those under 40 years of age believe social action should be undertaken, through consumer products' choices.
In other words, you can't right America's wrongs just through the purchase of an Obama mug at Starbucks.
Fixing America will require an equal amount or more of the dedication and purpose that was displayed by Obama's vast army of volunteers. If not, control of the government will invariably soon revert to the big-money special-interest lobbyists who were given a free run of the kingdom under Bush. After all, by 2008, even Bush's most faithful allies in the Christian fundamentalist movement came to realize that all the pious bromides they liked hearing the president utter were just the elevator Muzak being played to cover up the sound of Bush's big money corporate and financial benefactors picking the middle classes' pockets.
So enjoy the inauguration pageant as a glorious symbol of a nation attempting a resurrection from a very dark time. My wife has promised me that I'll get my fingers broken should I try to change the channel to CNBC to see how the financial markets are reacting to the inaugural address, so I'll be right there with the rest of the world, in front of the TV.
Afterward, since the inauguration will be commencing at 9am US West Coast time, it'll be a bit early for me to raise a glass to fete the new president. That will happen later. With apologies to Slate.com wine columnist Mike Steinberger, my libation of choice will be a finely aged 2008 Budweiser, imbibed, to best appreciate its delicately impudent pastiche and bouquet, straight out of its long-necked bottle.
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