Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Opportunities for leadership
Bob Herbert focuses on the two elephants in the American political room, unemployment and Afghanistan.
If I were a close adviser of President Obama’s, I would say to him, “Mr. President, you have two urgent and overwhelming tasks in front of you: to put Americans trapped in this terrible employment crisis back to work and to put the brakes on your potentially disastrous plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan.”How President Obama proceeds on these two issues will be a true measure of the mettle of the man. One requires putting national interests ahead of military-industrial and Pentagon demands and the other requires marshaling all his political talent and requiring that his advisers be on his page and not the other way round.
Reforming the chaotic and unfair health care system in the U.S. is an important issue. But in terms of pressing national priorities, the most important are the need to find solutions to a catastrophic employment environment that is devastating American families and to end the folly of an 8-year-old war that is both extremely debilitating and ultimately unwinnable.
I would also tell him that rebuilding the economy in a way that allows working Americans to flourish will require a sustained monumental effort, not just bits and pieces of legislation here and there. But such an effort will never get off the ground, will never have any chance of reaching critical mass and actually succeeding, as long as we insist on feeding young, healthy American men and women and endless American dollars into the relentless meat grinders of Afghanistan and Iraq.No amount of spin will, in the end, distract people from the realities of their daily lives.
We learned in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was trumped by Vietnam, that nation-building here at home is incompatible with the demands of war.
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