While voters in our groups gave the president higher marks on the economy after the speech than before, that was clearly driven by his new priority, jobs, and perhaps a clearer understanding of the difference between Bush era policies and the new one. Still, the president and the Democrats in Congress do not yet have a narrative or a framework to explain their economic policies in a period where the gap grows between macro and micro growth.
To make matters worse, there is the perception by some fairly smart people that there may not be a narrative to be found. We may be living in an America that is ungovernable.
System Failure Toward the end of the decade, as the establishment definitively rebuked Bush and sought to distance itself from his failures, the big-tent center-left coalition took on an influential constituency--the Colin Powells and Warren Buffetts--who didn't want reform so much as they wanted restoration. This was reflected in a strange internal tension in the Obama campaign rhetoric that simultaneously promised both: change you can believe in and, as Obama said at a March 2008 appearance in Pennsylvania, a foreign policy that is "actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush's father."
If the working hypothesis that bound this unwieldy coalition together--independents, most liberals and the Washington establishment--was that the nation's troubles were chiefly caused by the occupants of the White House, then this past year has served as a kind of natural experiment. We changed the independent variable (the party and people in power) and can observe the results. It is hard, I think, to come to any conclusion but that the former hypothesis was insufficient.
The Teabaggers, Sarah Palin, they are a natural outgrowth of the elemental , gut level perception that things have become fundamentally unhinged. The pain that this movement seems to represent is all to real. The fear that this pain spawns leads them to flail about for reasons, causes, ways out, and heaven help anyone who has the responsibility, the job of trying to fix the mess - which maybe in the short term unfixable.
Here in Texas, the fallout of misgovernance is all around us. Recall our rankings in education, child welfare, prisons, care for the mentally ill, juvenile justice. Don't forget our defective revenue system make worse and worse by the Governor's mindless mantra of cutting taxes.
Blame the childish, ignorant American public-not politicians-for our political and economic crisis. Anybody who says you can't have it both ways clearly hasn't been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic-or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation-is what locks the status quo in place.
Texas has been at the very heart of these transformation. We gave Bush to the world. We gave the world the funding for the Swift Boaters. When Republicans, nation-wide, are looking for funding, they come to Texas. I am hopeful we are on the cusp of taking Texas back. I am left wondering what exactly there will be left to take back, what resources we can command to fix so much that is broken.
