It is the utter incompetence of George W. Bush which has led to sentiments such as this. It is axiomatic in the practice of legal negotiations, for example, that the side which controls the drafting of the first proposal has a tremendous advantage in the ultimate outcome of the deal. It's simply the way the human mind works: the opening offer sets the template or frame for what is possible. Yet when Bush, out of the blue, announced that America, unlike the economically thriving place he had described just weeks earlier, was on the verge of complete collapse, he filled the panic-stricken void with the stupidest proposal feasible. His Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, until recent years the Chairman of Goldman Sachs, one of the most likely beneficiaries of the huge bailout, rolled out a program which gave the Treasury Department absolutely unfettered discretion to dispense the largesse in any fashion he deemed appropriate to save the economy. The terse, skeletal, three-page "legislation" denied all other branches or agencies of the government, including the courts, any right to review any action taken by Paulson. It also empowered Paulson to hire any private outfit he wanted to help him with his unsupervised work.
Yet another stunning example of Bush's grotesquely inappropriate temperament for the job he pretends to do. The huge problem, which he helped more than most to create with his absentee-landlord government, does need intervention to save us from the worst of the inevitable decline the U.S. economy is headed for. But Bush, in his utterly bottomless arrogance, nevertheless proposed that only he and his cronies in the Treasury Department would have any input into the process of solving the problem. I suppose, when psycho-historians look back on this strange interlude in American history, the one recurring theme they will delineate is the reality distortion so obviously inhabiting the mind of the president. He simply cannot see what's going on here. He thinks that his 70% disapproval rating, almost unprecedented in U.S. history, reflects only the misunderstanding of his subjects. If they could see the world through his wondrous eyes, they would realize that the crazy and useless war in Iraq, the cratering economy, the shredded Constitution, the diminished place of America in the world, were not actually any of these things. Our view, like seeing the nonexistent bend in a pencil placed in a glass of water, is the result of inaccurate reporting and a biased media. We should continue to trust him, to allow him and an investment banker to figure out the entire economic problem, because his gut instincts, informed by daily chats with the deity, always lead him to the right decide-making.
Bush will never understand that we're not missing anything. The picture up above, with its hilarious echoes of 1929, when men who created disasters did the noble act of self-defenestration instead of begging the government for a handout, reflects an honest reaction to Bush's first proposal. The American people don't want to give a trillion dollars to Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase or whoever is left standing on Wall Street as a reward for their perfidy. The three-page ransom note Bush initially handed to Congress implied that possibility, and it was his fault that the entire initial bailout debate degenerated into a "Wall Street versus Main Street" slugfest. As a result, precious time was lost and the problems of liquidity have gotten worse. Bush caused the impasse by framing the debate in exactly those terms.
The bill that was voted down was much different from Paulson's sketch, yet even the House bill suffered from the effects of the original template. Many economists have weighed in with much more sensible and direct approaches for recapitalizing cash-strapped banks, ones that do not carry with them the stigma of bailouts for billionaires. Such proposals start from scratch, without reference to Paulson's prescriptions. Maybe for that very reason Bush was never very interested in such real solutions to real problems.
The Senate takes up the task now, I'm sure with the able assistance of the senior senator from Arizona, who will murmur his own
diktats to help the process along. Something will happen soon, no doubt. The Congressional Clown Troupe can't strike the tents and go home until they finish this, and the one motivation that energizes them more than any other is the chance to stop working.
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