The consummate reporter magi has spoken. We listen and take heart. But i am not sure he does justice to reality here:
"Obama would do well to remember the example of a young Democratic president who was willing to make long-range plans. Bill Clinton began his presidency in 1993 after having promised to cut the federal deficit in half in four years. The initial plan looked shaky, and Clinton took a lot of heat for more than a year. But he and his team stuck to their basic strategy of cutting federal spending and raising taxes, which laid a major part of the foundation of the economic boom of the Clinton era. It was classic strategic planning, showing a willingness to pay a short-term price for the sort of long-term gains that go down in the history books."
The dynamic is so different now. Clinton inherited a fed who was already expanding the money supply. Its been going on for 25 years. They were borrowing then from the future too. We are now at that place of mathematical reckoning , were they have delivered us to, a place upstream along the river of pumped liquidity from 1987 onward where the expansion grew by manipulating lending programs and discounting lending rates.
Obama inherits a situation where capitalism has distorted itself by all means available into a twisted nightmare of excess (substitute words greed, miscalculation, misregulation etc).
Obama is at a crossroads where he must square the books, retract the expansion of excess honestly, transparently and in the most crude of accounting terms by calling onto the books the many 100's of trillions of bad debt, allow the bankruptcy's, allow the immensely huge overdue crash to heal the drunken spending spree road that capitalism turned down. Since Obama is 99% unlikely to do this, by any stretch of anyone's imagination, go down that road of pain to correct the distortion of what unplugged capitalism has produced , its probably wrong of Woodward to treat it out of context, and compare it to Clinton's years. Its not that paradigm. That paradigm was the culprit, and Clinton was on watch while it was promoted.
We need structural change. Woodward could have spelled it out. He didn't.
Added: In short, Obama must shoot all the villagers to save them. He could not possibly muster it up.
