In this past campaign, we heard yet another round of conservative ads and rhetoric bashing Obama & the Dems over the bailouts, the purchase of GM & Chrysler, and the stimulus. And I feel my blood pressure slowly notching up as I watch the Dems let sand get kicked in their face over it yet again. If these initiatives did something good and worthwhile, they should be proudly taking credit for these actions. Then I catch myself wondering "Did they?" I've been told there would have been a greater crisis had they not, but how do I know? Did the Dems save us from another Great Depression, or would the markets have worked things out on their own? This is the difference between reality and theater. In theater, the crisis is always more palpable.
In a typical suspense movie, you have the time bomb ticking under the desk while our hero takes dramatic steps to find it and disarm it. The last wire is cut with two seconds left to spare, a big sigh of relief is made, our hero has saved the day, and we the audience are treated to another celebratory catharsis. All well and good; I love a good catharsis as well as the next person.
The hitch is, the suspense in those films comes from the fact that we are shown the bomb under the desk. We know there's an impending disaster, so we feel good when the hero struggles to stop the bomb, even if those steps are reckless and destructive. Killing a few bad guys and wrecking a few cars are accepted and appreciated by the audience because we know there is life in the balance.
But what if we were never shown the bomb? What if the hero wasn't even sure if there was a bomb, but just had a strong feeling something bad would happen. And so our hero jams the radio detonator, and then we wait...and no bomb goes off. What now? We never see...we never truly know...if it was all worth it. If there really was a bomb, our hero is truly heroic and much can be forgiven. But if there wasn't, he's a murderer and a public nuisance. For the movie maker, this is terrible cinema because instead of catharsis the audience is left with emotional confusion. So how does this play out in politics?
In politics, the "bomb" is an impending economic disaster that threatens to cripple the country with economic ruin for years to come, and Obama takes on the roll of the hero trying to stop it. The measure of respect we have for his actions depends on our perception of how real the bomb is. We can't "see" the bomb, and we've no idea it's destructive force, so we're left taking our hero's word that it's there and it was big and bad. No wonder it's so easy to hate the stimulus and bailouts. If the impending distruction was real, the Dems and Obama are heroes; if not, they wasted a fortune in the taxpayer's money.
We'll never know, and that's what makes those measures so maddeningly hard to defend and easy to attack.