Parts to Wholes: the Socionomic Systems Nexus

State of the Union Speech

Survey Reveals Broad Support for President President Obama is benefiting from remarkably high levels of optimism and confidence among Americans about his leadership, providing him with substantial political clout as he confronts the nation’s economic challenges and opposition from nearly all Republicans in Congress, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. A majority of people surveyed in both parties said Mr. Obama was striving to work in a bipartisan way, but most faulted Republicans for their response to the president, saying the party had objected to the $787 billion economic stimulus plan for political reasons. Most said Mr. Obama should pursue the priorities he campaigned on, the poll found, rather than seek middle ground with Republicans. Mr. Obama will deliver his first address to Congress on Tuesday evening against a backdrop of deep economic anxiety among the public, with worries spanning party, class and regional divides. A majority of Americans, 55 percent, say they are just making ends meet, with more than 6 in 10 concerned that someone in their household might lose his job in the next year. Americans are under no illusions that the country’s problems will be resolved quickly, but the poll suggested that they will be patient when it comes to the economy, with most saying it would be years before significant improvement.  A month into Mr. Obama’s term, with his first big accomplishments, setbacks and political battles behind him, more than three-quarters of the people polled said they were optimistic about the next four years with him as president. Similar percentages said that they thought he was bringing real change to the way things were done in Washington and that they had confidence in his ability to make the right decisions about the economy. The aura of good will surrounding Mr. Obama at this stage of his presidency is similar to the one that benefited Ronald Reagan as he led the nation out of economic gloom. With a job approval rating of 63 percent, Mr. Obama is in a strong position to sell his economic policies. Yet the poll also captured skepticism about how effective his plans will prove to be in addressing the deep recession, as well as a strain of populism that could test his ability to retain public support for efforts to prop up key sectors of the economy.

• President Reaches Out to Average Americans

Analysis: Obama address renews audacity to hope President Barack Obama gave America the audacity to hope again. After describing the U.S. economy in nearly apocalyptic terms for weeks, pushing his $787 billion stimulus plan through Congress, the president used his address to Congress on Tuesday night to tap the deep well of American optimism — the never-say-die spirit that every president tries to capture in words. And great presidents embody. "We will rebuild. We will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before," Obama said, echoing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. "The answers to our problems don't lie beyond our reach," Obama said. "What is required now is for this country is to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more." The themes of responsibility, accountability and, above all, national community rang throughout an address carefully balanced by the gravity of its times. Job losses. Home foreclosures. Credit crisis. Rising health care costs. Declining trust in government. Obama touched all those bases. Like Roosevelt, Obama asked Americans to unite against pessimism. "We are a nation that has seen promise amid peril, and claimed opportunity from ordeal," Obama said. "Now we must be that nation again." Like Roosevelt, Obama said his government had already provided the machinery to create jobs, improve access to health care, free up credit and help struggling homeowners. And, like Roosevelt, he challenged Americans to help fix the nation's woes. Obama even challenged his fellow citizens to recognize their role in creating the problem. "People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford," Obama said, "from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway." He was blunt but bullish on America. "None of this will come without cost, nor will it be easy," he said after spelling out his agenda. "But this is America. We don't do what's easy. We do what is necessary to move this country forward."

• Analyzing Obama’s Speech to Congress
• Shields and Brooks Assess Obama's Speech to Congress

Obama Outlines Road to Economic Recovery President Obama offered a grim portrait of America's plight in an address to a joint session of Congress last night, but he promised to lead an economic renewal that would lift the country out of its current crisis without bankrupting its future. Striking an optimistic tone that has been absent from his speeches in recent weeks, the president said his stimulus plan, bank bailout proposal, housing programs and health-care overhaul would work in concert to turn around the nation's struggling economy. And while he bluntly described a country beset by historic economic challenges and continued threats abroad, he said the solution lies in directly confronting -- not ignoring -- those problems. Obama received a standing ovation when he vowed that corporate chief executives would no longer travel on private jets at the same time they laid off thousands of workers. "Those days are over," he said. Lawmakers leapt to their feet again when he declared that "health-care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year." After weeks of persistent questions about whether he had grown too downcast and pessimistic in describing the economic crisis to the American people, White House officials said Obama was seeking to strike an appropriate balance between hope -- the mantra of his campaign -- and realism in an era of serious problems. He sought to juxtapose those ideas repeatedly, saying at one point: "While our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken, though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before."

• Lawmakers All Thumbs During Speech, The Assurance of Smooth Talk

Call for Action Balances Optimism & Urgency Barack Obama climbed Capitol Hill last night and staked his presidency on bringing the nation out of its economic crisis. Not since Franklin Roosevelt delivered his first fireside chat, eight days into his presidency, have Americans been more hungry -- and more desperate -- for economic leadership. And not since FDR has there been an economic agenda as bold or ambitious, or as likely to reshape American capitalism.  It remains an open question whether by trying to do so much so fast, Obama will be able to create the momentum and sense of urgency necessary to overcome pushback from many Republicans, the inevitable opposition from special interests and the natural tendency of the system to return to the old political equilibrium.Already there are signs that the demands of the president's ambitious agenda have overwhelmed the economic team that has been assembled at the White House, the Treasury and other federal agencies. And there are some who warn that in asking Congress to consider so many different issues, Obama runs the risk of political gridlock as one initiative is held hostage to another. But as Obama sees it, his strategy is not to find a way to maneuver a wildly ambitious economic program through the twists and turns of a hostile and byzantine political system, but to use the urgency of the moment and his considerable political capital to reform that system and transform the way politics is done.

Poor Gov. Jindal Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal didn't stand a chance. The rising Republican star delivered his party's response to President Obama's hour-long address and simply didn't rise to the occasion. Where Obama in tone and message was relentlessly positive, Jindal's relentless utterance of "Americans can do anything" masked a Debbie Downer negativism that permeated his speech. And coming after Obama's boffo performance, Jindal's Don Knotts-like "golly gee willikers" story-telling and cadence was, how does one put this delicately, downright strange. I'll cut Jindal a little bit of slack. His speech, like the president's, was written without knowing what the other fella was going to say. But it was as if the speech were written by a team of speechwriters who hadn't been let out of the basement of RNC headquarters since the Reagan administration, with all that talk about tax cuts being the only answer to everything ailing the economy. Jindal's proposal for creating jobs is "lowering income tax rates for working families, cutting taxes for small businesses and strengthening incentives for businesses to invest in new equipment and hire new workers and stabilizing home values by creating a new tax credit for homebuyers." But here's the problem: the credit markets are frozen. As a result, businesses aren't investing, small businesses aren't hiring and people are losing their jobs or can't find new ones. Americans are hurting and are looking for answers. They didn't get anything new, innovative or imaginative from Jindal. The national Republican Party is groping for a way forward. It needs to do what Obama did. Get out of Washington, listen to and feel the anger of the American people, and listen to the sane Republican governors who are desperate to hold their states' finances together with the federal government's help. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist defied his party when he helped Obama sell the stimulus package in his battered state earlier this month. After Jindal's performance tonight, Crist's stock should rise. That is, if the GOP wants to start finding its way out of the wilderness.

• Jindal Doesn't Levitate to the Occasion, Grateful Nation Thanks Jindal for Gift of Laughter
• Banal in Baton Rouge
• Shields and Brooks on Jindal's GOP Response to Obama's Speech

'We Are Not Quitters' It was a moment that Franklin D. Roosevelt would have savored in 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression — the president gesturing to the gallery of the House of Representatives and quoting a high school student from South Carolina: “We are not quitters.” No, sir! No way. Not Tuesday night. For the first time in his presidency, Barack Obama was truly presidential, finding a language and a cadence to speak to a country that has become paralyzed by the economic decline. Before the speech, even the nation’s most tough-minded investors were saying that the best hope for the economy was that Obama would sprinkle some political magic. His policies hadn’t stemmed the decline; the massive $787 stimulus package was criticized even by its supporters as a grab-bag, and his financial recovery plan sent the stock market plummeting. But perhaps the president, the Orator in Chief, could turn it around. The big asset in our depleted national bank right now is Obama himself. And to this listener, at least, he delivered a big tranche of what the bankers and boardroom titans have failed to provide over the past year, which is leadership. That won’t be enough to offset all the bad news that’s still ahead, but it was a start. It was a strong, ambitious speech, important not just for what Obama said but for what he still has in reserve in terms of leadership and rhetorical power. After eight years of botched words and shrugs and smirks, we have a president who can harness the English language and use it speak to a frightened country. He had his priorities sharply focused Tuesday night: energy, health care, education, fiscal discipline — the same themes he kept pushing on the campaign trail, but now it is for real. The odd thing about leadership, especially when it comes to economic issues, is that it’s a confidence game. To make this recovery happen, you gotta believe. That act of belief is fragile, especially when the economy is still heading down and hasn’t yet hit bottom. But Tuesday night, Obama was able to speak directly to the American people, powerfully and passionately, at the beginning of what will be a nightmare year. That’s a big plus for a frightened nation. The Republicans had new reason to be worried after the speech; the public had new reason to be hopeful.

• Finally, an Inaugural Address, A Strong Economics Speech

'Reagan-esque:' Obama Wins Over Skeptics with Optimism, Leadership on Banks Joe Brusuelas, director of market economics for Moody's Economy.com, gives Obama high marks for such "Reagan-esque" moments. More surprisingly for an economist who publicly supported John McCain, Brusuelas also applauded Obama for showing "leadership" on the vexing issue of how to resolve the banking crisis. While acknowledging Americans' anger toward Wall Street and the banks, Obama did not pander to the populist rhetoric, Brusuelas notes. Instead, the President - echoing Ben Bernanke earlier in the day - spoke directly about the need to resolve the financial crisis if we're to have any hope of sustaining a recovery. "When there is no lending families can't afford to buy homes or cars, so businesses are forced to make layoffs. Our economy suffers even more and credit dries up even further," Obama said. "That is why this administration is moving swiftly and aggressively to break this destructive cycle, to restore." In the accompanying video and forthcoming segments, Brusuelas addresses related questions: Are Obama and Bernanke pursuing the right course in dealing with the banking crisis? How likely will the economy bottom this year, as Bernanke suggested is possible? Will the stimulus package work? Should big banks be put into FDIC receivership, i.e. nationalized?

US Budget, Priorities and SEE-Changes

A Risk Obama is Willing to Take President Obama's first budget -- with its eye-popping $1.75 trillion deficit, a health-care fund of more than $600 billion, a $150 billion energy package and proposals to tax wealthy Americans even beyond what he talked about during his campaign -- underscores the breadth of his aspiration to reverse three decades of conservative governance and use his presidency to rapidly transform the country. But in adopting a program of such size, cost and complexity, Obama has far exceeded what other politicians might have done. As a result, he is now gambling with his own future and the success of his presidency. Audacity has always been Obama's stock in trade. At stake in this endeavor is the well-being of a nation now in an economic crisis of historic proportions. The president's budget blueprint, which comes after the passage of a $787 billion stimulus package and costly proposals to unlock frozen credit markets and shore up the shattered housing market, demonstrates his assessment that timidity in the face of these problems is a risk not worth taking. Confronted by economic woes that threatened to derail the already ambitious domestic agenda Obama laid out during his campaign, he has chosen an all-in strategy. He first moved aggressively to confront the current weaknesses in the economy. Yesterday, he showed he is not eager to back away from campaign promises (although Congress may have other ideas) on health care, energy and education. With his new budget, he indicated his belief that both short- and long-term economic problems must be dealt with now, rather than later. As he put it, this is a time to deal with the foundations of the house. But is now, with the economy in such a fragile state, the time to dig at its foundations? Can Obama put together majority coalitions to pass universal health care or a new energy policy? The prospects for health-care reform may be brighter than they were when President Bill Clinton tried unsuccessfully to enact his program in 1993-94, but Obama will still have to defeat the arm of interests and lobbyists that sank Clinton's plan. Can he win passage for a cap-and-trade energy plan that the budget says would produce more than $600 billion in revenue by 2019? Obama will face increasing partisan opposition to major elements of his plan, even as he attempts to change the tone of political debate in Washington. But he may run into resistance from some Democrats as well, given the size of his ambitions.

• Agency Budget Impacts Graphic
• Obama Signals Shift in Priorities,  Who Gets What

OMB Director a Centrist Who Can Deal The gangly, bespectacled official who yesterday laid down the fiscal footprint of a new presidency is an unassuming man who proudly refers to himself as the administration's "super-nerd." "I hope I don't bore everyone else in the room," Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag deadpanned to an auditorium full of reporters as he unveiled President Obama's first budget. Orszag, at 40 the youngest member of the Cabinet, has assumed an outsize influence among the tight circle of wonks Obama has dubbed his "propeller heads": a team of economists with big personalities and bigger intellects. Orszag has already surprised lawmakers on Capitol Hill with his apparent overnight transformation from the low-key academic they remember from his tenure at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to a political dealmaker instrumental in negotiations over passing Obama's economic recovery plan. In the past week, Orszag has unveiled a $3.6 trillion budget and convened a "fiscal responsibility" summit aimed at easing the country's economic crisis and advancing the president's domestic agenda. He is also expected to play a leading role in efforts to reform the nation's health-care system. A self-described economic centrist who fought President George W. Bush's proposal to privatize Social Security, Orszag thinks the soaring costs of health care pose the biggest threat to the nation's fiscal health. Left unchecked, he fears, health-care costs will become "the primary driver" of a crisis. "He doesn't come in and say, 'I've got a problem,' " White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said. "He says, 'I've got a problem, and here's my idea for a solution.' . . . I can't imagine we'd be at this point in passing the economic recovery act and 10 days later having this budget if it wasn't for the fact that Peter Orszag was running both." After a succession of other posts, including directing the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, Orszag moved to the Congressional Budget Office in 2007. There, he forged ties with lawmakers in both parties. Those relationships were put to use last month when Obama dispatched him to Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid's office to secure deals on the stimulus with wavering moderates. "He wasn't just some pointy-headed intellectual," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Reid (D-Nev.). "He grasped the politics at stake, as well."

Economic Scene: A Bold Plan Sweeps Away Reagan Ideas The budget that President Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters. The Obama budget — a bold, even radical departure from recent history, wrapped in bureaucratic formality and statistical tables — would sharply raise taxes on the rich, beyond where Bill Clinton had raised them. It would reduce taxes for everyone else, to a lower point than they were under either Mr. Clinton or George W. Bush. And it would lay the groundwork for sweeping changes in health care and education, among other areas. More than anything else, the proposals seek to reverse the rapid increase in economic inequality over the last 30 years. They do so first by rewriting the tax code and, over the longer term, by trying to solve some big causes of the middle-class income slowdown, like high medical costs and slowing educational gains. He sought to eliminate some corporate subsidies, for health insurers, banks and agricultural companies, that economists have long criticized. He proposed putting a price on carbon, to slow global warming, and then refunding most of the revenue from that program through broad-based tax cuts. He called for roughly $100 billion a year in tax increases on the wealthy — mostly delayed until 2011, when the recession will presumably have ended — and $50 billion a year in net tax cuts for the nonwealthy. The history of the United States economy over the last 70 years can be roughly divided into two periods: the decades immediately after World War II, when inequality plummeted, and the past three decades, when global economic forces and government policies caused it to soar. Mr. Obama is setting out to begin a third period that looks more like the first than the second. But for the country to repeat the post-World War II pattern, the incomes of most families would also have to begin rising at a faster rate than they have since the 1970s. That outcome remains deeply uncertain. Economists who study economic growth say the American economy is unlikely to grow nearly as fast in coming years as in the 1950s and ’60s. Mr. Obama would try to lift the incomes of the middle class and poor through two main channels, administration officials said. The first is an overhaul of health care, meant to reduce the insurance premiums now taking a large bite out of many families’ paychecks. The other channel is education. Over the last three decades, the pay of college graduates has risen significantly faster than the pay of less-educated workers. Mr. Obama aims to move workers into the first category by increasing federal financial aid and simplifying the myriad of aid programs. In recent years, the United States has lost its standing as the country in which the largest share of young adults graduates from college.

Bad Old World or Brave New One

Analysis: GOP at risk of becoming party in the no After near-unanimous Republican congressional opposition to President Barack Obama’s stimulus package and a week dominated by headlines of GOP governors poised to reject stimulus funding, House Republicans followed up with another resounding “no” on the $410 billion omnibus spending package Wednesday. This time, though, 16 members broke from the party line on a vote Minority Whip Eric Cantor had urged his colleagues to reject. And the cracks in the facade appear to be the first public signal of Republican rank-and-file squeamishness with a remarkably high-risk strategy that promises an uncertain return. For Republicans, a central question looms: Is saying no to Obama’s agenda the way to get voters to say yes to an already beleaguered GOP brand? Despite two consecutive election thrashings, and despite Obama’s high approval ratings and their own low standing, Republicans have wagered that the return to the majority is paved by unwavering opposition to further spending, an audacious bet that won’t pay out for another 21 months. If Republicans are right, the economy will remain in tatters and voters will recognize in 2010 that the recovery was delayed by profligate Democrats and their president. If the GOP is wrong, however, and the economy begins to show signs of life, the resistance will be easily framed as reflexive obstructionism, the last gasp of an intellectually bankrupt party. The timing only heightens the stakes. Midterm elections are traditionally hostile to the party in power, which means Republicans will have a wind at their back for the first time in six years. But 2010 is also the election cycle that, across the nation, will begin laying the groundwork for the decennial congressional and state legislative redistricting, raising the prospect that, if Republicans are wrong, they could find themselves consigned to minority status for close to a generation. “They just seem to be sitting back and waiting for the Democrats to come up with the plan so they can look for something to shoot at,” said House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), who is locked in a battle with his home stategovernor, Mark Sanford, over money for unemployment insurance. “They’re making a calculated decision to just say ‘no.’”  Republicans don’t readily concede the risks inherent in their approach. In an acknowledgment of Obama’s popularity, they are carefully drawing distinctions in what exactly they oppose and trying to avoid going up against Obama’s formidable personal charisma.

Paul Krugman: Climate of Change Elections have consequences. President Obama’s new budget represents a huge break, not just with the policies of the past eight years, but with policy trends over the past 30 years. If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America on a fundamentally new course. The budget will, among other things, come as a huge relief to Democrats who were starting to feel a bit of postpartisan depression. The stimulus bill that Congress passed may have been too weak and too focused on tax cuts. The administration’s refusal to get tough on the banks may be deeply disappointing. But fears that Mr. Obama would sacrifice progressive priorities in his budget plans, and satisfy himself with fiddling around the edges of the tax system, have now been banished. For this budget allocates $634 billion over the next decade for health reform. That’s not enough to pay for universal coverage, but it’s an impressive start. And Mr. Obama plans to pay for health reform, not just with higher taxes on the affluent, but by putting a halt to the creeping privatization of Medicare, eliminating overpayments to insurance companies. On another front, it’s also heartening to see that the budget projects $645 billion in revenues from the sale of emission allowances. After years of denial and delay by its predecessor, the Obama administration is signaling that it’s ready to take on climate change. And these new priorities are laid out in a document whose clarity and plausibility seem almost incredible to those of us who grew accustomed to reading Bush-era budgets, which insulted our intelligence on every page. This is budgeting we can believe in. Many will ask whether Mr. Obama can actually pull off the deficit reduction he promises. Can he actually reduce the red ink from $1.75 trillion this year to less than a third as much in 2013? Yes, he can. Right now the deficit is huge thanks to temporary factors (at least we hope they’re temporary): a severe economic slump is depressing revenues and large sums have to be allocated both to fiscal stimulus and to financial rescues. But if and when the crisis passes, the budget picture should improve dramatically. So if Mr. Obama gets us out of Iraq (without bogging us down in an equally expensive Afghan quagmire) and manages to engineer a solid economic recovery — two big ifs, to be sure — getting the deficit down to around $500 billion by 2013 shouldn’t be at all difficult. But won’t the deficit be swollen by interest on the debt run-up over the next few years? Not as much as you might think. Interest rates on long-term government debt are less than 4 percent, so even a trillion dollars of additional debt adds less than $40 billion a year to future deficits. And those interest costs are fully reflected in the budget documents. So we have good priorities and plausible projections. What’s not to like about this budget? Basically, the long run outlook remains worrying. According to the Obama administration’s budget projections, the ratio of federal debt to G.D.P., a widely used measure of the government’s financial position, will soar over the next few years, then more or less stabilize. But this stability will be achieved at a debt-to-G.D.P. ratio of around 60 percent. That wouldn’t be an extremely high debt level by international standards, but it would be the deepest in debt America has been since the years immediately following World War II. And it would leave us with considerably reduced room for maneuver if another crisis comes along.

Responses and Consequences: Dr. Noes vs Realities

The GOP's 'No' Problem  House Republicans are fashioning themselves after Newt Gingrich, the bombastic former Speaker who led them to their first majority in 40 years. Gingrich and his merry band of reformers opposed President Clinton's first major economic legislation, a deficit reduction package with a tax increase for the top one percent of wage earners. Clinton didn't get a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate, but his stewardship of the economy got him reelected and led to a budget surplus. But success came with a high political price. Republicans capitalized on short-term dissatisfaction with Clinton and gained dominance of Congress for a dozen years, until their majority collapsed of its own weight, overcome by corruption, greed and inattention to the nation's problems. Now, Republicans are betting that the $787 billion stimulus plan won't work, and they can frame the 2010 congressional election as a referendum on Obama's stewardship of the economy. Their mocking references to elements of the legislation are reminiscent of the way Gingrich's Republicans caused havoc with Clinton's crime bill, ridiculing as "midnight basketball" a program to open gyms at night to get inner-city youth off the streets. Gingrich played hardball, but he knew it wasn't enough to just say no, that Republicans had to be for something in a town where sparring over old political fights too often substitutes for original thought. With an intellect as explosive as his personality, aides joked that in his office there was a big box for Newt's ideas and a much smaller box labeled, "Newt's good ideas."

The Uncertain Trumpet On Tuesday night, President Obama talked about a national culture of irresponsibility. He talked about the way Americans have sacrificed the long term for the short term, spent more than they could afford, and how the country’s leaders have broken promises and delayed reform. Obama described a rot that was ingrained and pervasive. On Thursday, he offered a budget of his own, and the question arises: Will he really change all that? The answer is somewhat, but not enough. Obama’s budget is far more honest than the ones that preceded it. It imposes real pay-as-you-go rules on future outlays. Intellectually serious efforts are made to pay for at least half of the cost of health care reform. But the ingrained habits are still there, and the rot is not expunged. Obama enthusiastically perpetuates the myth that the American people can have everything they want without a dose of shared sacrifice. They can have health care, education reform, even a cure for cancer, and 98 percent of them need pay nothing. The burdens of progress will be borne by the rich while everyone else can enjoy their tax cuts and go shopping. Obama perpetuates base-line gimmickry. He claims to save hundreds of billions by drawing down forces in Iraq. But even the Bush administration was going to draw down. Obama is claiming bogus savings by not spending money that never would have been spent anyway. Even though the budget is not all one would have hoped, I’d trust the folks in the Obama administration to craft a decent health care plan before I’d trust the Congressional Old Bulls. Obama blew a mighty trumpet Tuesday night, but after you blow the trumpet, you actually have to charge.

The Age of Irresponsibility Decades from now, historians are going to fill e-tome after e-tome debating when the crisis in American authority began. A good place to start would be the Clinton era. The president of the United States had a tawdry affair, lied about it, and refused to accept any responsibility for his actions. The Republicans correctly pointed out that the president had acted beneath his office. The problem was that many of them were acting beneath their offices, too. In Washington, where the spirit of public service is supposed to reign, both Democrats and Republicans were using positions of power for private indulgence. Many things sprang from the Clinton impeachment. Confidence in authority was not one of them. We correct for the mistakes of past presidents. George W. Bush (barely) won the White House in part because he promised to restore integrity to the office. And the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did briefly increase the public's trust in government and its elites. In the tense months following the attacks, the public rallied behind strong leaders like Bush, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Rumsfeld. These men, who had many private failings, nonetheless were seen to be acting in the interests of the nation as a whole. We seemed to be on the verge of a new era of patriotism and civic renewal. But it was not to be. The lack of accountability among the elites quickly caught back up. America's political, economic, and cultural elites seem incapable of behaving responsibly and being accountable for their actions. That incapacity is why you wake up in the morning and dread reading the day's headlines. It is why, for years, there seemingly has been nothing but bad news. It is this larger crisis that has driven the public's opinion that the country is headed down the "wrong track" and fostered the widespread sense that American power has entered a period of decline. This is the age of irresponsibility. The failures of the elites aren't related to public expend-iture. They are related to a spiritual torpor afflicting the affluent. In a rich society, as we pursue our individual ends, obligations--both private and public--fall to the wayside. The status game consumes all. Corners are cut. The higher we scale the ladder, the more material possessions become an end in themselves. We chase one pleasure after another. Our mantra is "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." The reigning ethic is every man for himself.

Bill O'Reilly vs. America Still, one of our biggest obstacles in taking these programs to the next level isn't resources but cynicism. To promote a mid-February in-depth special about the children of Appalachia, like the those in Owsley County, the special's host, Diane Sawyer, appeared on the O'Reilly Factor. O'Reilly did all he could to debunk Sawyer's sense of hope and optimism:- "I submit to you that the culture in Appalachia harms the children almost beyond repair... There's really nothing we can do about it." - "You know, I don't want to rebuild the infrastructure of Appalachia I want to leave it pristine, it's beautiful." - "I don't want to sound hopeless about it, but I think it is hopeless. I don't think the government can do anything about it." The facts prove Bill O'Reilly wrong. During the last school year, Save the Children's public-private partnership programs have helped improve reading skills by 54 percent. In Kentucky, the proportion of children participating in our programs who were reading at grade level increased by 42 percent and, in Mississippi, the increase was 75 percent. But it's more than just facts that prove O'Reilly wrong; it's the spirit of the American people that does. For our entire history, the notion of imagining an even better, more perfect America has driven us to go to the moon, elect an African-American president, conquer deadly diseases and defeat fascism and communism in Europe. And it's why we need the American spirit of possibility -- rather than O'Reilly's fatalism -- to envelop every mountaintop and valley in Appalachia and across America so that we achieve that achievable dream of giving every American child an equal opportunity for success.

Obama Rolls The Dice The size of the gambles that President Obama is taking every day is simply staggering. What came through in his speech to a joint session of Congress and a national television audience Tuesday night was a dramatic reminder of the unbelievable stakes he has placed on the table in his first month in office, putting at risk the future well-being of the country and the Democratic Party's control of Washington. It was also, and even more significantly, a measure of the degree to which he has taken personal responsibility for delivering on one of the most ambitious agendas any newly inaugurated president has ever announced. Most politicians, facing an economic crisis as deep as this one -- the threatened collapse of the job market and manufacturing, retail and credit systems, along with the staggering, unprecedented costs of the attempted rescue efforts -- would happily postpone tackling anything else. But not Obama. Instead, no sooner had he finished describing his plans for spurring an economic recovery and shoring up the crippled automotive and banking industries than he was off to the races, outlining his ambitions for overhauling energy, health care and education policy. The House chamber was filled with veteran legislators who have spent decades wrestling with those issues. They know how maddeningly difficult it has been to cobble together a coalition large enough to pass a significant education, health care or energy bill.