What is this brilliant young president to do, when, in fact, there appears not to exist even theoretical solutions to what he is facing. But even if there were -- let's call these "broad enveloping solutions", the ones that in a hyper-general manner of all economic theorizing, makes sense -- there is the utterly bizarre Republican Party to deal with. A party that is not merely gone gaga-irrational. It is indescribable.
In listening to the political and economic commentary, I find, on rare occasions a measure of validity or reliability. And that in the writings of (unbearably shy) Paul Krugman.
Paul Krugman's qualities are those I admire: magnificent thoroughness, fairness, openness, hard work to the point of, at times, seeming as having long ago personally withered; his honesty which gives coherence to the intention of his writings is nonetheless bogged by the problem of complexity and inherent unmanageability of a world whose contents and contours were never anticipated.
There is simply this massive problem: the Economics for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize no longer applies to the economic system the world has, all of a sudden, inherited.
The mathematics and logics of the system that is our present-day world has not been worked out; and this is so at several levels of description. He couldn't, on this view, say anything that might stand good (I shouldn't say, what is now eons away, 'old fashioned' ) criticism. When his comments are valid they are inapplicable since an account of their relevance and application resides in a theory that does not (yet) exists.
This is the peculiarity of the ultra-postmodern, in a nutshell: its patterns are meaningless since they cannot be mapped into an interpretive universe.
So Obama didn't just have to deal with, as his luck would have it, Republican beligeranti but, as I pointed out, a whole lot more, insolvabilia and their consequences. He is now 'guilty' of sincerely having tried to solve the problems before him as he had promised during those magic moments which brought tears to everyone's eyes.
He should've, many would say, fudged the issues, played politics as usual and looked as good as he could manage. Isn't that what, nearly all, do? Once in a blue moon we get a Bill Clinton whose political skills are so refined and intuition so deep that he does manage to achieve quite a lot. Clinton might've been able to do things a little better. But given the task before Obama, one doubts it.
A year later, I have re-edited this posting. Last year I had wondered if Obama had lost his magic. But, subsequently, he has pick himself up to a very high level of performance indeed. So that, the magic, in his case, has been re-gained.
