Noemie Emery
Sometimes the plumber must be fired
By: Noemie Emery
Examiner Columnist
March 10, 2009
Suppose you called the plumber to unstop your toilet, and he ignored the toilet, and spent his time and your money building a deck in your yard.
Suppose you told him you didn’t need a deck, or didn’t need a deck now, or would think about the deck later, after he unstopped the toilet. And suppose he ignored you and went on building the deck while the toilet began to back up and spill over.
And when you complained, he told you the toilet was just a distraction---like a tracking poll, or whatever---and that the deck he was building was just what you needed to make property values go up.
You replied that even if the back yard had a gazebo and fountain, no one would purchase a house with unusable plumbing. He said you were letting details obscure your view of the big picture, and that he was following the lead of the firm’s esteemed founder, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a local legend in the home contracting universe, who, when called in to unplug the toilets back in the old days, installed a patio, and put in a swing for the children.
You said that as you remembered, he put in the patio after he saw to the toilet, whereas while he was busy with planning the sundeck, the toilet’s condition had gotten much worse.
The plumber of course is not Joe, but President Barack Obama, the toilet is the national and global economy, and the sundeck is the health care and other offensives on which he is wasting your money, and most of his time.
The upside is that he has finally answered the question of whether he is more like FDR or like Lincoln, and the downside is that the answer is ‘no.’ FDR and Lincoln addressed themselves at once to the crises they were were elected to handle, whereas Obama has done the reverse: He is spinning his wheels on the thing that requires attention, while plowing full speed ahead on things that do not.
It is hard to find the presidential model he thinks he is following, as there have been failures---Buchanan and Hoover and Carter among them---who failed to step up and to handle a crisis, but none who seemed to ignore one on purpose, while diverting attention to less-pressing things.
In terms of comparing Obama to Roosevelt, let’s look at some tiresome facts. As Rich Lowry writes in The Corner, “FDR took office in the midst of a total meltdown of the banking system and acted boldly to arrest it. In March 1933 the Dow was at 52. It climbed 75 percent in the first 100 days…Obama is temporizing with his financial crisis in favor of moving quickly on his big spending plan, and watching the Dow trip steadily downward. It’s as if FDR skipped the banking holiday and focused first on passing the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC).”
It’s inconceivable that FDR would have shown the same disdain that Obama did to the concerns of the millions-on-millions who have seen their life savings halved in the past six months, and even more so in the two months of his tenure. There is an argument over whether later on some of his policies inadvertently delayed the recovery, but no one could accuse him of having made the depression worse at the outset, or showing indifference to its victims’ fears.
You can say what you like about Reagan and Roosevelt, (if not about Lincoln), but the three of them all shared a genius for leadership, which featured a forceful attack on what threatened the country, whether it was war - cold, hot, or civil - or economic malaise and depression. They understood the difference between a critical threat and a nuisance (or a wish list of interest groups.) They knew that if the plumbing was bad, your house was not habitable, no matter how many gazebos you put up on the lawn.
Meanwhile, those three have gone out of business, and you are in a four-year deal with the plumber you have. You can threaten to fire some of his crew two years from now, and then fire him two years later. In the mean time, the toilet still isn’t flushing. Good luck with that.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
More from Noemie Emery
Follow The Examiner
