You are herePolitics / On The Nature of the Test and It's Meaning II

On The Nature of the Test and It's Meaning II

By Henri - Posted on 24 February 2009

Or How an Unpopular Republican Governator Could Succeed and a Popular President Fail -- Part 2

The Governator is the other half of this story. Arnold is a great big doofussy guy with huge pecs and a wife tougher than any of the characters he has played in movies. Civilizing Arnold was obviously impossible, possibly he played too many pagan warrior types in the movies. He started out as a popular politician because he sold himself as the answer to governing the ungovernable. The man he replaced had none of his glamor, he never wore armor or charged into battle. Of course we in California picked Arnold over the Gray man in the flannel suit.

Only somewhere in the process of governing Arnold discovered a capacity most of us would never have ascribed to him. He discovered that in solving problems it is sometimes necessary to compromise. Then he actually learned how to do that. It is quite likely that his wife Maria had something to do with his tutelage. She is a very determined woman when viewed from my seat in the gallery.

He manhandled the totally out of control California Legislature into an Ugly compromise. That compromise cleared up an impasse that annually threatens to leave California without funds for at least the next year. In explaining himself he elucidated a basis for that compromise that enraged his Republican partisans. He ascribed it to the fact that the people wanted more taxes more than they wanted less services. He actually represented himself as a man interested in the will of all his constituents. That is not just the thirty five percent of us who still admit to an affiliation with the Republican Party but all of us here in this once Golden, now bankrupt, State.

Pretty much it all comes down to one fact. Few of us who pay taxes want to pay for other people's mortgages or badly run banks past, present and future mistakes. Banks that are bankrupt but for government guarantees that have propped them up too long already must die.

We must not keep them paying bills that should not be paid by unentitled shareholders otherwise known as taxpayers. Zombie Banks have no viable or even real place in a capitalist economy. They retard growth and delay recovery. Nationalization may not fix them but it will remove them from the competition for investors money and demolish them slowly enough to eliminate disaster as an outcome. Let the government use the FDIC as intended and slowly demolish these monstrosities. The system will replace them quickly enough once they are put on the sidelines and removed from competition with smaller better run rivals.

So a popular populist President could lose by embracing zombie banks and taking the wrong side in relation to his constituency's views of how things should work. On the other hand a currently unpopular Governator may win by exercising the capacity for compromise that his constituents never expected of him. Politics is indeed a wild and wacky world isn't it?

Bookmark/Search this post with: