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Drooling on the Pillow

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Coolidge, Dutch, W and Cohen 

I'm a Coolidge guy, in a couple of ways. I follow his crisis management style which said that if ten problems are headed down the road at you, eight of them are going to run off into the ditch before they get to you.

I remember just after the stock market crash of 1987 reading a NYT op-ed announcing that what we were seeing was the "end of capitalism". There was a lot of hysterical commentary as stopped-clock opinion enjoyed it's moment in the right. At the time my portfolio consisted of a couple of old Pirate baseball cards, but it's hard at times like those not to get caught up in the eschatology of panic.

President Reagan's response was pretty much "How 'bout those Redskins?." Which was exactly correct. He affected to be blithely, blissfully, comprehensively unaware of any problems more serious than the national jelly bean supply chain. Ahhh, I thought, and went back to trying to nail the lead actress in Antigone. Of course, in the months that followed, steps were taken, adjustments were made, legislation was proposed. These seem to have been effective.

Not everyone can pull this off, of course. Jimmy Carter was a common enough type of leader who tends to make more of things than they are, exacerbating the problem. My wife is not on board with this style of thinking either, especially when I attempt to apply it to household projects and money management.

George W. Bush is kind of in the middle here. On the one hand, he is reviled for not leaping up in that Florida classroom after getting the news that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and . . . what? Wave his Presidential wand and make it go away? Make a phone call to find out if Andy Card was punking him? He took five minutes to finish his business with the kids and then, I think, dealt with things pretty effectively. I liked that. Other people found it troubling.

On the other hand, he's not a guy who's afraid to go out looking for trouble if trouble is between him and what he wants to do. He could have passed the terrorism problem on to his successor, as is traditional. Same with Arafat. Same with Social Security. He did not. In fact, he dared us to fire him for not punting.

Now we get to Richard Cohen, who's something of a grab bag himself. His column today in the Washington Post discusses, in a tentative way, the possibility that W might actually be right about a thing or two. Mr. Cohen often qualifies himself from sentence to sentence and column to column and this may be the equivalent of an ass-covering memo that he can point back to in the halcyon days of universal peace of 2008. One sentence takes back the last and one clause snarks on the following. Thus:
First and foremost comes all this talk about freedom
and democracy, a goal for the Middle East, for instance,
that is either bold or foolish -- or both. Whichever, it is
not one that suggests containment, a policy supposedly
resigned to reality, but one designed to change the very
reality of the region and its threats (the home office of
terrorism, after all), seize it by the throat and shake the
corruption and despotism out of it. Good luck, I say --
and a good start, too, at the moment.

How's that for covering your bases?

I'm glad reliable Dems are starting to hedge their bets, but I'm not going to get to wacky about it. Let's just see what makes it down the road to us.
Posted by: Sluggo / 10:26 AM
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