The Chicago View
By DAVID BROOKSThe big retreat to realism concerns democracy promotion. The Bush administration tried to promote democracy, even at the expense of stability. That proved unworkable.
But many of us hoped that Obama would put a gradual, bottom-up democracy-building initiative at the heart of his approach.
Some of Bush's failed policies have to be maintained for a while. It's like the way the economic problems are being handled...keep as much as possible together as things sequentially hit the floor. Yes, Chrysler hit the floor, followed by G.M....but imagine what things would be like if both companies crashed as soon as the depth of teir problems became apparent. In fact, imagine what would have happened if the Feds said, "Yes we know they're going to crash, and no we're not doing anything about it."
The Conversion of the Middle East is not one of those things. Not only do we not have the resources to juggle those Middle Eastern balls while pulling our own economy and politics out of their respective sewers, we never did.
A sane leader prioritizes.
There was a democracy-promotion section to the speech, and given the struggle behind it, maybe we should be grateful it was there at all. But it was stilted and abstract — the sort of prose you get after an unresolved internal debate.
Yup. We're the reality based community, remember?
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The Cure May Be Worse Than The Illness
I'm following your drift but what the Obama Administration has actually done with regard to these two firms, for example, may be, in the long term, worse, I believe, than what would have happened if these two automakers had simply been allowed to collapse. I am not advocating that allowing them to fail is more preferable than trying to salvage them but the steps the Administration, i.e., Obama, Summers, Geithner et al., have initiated will not benefit folks who work for wages or the American taxpayers.
We are assuming the lion's share of the financial costs of this restructuring and we will eventually assume all of the social costs their plan carries but the return on our investment will be small. Both firms, as part of their restructuring plans, will continue to move jobs overseas while U.S. workers directly and indirectly involved in the auto industry will continue to lose jobs.
None of this, however, pertains to your point about David Brooks. He is simply a spinmeister for dubious causes and positions.