Popularity versus reality

March 19, 2009
Written by News Team, in Editorial

Will the oratory of President Barack Obama during the joint session of Congress last month help solve America’s serious problems?
This is the question that many Americans, including Filipinos, are asking now that he has proposed to allocate trillions of dollars in the Stimulus Package and annual budget to stave off an economic calamity under his watch. “Doing nothing,” Obama says, is not an alternative.
Republicans and Conservative Democrats are worried. They say the huge appropriations will lead to a fiscal crisis and will make future generations pay for the huge deficits.
Just a month in office, Obama has already pushed through additional fiscal stimulus outlay equal to 5 percent of the country’s economic output. His Treasury Department is about to embark on the second phase of a program that will lead to greater government control and ownership of some of the nation’s biggest banks. He has assembled a team to pull off what amounts to a bankruptcy reorganization for automakers that will leave taxpayers as one of the industry’s biggest creditors. He has set aside an outlay to help home owners facing foreclosures. And within months, the president has promised to deliver the blueprint of a new regulatory architecture that will dramatically increase the government’s oversight of financial firms and universal health care.
Add to this the trillions of dollars in the budget that the White House has proposed to Congress and the total would stagger the imagination.
The burden is now on Obama. If he succeeds in jump-starting the economy, he will be hailed as a great leader, maybe even by his critics. But if he fails, he told the people last month, they will have to look for another leader.
Popularity may enable Obama to get what he wants. But he is making a very big gamble. And Americans of all stripes must hope and pray that he succeeds. The alternative is just too difficult to contemplate.