Posted on Tue, Feb. 17, 2009

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To be an American is to share sacrifice

OK, everybody take a deep breath. President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan has become Congress' and the nation's plan.

"Not mine," you say? Oh, yes, it most certainly is everybody's plan, despite the fact that almost all the votes in Congress were from one party. That's what democracy is about. Just as George W. Bush's Iraq war became Congress' and the nation's war.

When we decide, in our clunky and shaky way, what we will do, we need not all agree that it was the right or best thing to do, but we are all obliged to try it, together.

A few things to think about in the wake of the first political dustup of many sure to come during the Obama presidency:

• The messy process of democracy has resulted in a compromise between starkly different ideologies. It may not work, and if it doesn't, we'll have to try something else. But we won't know for at least a year or more, so energy spent keeping a political running score is wasted.

• Recessions are caused by unanticipated and varying backfires in the complex engine of the world's economy, but the cure is always the same: Tune the engine by spending. Problem is, once a recession takes hold, people and businesses are afraid to spend, so it gets worse. If individuals won't spend, then only the government can stimulate spending. It can do that directly or by cutting taxes. Either method adds to the nation's deficit. Cutting government and taxes failed to head off this recession. Time to try something else.

• Obama is making clear, subtly and without pandering to any ideological base, just how tonally different and transformative he intends to be. His speech on Abraham Lincoln's birthday was the most recent example, though it was virtually ignored by news media focused on the melee over his stimulus plan.

He started by quoting Lincoln: "The legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, by themselves."

Lincoln recognized, Obama said, that "there are certain things only a union can do.... Individual liberty is served, not negated, by a recognition of the common good."

The present time of multiple crises, Obama said, results "from a failure to meet the test that Lincoln set. I understand there have been times in our history when our government has misjudged what we can do by individual effort alone, and what we can only do together; when we didn't draw the line as effectively as we should have; when government has done things that people can -- and should -- do for themselves....

"But in recent years, we've seen the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction. What's dominated is a philosophy that says every problem can be solved if only government would step out of the way; that if government were just dismantled and divvied up into tax breaks, that it would somehow benefit us all.... Only by coming together, all of us, in union, and expressing that sense of shared sacrifice and responsibility -- for ourselves, yes, but also for one another -- can we do the work that must be done in this country. That is part of the definition of being American."

Davis Merritt is a former editor of The Eagle. Reach him at dmerritt9@cox.net.

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