Crisis Without Leadership

Crisis without leadership

The financial crisis in America has also become a political crisis. The political leadership of the superpower has lost their authority. That hurts John McCain and Barack Obama as well.

Historic: A political grassroots rebellion in Congress has run over the president, the leaders of both parties, and the candidates for the presidency of the United States. That has hardly happened before in American modern history.

What is typical for this situation, is that president Bush had to go on television for the eigth time in two weeks yesterday with an appeal to find a solution. It is just as typical that both John McCain and Barack Obama were taken completely by surprise by the vote on Monday.

McCain had partially taken credit for the deal before hand. His retreat was of the embarrassing kind. Obviously there is also an intense game over who is to blame for the political collapse. That game will continue the next few days.

What is far more important – and more serious – is that we are witnessing a superpower in a time of serious crisis without a political leadership that has the ability to rally around a conclusive measure that can stop the catastrophe. It is first and foremost president Bush, but it also applies to the leadership of both parties. The reasons are many. The intense resistance in the republican party has mostly to do with ideology.

Mobilization

Words like “socialism” and “un-American” have been used about this crisis package, and the Republican right have mobilized tremendously against it. For this part of the political landscape it is a disgusting thought to use enormous amount of tax payer money-an almost holy expression in America-for a financial bailout interfering with the dynamics of market economy.

The Democratic resistance is not ideological, but they feel this is a package is a Wall Street-solution to a Wall Street-problem. In this camp they want concrete measures for the average American who is now in danger of losing both home and pension savings.

Monday these two lines of resistance crossed each other, and the result is a piece of political history. In addition, there is no coincidence that many of the ones who voted against it, are running for re-election themselves this fall. And that most of them are already in danger of losing their seats.

Because the bail-out plan is not popular with the American voter. In a USA Today poll, 78 percent did say they wanted a bail-out, but 56 percent said they wanted a different plan than the one on the table.

And more polls yesterday showed that the bill that was defeated divided the population, even if the majority in these polls also said the politicians has to do “something”. The problem is what.

Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama has done well during these critical days. McCain wanted to demonstrate his power to act by suspending his campaign to go to Washington and gather the troops. He failed miserably, and is sarcastically compared to a general screaming “Attack!” while his troops are retreating.

Obama has gathered some of his advisors, and drew up some principles that could go in to a possible solution. He also failed and is now met with demands for concrete proposals. Neither of them has demonstrated the supreme leadership a lot of confused and angry American voters are looking for during this election season.

Still, they have been given the opportunity to show a completely different style of leadership. American voters will notice. Because the economic crisis now dominates the campaign completely. The conventional wisdom is that things will get worse. Or as one of the CNN-commentators summed it up: “Now is the time to really worry”.