Tony Blair has just appeared before the commission set up to investigate whether getting Britain involved in Iraq was justified. We’ve had no such government inquiry sponsored by the ruling party in this country (currently the Democrats, at least officially). Don’t ask why. The behavior of the Democratic Party since they came to power again in Washington is largely incomprehensible in all kinds of ways.
In any case, those hoping for Mr. Blair to admit he was sorry for doing a go-along with President Bush were not happy with his responses to the U.K. commission’s questions. He not only didn’t apologize for a ghastly mistake perpetrated with bogus arguments, he declared the following: “I genuinely believe that if we had left Saddam in power, even with what we know now, we would still have had to have dealt with him, possibly in circumstances where the threat was worse.”
And there you have it. The endless excuse employed by political leaders for their past failures and rotten performances. The old “it would have been worse otherwise” excuse.
We heard the same excuse the other day from David Axelrod, an Obama Administration spokesman, seeking to explain away Mr. Obama’s economic failures — failures that have made so many Americans so angry about his administration’s approach to Wall Street bailouts and stimulus programs. Things would have been much worse had the administration not done what it actually did, he declared.
But here’s what M. Axelrod and the officials he spoke for still don’t understand, and perhaps are incapable of understanding. Americans weren’t angry at banking bailout because it was obvious to everyone that the banks had to be saved. It’s the mechanisms chosen to do so that was the problem. It was a giveaway without strings. It was giving the slickers all they money they could absorb and just hoping they would be nice enough to pass it down to the rest of us.
When it came to the stimulus, you had another need that everyone with an ounce of sense knew had to be met. But instead of doing something in a focused, concentrated way that would achieve immediate and easily perceivable results (a Social Security Tax holiday pushed by many both liberal and conservative observers, or giving a giant boost in aid to struggling states as suggested by economists such as Robert Reich) the administration gave all sorts of worthy approaches just a taste of the goodies, watering down the effort, not advancing any of these causes enough, and doing it all so slowly the public couldn’t see the point.
And the Axelrod cop out for not getting all this right? It would have been worse had we not done what we did.
I’m thinking we need fewer really smart people like Tony Blair and Barack Obama running things. People who don’t always look ahead and see what’s possible down the road. People who simply look at present needs and do the obvious. Oh, and by the way, people who also understand the worth of listening to the public that elected you.