BACK TO WORK

Okay, it's time to get back to this blog. It has lain idle for a couple of months, in the doldrums of the summer. Fall, I note, resurfacing, is pretty much doldrums too. In Washington, the same fractious inaction in the US Congress, the same bickering, the same obstinate refusal to even consider or debate what's needed for the country. In the media, an obsession with what's going to happen a year from now.

Meanwhile, President Obama has produced a credible plan for addressing the country's direst problem: not the deficit, but jobs. Nothing will happen to solve the economic crisis without them. I credit him for persisting, despite all obstacles. I'm glad to see him focusing on the problem with appropriate intensity and unsparing criticism of those who seem to embrace inaction as a political strategy. The single issue worthy of Republican attention, it now seems, is to defeat Obama next November.

I watched with incredulity as candidate Rick Perry's wife whined to the media about the ill-treatment of her husband, even while happily joining the chorus of those heaping scornful blame on the President. It would take, she lamented, forty years to undo the damage that Obama has wrought. As I see it, he has only just begun to work on undoing the damage Ronald Reagan wrought--and that was quite a number of years ago. It's my belief that a second term would allow him to continue that work; and, if given at the same time a more powerfully Democratic Congress, to set the country back on the right course.