The phrase “pack journalism” is mostly a misnomer, because the reality of the business is that the overwhelming majority of reporters do their work at the local level — where there’s no herd to run with. It’s just a reporter, the zoning board (for instance) and a scattering of citizens with complaints or needs. But the community of national political writers is truly a pack, which explains why there’s a certain sameness to their reports, and why certain story lines seem to evolve with astonishing speed.
You may have tuned into this narrative recently: Barack Obama, the change agent, actually isn’t much of a change from George W. Bush.
The oft-cited evidence for this is that Gitmo remains in operation; the war in Iraq has simply been replaced with the war in Afghanistan; marriage is still defined by the White House as something that exists only between a man and a woman; and coal companies are still decapitating Appalachian mountaintops.
You can quibble with the accuracy of all this, but do your quibbling somewhere else. I neither endorse nor dispute this story line. I only mention it because for all the ways some people want to link the two men, the most glaringly obvious linkage rarely is made: Both presidents, when faced with profound crisis early in their terms, did what they felt they had to do, and decided to worry about the consequences later.
Bush took a page from Barry Goldwater’s playbook. After 3,000 Americans were killed in a single day of terror attacks, Bush realized that moderation in the face of murderous zealotry was no virtue. The result — two invasions, a prolonged war, expanded powers of government surveillance, the alleged loss of international prestige, etc. — became his legacy. The Bush approach worked in the short-term, in that America suffered no further terror attacks during his term. But the long-term consequences are still debated.
Obama took a similar tack with the financial crisis. Faced with the prospect of a global depression, Obama’s first few months in office weren’t a time for dithering. He threw money, unimaginable amounts of it, at the problem and made himself the virtual overseer of corporations and whole industries. The country is now mortgaged to the hilt, but there’s been an undeniable short-term benefit: Markets have settled, retirement portfolios are clawing their way back and you can still buy a Chevy. Still, even Paul Krugman, who poo-poos the fear of inflation, acknowledges that Obama has dug us into a very deep hole:
Yes, we have a long-run budget problem, and we need to start laying the groundwork for a long-run solution.
Each president opted to tend to the present and let the future sort itself out. You can damn them both for their heedlessness — understandable as it may be — but if you damn only one of them, it’s partisan posturing. Pure and simple.
