Overcoming the Crisis: Be Who They Fear You Are

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 44 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

Regular readers of this space may know
that I believe we've had four major political crises in this nation's
history, and four crisis Presidents who led us through them.

This is the fifth.

The four previous crises were the Civil
War, the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Nixon Revolution. The
fifth crisis began in the last decade, with Iraq and Katrina and
deliberate speculation leading directly to the 2008 economic collapse
we're still pulling out of.

I call this crisis the War Against Oil.
There's an artificial shortage of energy because we define energy as
oil, gas, and coal, which deplete. The oil forces, like the slaveholders of the 1850s, took control of our politics in order to
maintain this scarcity. Thus the battle is to overcome them so the market, and science, work their will.

Previous crisis Presidents Abraham
Lincoln, William McKinley, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon
had some important things in common. First, they came from the old
anti-thesis, the set of beliefs of the recent past that leaned
against the assumptions or political assumptions of their time. Each
thesis is set by the previous crisis President, thus our current
crisis is upheld by the Nixon-era assumptions that politics is
conflict and only Republicans are legitimate Americans.

By talking about Crisis Presidents as
being from the Anti-Thesis to the Thesis of their time I only mean
that Lincoln was a Whig, McKinley a Mugwump, FDR a Wilsonian and
Nixon an Eisenhower Republican.

Barack Obama, if you haven't noticed
yet, is a Clintonite.

The first instinct of a Crisis
President, thus, is to compromise, to do as little as possible, to
lean against existing assumptions and hope compromise can succeed.
Lincoln didn't come to Washington to free the slaves. McKinley
thought himself a friend to business. FDR was wealthy, and Nixon only
sought to moderate liberalism.

These earlier crises, however, were
only overcome when each Crisis President became the men their enemies
saw them to be. Lincoln achieved greatness only after the
Emancipation Proclamation. McKinley became important only after
Theodore Roosevelt took his flag and ran with it. FDR “welcomed
their hatred” in 1936, confronting Republicans directly, and Nixon,
of course, became the Nixon we all remember.

This act of becoming what they think
you are has yet to be performed by our current Crisis President. And
it may end up costing him his presidency in a week's time. (I don't
think it will, but as this was written it remained possible.)

Thus, I believe this President's
biggest mistake in office was his appointment of Eric Holder as
Attorney General. Not for the reason Republicans may give, the Fast &
Furious “scandal.” But because he has been, on the whole, a calm,
judicious, patient and honest attorney general. That's a great way to
be in normal times, and it's what we expect an attorney general to
be. But when you're surrounded by enemies, real enemies prepared to
do all they can to remove you from office – even kill you – it's
not enough.

In this case history tells me President
Obama should have done what Nixon did – appoint a pitbull partisan
as attorney general, a John Mitchell. 

Mitchell was a highly political attorney general, who directed both
Nixon's 1968 campaign and the CREEP that spawned Watergate. He went
after Nixon's enemies, and perceived enemies, with all the force of
the government. He made those enemies fear the President, and the
power of his presidency. He brought those who were defying the law
(the anti-war forces and counterculture in this case) to heel.

With the current crisis this would have
been very useful. Today's “hippies” are the ultra-rich, men like
Donald Trump, Sheldon Adelson, and the Koch Brothers, billionaires
who consider themselves to be above the law. Their excess got us into
this mess.

Today's crisis has most in common with
the one faced by McKinley, when the struggle was against powerful
business trusts run by men like Jay Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and
William Andrews Clark. McKinley, despite being an Ohio Republican
endorsed by these same men, nevertheless went after John D.,
personally and with malice aforethought. It was a long war, won only
10 years after McKinley's death, with the break-up of Standard Oil,
and the result actually benefited the Rockefeller fortune immensely,
because the broken bits of the Standard turned out to be even-more
valuable than the Standard had been standing alone.

The point of that fight, and Theodore
Roosevelt's “trust-busting” efforts of the 1900s, was to convince
the nation's biggest businesspeople that they were not above the law.
Any man who is above the law becomes the law, becomes the government.
Just as Mexico is run by its drug cartels and Russia by its
oligarchs, the power of America's billionaires to flout all law and
custom, and to dictate to the rest of us who should run our
government, what its policies should be, makes them exceedingly
dangerous, the source of all the trouble.

Obama's biggest failure in office has
been that he has not taken on the crime in the suites. From the
bailout and the mortgage scandal to Sheldon Adelson's hooker scandal,
he has assumed good intentions where there were none, and refused to
investigate without evidence. This has let the oilagarchs, and their
friends on Wall Street, to act with impunity, damaging the
President's reputation with his own constituency. Worse, it has
emboldened them, allowing them to spend billions painting him as
something he is not.

The fact that the man who might replace
Obama is Mitt Romney, who has untold millions in the Caymans and more
in Switzerland, but won't detail those holdings (so we don't know
what conflicts of interest he might bring to the office) should speak
volumes.

For the President, the only cure is to
become what they claim you to be, to take on his enemies directly.
Arrest Adelson and ship him to Macau. Do more perp walks on Wall
Street. Fire Trump. Go after people like Rupert Murdoch and Fred
Anschutz. Invade the Cayman Islands, if not literally than
figuratively, negotiating a treaty with our major trading partners
that will rein in all the tax havens, and force Americans who want to
claim they're loyal to this country to keep their money here, or lose
the protection of this government. Getting the Europeans and the
Chinese to do the same to their tax havens would bring untold wealth
to all the world's governments, and a mighty cheer from their
constituents.

Be what they claim you are. That's what
makes a Crisis President successful. A failure to be what they think
you are will destroy you. Every political crisis is war, and the only
way through a war is to win it.