Winter Waning Wolf Moon
MPR broadcast the confirmation hearing of Ted Geithner while I went to the grocery store and picked up my print. It changed my thinking.
The world weariness of all these Reagan clouded years, even during the Clinton presidency, has affected me, taken the glitter off my enthusiasm for Obama. His election lifted my spirits, made me cry, attacked my cynicism. I was glad. Somehow, between then and now, the realization that Obama would be the 44th President sank in and the thought of 2 wars, the economic crisis, health care reform, climate change and a man with little personal political capital pushed me down again.
Listening to Geithner, though, buoyed me up. The old free-market über alles rhetoric has disappeared. Keynesian economic assumptions underlay his responses. He agreed, too, that health care reform preceded any monkeying with the specifics of medicare.
This may not sound like much, but anyone sensitive to economic patter would immediately recognize the difference between this man and the distant authority of Paulson or the doom machine of the Bush Whitehouse. It made this cynic’s heart thaw a little, hope again. Maybe, just maybe, the game has changed.