OBAMA’S CROSSING

Panics in some cases have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind grows through them, and acquires firmer habit than before.
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

The media is having a field day making historical comparisons to Obama’s presidential ascension. Time Magazine had him on the cover as FDR and the New York Times had him morphed into a photo of Lincoln. Perhaps a more fitting comparison would be to George Washington, before he was elected president, when he was just General Washington, Commander of the Continental Army, specifically during the perilous winter of 1776 when Washington had to plan and execute the wholesale retreat of his army as it was chased through New Jersey by the British generals Howe and Cornwallis.

As depicted in Washington’s Crossing, the National Book Award finalist by 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner David Hackett Fischer, this was the darkest time for the nascent republic. The British had landed an enormous force of their own and Hessian troops in New York Harbor in order to chase Washington and his soldiers from the pillar of Long Island to the post of Manhattan and everywhere else north and east. It was a rout. Washington’s small, ill- equipped army could not stand and fight against the British. They often fled in utter panic at their first engagements. Dissention, desertion, and chaos ruled Washington’s army, which lost 90% of its men. Several states questioned the authority of General Washington to raise additional troops through conscription of their citizens. What funds and supplies the Continental Army had were makeshift and impromptu.

Defeat followed defeat, and by the time they lost Fort Lee in New Jersey it looked like the British had them on a fatal run. There was no line General Washington could defend as the ragtag patriots fled deeper into South Jersey. In an effort to save his remaining troops, Washington retreated to Trenton, crossing the Delaware River and hiding on the other side. The organizational courage and thought in this first crossing, plus the unimaginable hardships endured by his men, make this one of the most inspirational stories in American history. Everyone knows about the second crossing, the one depicted in all the paintings, the famous re-crossing to advance on the by now cold and tired British and Hessians. The second time they were surprised and ultimately defeated, but it was only because Washington staged such a brilliant initial retreat that this was possible.

Obama is in a very similar situation. He now has to manage two key retreats from threats to America. Today it is no longer the Red Coats that pressure American independence. Obama’s opposing force is the army of unreality. This army was raised and funded by decades of political and economic fantasies and lies, endorsed by the two parties that make up our political establishment. The capital and property markets retreat of recent months are a reaction of this advancing army of policy failure.

First, Obama will have to organize a retreat from America’s role as the world’s go-it-alone-at-any-cost superpower. Our defense lines are overextended, and we have chosen not to tax ourselves at proper levels to support them. Therefore we fund our armies by issuing debt. From Korea to Germany, from Guam to Kuwait, we have legacy garrisons that are not necessary and possibly inflammatory, like those in Korea and Guam. We are fighting two blood-soaked insurgencies on lands steeped in religious zeal, where no outsider has ever been able to pacify the tribal spirits that rule. As Great Britain knows and America is learning, the true cost of empire is frequently bankruptcy, as either taxation or debt choke the domestic economy to pay for adventures abroad. Hopefully Obama will cut the nonsensical troop deployments all over the globe and consolidate the remaining forces into a leaner more productive, focused army. General Washington was forced to do the same.

Secondly, Obama will have to organize the retreat from endless, unlimited, non-prioritized entitlements and promises to everyone for everything. Here, the behind-the-lines battles have already begun and he isn’t even in office. The following are fighting and or simultaneously begging the federal government: automakers, Wall Street, the insurance industry, banks, and now states and cities. Even tiny San Diego is fighting for some twelve billion in bailout money. As columns of industry and states retreat in pain to lick their wounds, they all want the Federal Government, with its printing press salve of cash, to ease their pain. The fact that the damage is self-inflicted does not lessen the potency of their cry. It just further infuriates the listener. It’s going to be ugly. In social welfare spending, its pensioners vs. prenatal care, the incarcerated vs. the college bound; pre-schools vs. heart transplants for octogenarians, special needs vs. gifted children.

General Washington paid his troops in Continental money, a script with dubious value and questionable claim on the then non-existent treasury. The first faith-based currency. Today, we have promised to pay all the future beneficiaries of social security and Medicare in similar script, there will simply not be enough funds in the treasury to meet these upcoming obligations. Rationalizing and prioritizing the endless claims to entitlements that both Democrats and Republicans have encouraged and exacerbated for the past three generations will not be easy. Like Washington’s troops, who often mustered themselves out of the army when they weren’t paid, so too will every imaginable special needs group threaten to desert Obama’s camp when they are denied promised benefits. General Washington pleaded with patriotic funders for more cash while demonstrating supreme self-sacrifice in order to persuade his troops to stay and fight. Obama will have to do the same with the countless potentially mutinous special interest groups in need of housing, education and medical care.

The current debt crisis is a result of our government in Washington’s eponymous capitol’s lack of reality. Ronald Reagan’s debt driven “morning in America” was reawakened by George Bush and ended up as “hangover in America.” Now reality is dealing with us. We are trillions in debt --foreign and domestic -- with nowhere to turn but the printing presses. We have demonized the concept of taxation and balanced budgets, not to mention surpluses as a policy for sissies.

Reading Washington’s Crossing several years ago actually brought tears to my eyes. The hardships, the numbingly lethal cold, the constant hunger, the absence of medical care for the wounded, the lack of shelter -- all tested the will of everyone fighting for independence. Obama should sit down with the American public and read aloud from this book as a small step in the direction of helping us envision and sum up the courage for an orderly retreat from the army of lies that we have permitted to advance upon us. We need to regroup to fight anew. We will need to have painful policy measures and cross new rivers of honesty with the nation’s citizens. Washington would have demanded no less.