Our Comparison

Consider Yeltsin

The media and its pundits are having a field day comparing Obama to other past presidents. It is almost a daily dose in the opinion pages. The left compares him to RDR or Lincoln, a worthy popular humanist of great intellect who has been elected to dig us out of the biggest economic hole since well, FDR. He has to restart the economy after the greedy and foolish bankers and financial manipulators self-destructed by creating and then popping a worldwide credit bubble. Obama in this vision has to do nothing less than rebuild the very pillars of capitalism and reassert the government’s role as captain of the ship of state.

The right sees him as another Jimmy Carter: a bumbling intellectual without a clear vision forward. They see him as spineless abroad in the face of Islamic threats and a tax and spender at home. They see him as in the thrall of unions and trial lawyers, as a redistributor of wealth, a conservationist and closet cardigan wearer on energy.

After Obama extracted 20 billion from BP, many on the Fox news circuit started comparing him to Vladimir Putin for “shaking down private enterprise.”

They may be closer to the mark for I propose we go to another Russian President…Boris Yeltsin, in order to understand the Obama presidency. The comparison is chilling in its accuracy. Yeltsin was elected in June 1991 and by December the Soviet Union collapsed. The fundamental flaws of the Communist command economy, the lies, the corruption, the incompetence, the tyranny and the Afghan war brought down this once mighty empire. The industrial base couldn’t make anything, workers pretended to work, the farms fabricated their crop estimate and the political elite skimmed off everything and anything of value from the collapsing economy. Afghanistan and several other foreign adventurers like Cuba and the Caucuses sapped the military and the treasury while exposing the ineptitude of the war material suppliers and the field commanders.

Here is what Wikipedia has to say, “The Yeltsin era was marked by widespread corruption, economic collapse, and enormous political and social problems.”

Sound familiar? I believe Obama is in the same situtation. His election was improbable unless you reason that the populace had an instinctual, gut feeling that Bush the second and the Republicans actually brought our country and its economy to its knees. That the two term stand in for the Republican house of Bush damn near caused a Soviet style collapse. Two bleeding and unwinnable wars, low caste soldiers and state reservists sent on a mission against suicide bombing jihads, a mission they were ill-equipped to fight. Lies on top of lies as to the rational for the wars, corruption and kickbacks among the contractors that haven’t been tallied yet, but are sure to be in the hundreds of billions. All this while the sons of the aristocracy trade on Wall Street and dance the night away.

Obama inherited a Yeltsin level of economic collapse too. The once mighty Golden State fulfiller of all capitalist dreams and engine of American growth lay in the ashes of debt, housing speculation and political chaos. Same for Florida…and that was the good news. Dying states like Michigan and Ohio became black holes of revenue sucking up every welfare bailout thrown their way, yet unable to recover, as the national economic brain trust long ago shipped their manufacturing base to Canton.

This is what Obama inherited: two failing wars, failed fiscal policy, massive trade deficits, a pathetic currency, and a domestic budget crisis through uncontrolled use of debt at both the governmental and private level.

Bush even failed to put the Iraq and Afghanistan war on the books pretending to catorgorize them as emergencies. Like Yeltsin, Obama inherited a once in several generations economic downturn. The very stalwarts of the economy, the government run Fanny and Freddie, the Federal Reserve and behemoths like Medicare and Medicaid walked away from a sane path and traveled down on the road to ruin. On the private side, the Wall Street investment-banking establishment became a huge pump and dump operation, a boiler room removed to a skyscraper. Toxic and fraudulent debt was created and distributed on a global scale so that even a small town in Norway and one in Australia were infected. What worked when Obama took office? What institution stood by us as an example of rectitude and competence?

The Fox and talk radio pundits have to scream very, very loud at Obama for they have lots to cover up. They have the hard job of trying to induce mass amnesia about why we need the stimulus, the bailouts, and the AIG takeover. The sober leadership, even in the Republican Party, knows how close to the edge of collapse this country was, how the lights on ATM machines almost went out. To me, President Obama was handed the most difficult reigns since FDR and if the Republic survives he will have bested Yeltsin in the history books.