Einstein is often quoted for his observation that "Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results." One doesn't need to be anywhere as smart as Einstein was to notice that there has been practically no change between the distribution of power before the election versus post-election: Obama was the president, and will be in office for four more years. The House was in firm Republican control, and will be so for at least two more years. The Senate continues with a Democratic majority, but without a filibuster-proof super-majority.
If the last couple of years provided nothing but a dysfunctional system with such an arrangement, and if we have voted for a continuation of the same, can we expect results to be any different? If we expect different results, well, are we insane? Will any of the principal agents in this setup have undergone any Damascene conversion so as to produce results that will be different from what the experiments yielded the last time around?
Perhaps this election shows, yet again, that by and large Americans are conservative. Conservative as in not being in favor of huge changes to the situation we are familiar with. The status quo is then preferred over the possibilities that a change might promise.
The election results do not mean that any of the real issues have evaporated away. They are looming out there, with deadlines fast approaching. The fiscal cliff is merely one. If the President, the House, and the Senate couldn't come up with a solution to the fiscal problems over the two years, they will work it out within a couple of months? Then there is unemployment, Iran, Palestine, Afghanistan, China, student debt, ....
Good luck to us.
Andy Borowitz satirizes thus:
One day after the costliest Presidential election in U.S. history, Americans awoke to the ugly realization that the nation had spent $2.5 billion with absolutely nothing to show for it.Borowitz is wrong; estimates are closer to $6 billion, than the 2.5 billion he writes about :)
“Four years ago, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, and that is still the case,” says Professor Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota. “The only difference is that we as a nation are out $2.5 billion.”
Mr. Logsdon claims that America’s system of egregious political spending “has made us the laughingstock of the world,” arguing, “Even Greece would know better than to blow through money like that.”
1 comment:
I am not sure what you are complaining about. The $2.5 bn or $6bn, was not flushed down the toilet. It was spent on economic activity - ads, calls, volunteers, paid staff, etc etc. The rich made the political donations, and the working class benefited. All these recipients gained economically. And most, if not all, of the recipients were Americans (it would never do to offshore your campaign activities). So everybody gained in the end and you are in the same comfort zone. So what's the problem ???
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