Reporting on the House’s passage of the Wall Street bailout today, CNN’s Frank Sesno relates the mood of the country:
the salient public emotion about the current situation is anger: “Anger at Wall Street, anger at Washington, anger at the Congress, anger at the White House.”
People certainly aren’t going to be angry at themselves, and, for the most part, they shouldn’t be. Mortgage backed securities and their interaction with the real estate and capital markets is a complicated issue. People go to graduate schools for years to understand it. The vast majority of Americans don’t pay particular attention, and most wouldn’t know what they were looking at if they did.
We expect smart, capable people in government to understand the complexities of American markets and to take their oversight responsibilities seriously. We rely on our government to pass and enforce regulations to protect our money and our homes. When they fail, and problems rear their heads, we get angry at politicians.
Which brings me back to Sarah Palin. At last night’s debate, she said this:
Get that? She said:
One thing that Americans do at this time, also, though, is let’s commit ourselves just every day American people, Joe Six Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band together and say never again. Never will we be exploited and taken advantage of again by those who are managing our money and loaning us these dollars. We need to make sure that our investments and our savings and we need also to not get ourselves in debt. demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in charge of Let’s do what our parents told us before we probably even got that first credit card. Don’t live outside of our means. We need to make sure that as individuals we’re taking personal responsibility through all of this. It’s not the American peoples fault that the economy is hurting like it is, but we have an opportunity to learn a heck of a lot of good lessons through this and say never again will we be taken advantage of.
She also said that
It is a crisis. It’s a toxic mess, really, on Main Street that’s affecting Wall Street. And now we have to be ever vigilant and also making sure that credit markets don’t seize up. That’s where the Main Streeters like me, that’s where we would really feel the effects.
In other words, she was taken in along with everyone else.
According to her backers, Sarah Palin is qualified to be president, not because of some fancy degree from an elite Eastern college or a summer spent backpacking through Europe sophisticatin’ herself. No, supporters say, she’s suited to the presidency because
She’s like us. She’s a regular person; she works hard, has a family that has some issues … but everyone does.
So about half of Americans are angry at the government for not seeing the economic disaster coming — something they didn’t foresee, either. Their solution is to replace the current government, which, they agree, wasn’t vigilant enough, with one led by someone whose level of knowledge and understanding of the issue is irrelevant to them.
Republican support for Palin comes not despite her lack of understanding of complex issues, but because of it. They like her because she’s a hockey mom, which, of course, is a critically important quality in a leader during a time of crisis. They believe she’ll solve the multi-trillion dollar problem because she’s from the West, has kids, and knows where to find the Wasilla Wal-Mart. (It’s at 1350 South Seward Meridian Parkway, incidentally.)
Hard to believe we find ourselves in this position at all.
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