Obama's change program (hopefully with no talkfest!)
November 6th 2008 10:08
American Public Broadcasting Service's insight on the matter came from New York Times columnist David Brooks and syndicated columnist Mark Shields (4.30-to-5.30pm today Aust EST).
Brooks predicted President Obama will opt for a steady-as-she-goes approach to implementing programs, to cover all the change he’s been talking about. That’s in financial sector reforms as well as all the other change areas, like US-led wars abroad, national health, energy crisis, global warming, etc, etc.
Brooks didn’t think the FDR Government in the US in the 1930s was a valid precedent, where President Roosevelt acted with speedy, massive introduction of expansive national economic and financial programs. The FDR Government was dealing with a similar-scale financial crisis to the one facing the world now. But according to Brooks, Obama does not have a mandate for FDR’s fast pace of government-led change. That’s despite one camp of Democrat economic policy advisers wanting regulation-based change implemented promptly.
Brooks reckons Obama is more likely to follow the other camp, which sees the need to prove credibility on a program-by-program basis. This would mean steady program introduction, whose pace can be accelerated as consensus gets built transcending party lines. (As a simple comparison with Australia's two main parties, US Democrat Governments have tended to be more like our Australian Labor Governments. They're called the blue party. Ironically the more conservative Republicans are called red.)
Implications for Australia
Syndicated columnist Mark Shields believes President Obama will act to help groups disadvantaged by the new world economic model that started in the 1980s with US President Ronald Reagan. Continued and expanding to the present time, this has fostered individual success through free market capitalism - often at the expense of vulnerable groups in the US economy. Among these are US workers made redundant when US manufacturers "exported" operations to get China's cheaper labour costs and bigger economies of scale.
Shields said Obama's overwhelming election victory gives him an immediate green light for new economic policies that wind-back the old model’s adverse side-affects. (Like Margaret Thatcher’s UK Government, Australian and New Zealand governments also acted to free markets and bring about the one world financial system. If Obama seeks to help adversely affected groups in America, perhaps Kevin Rudd will in Australia too. But as for ideas flowing the other way, Obama will be too canny to want a national talkfest like our Australia 2020 Summit of 19-20 April 2008, encouraging a new elite!)
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Comment by Janet Collins
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What Rudd said at the time of the 2020 Conference - that politicians and bureaucrats didn't have a monopoly on ideas - couldn't have been more correct. But yes, those chosen to contribute were too selective.