YOU KNOW I CAN’T HEAR YOU WHEN THE STIMULUS BILL IS PENDING

Two nights ago, I and 15 other members of a play-reading group to which I belong read a play by Robert Anderson that I had selected, “You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running.” This is a collection of four short “sex comedies,” the title one of which is sub-titled “The Shock of Recognition.” Its theme is the effort of a playwright to convince a producer to stage a play, one scene of which involves a man, after his wife has called out something to him from their bedroom, to emerge stark naked with that “can’t hear you” complaint. The producer/playwright colloquy centers on the producer’s insistence that full male nudity cannot be depicted on stage (the play was written in 1967 when public display of the penis was still restricted to Roman statuary and before Broadway and Hollywood both introduced “the thing” into some of their productions.) The producer is even more aghast at the insistence of the playwright that the actor who played the role was to be a man of decidedly modest genital “endowment,” in fact that the very ludicrous quality of that endowment would produce laughter and the “shock of recognition” of Every Man who would identify with the poor schmuck who found himself in this role. The producer’s complaint is realized at the end when a too-eager actor appears (off stage) in the posture of the naked man and the producer goes into a swoon.

24 hours after this reading, I felt I might be in Robert Anderson land again as I watched President Barack Obama’s first presidential press conference. I couldn’t help thinking of that too-eager actor willing to let it all hang out for the advancement of his career: in Obama’s case, his career as the nation’s Chief Executive, intent on making a name for himself as the Great Emancipator from the Grave Problems of the Day. Immediately after his election, on January 22, he had made a “surprise” visit to what would amount to a locker room with a lot of guys sitting in the buff as they were toweling off from showers: an impromptu meeting with reporters in what has been described as the “hell whole” press lounge in the basement of the White House. While Obama metaphorically may have stripped off his clothes and joined the “guys” in the showers, as soon as one of them treated him as an equal and asked him an embarrassing question (about his approval of a “waiver” of his rule against lobbyists in the White House when a former Raytheon official was appointed Deputy Secretary of Defense), he (again metaphorically) put a wash clothe over his “thing” and said, teasingly: “I came down here to visit. I didn’t come down here — this is what happens. I can’t end up visiting you guys and shaking hands if I am going to be grilled every time I come down here,” In a comment (comment at 4:44 PM 2/7/08 )on one of the numerous articles advocating that Obama would have to be given Molly Ivins-style hell if we wanted Presidential accountability, I asked rhetorically, how Obama was going to handle the heat of a Helen Thomas press conference question if a White House basement question was going to rattle him so. So I was looking last night at his response to her’s and other reporters’ questions.

As it turned out, the press conference turned out to reveal far less of Obama than the pruriently-minded may have hoped. If the public expected an orderly discussion of the public’s business, they got instead a campaign speech on the same day that the President had stumped in Elkhart Indiana (which he must have mentioned at least 20 times during the hour), selected for its monstrous unemployment rate; and Fort Meyers Florida, probably selected for its monstrous rate of mortgage foreclosures. His message, in the press conference appearance between these two campaign stops, seemed to the candidate’s display at his prowess in dealing with the situation: “I’ve got this one (the economic crisis) covered guys.” Yeah, there are other problems your pesky questions insist on bringing up: about Iran’s “nuclear threat” about whether there is an “exit strategy” for the surge of troops into Afghanistan, etc. But really folks, you know I can’t hear you when the stimulus bill is pending, even your questions about the long-term prospects of economic recovery: as we said last year when we rammed through Congress and into the hands of Treasury Secretary Paulson, we HAD to “do something now” or the sky would fall tomorrow on the economy. And, while we’re now admitting that the first round of bailouts didn’t work, we’re going to do another round of bailouts with “regulations” that will make them work. What regulations? Well, my own Treasury Secretary, “Tim” Geithner, will be spelling those out tomorrow in his own press conference and I don’t want to “steal his thunder.” (Tim has a much “bigger one” than my pathetic one, as do Larry Summers and my “special envoys” George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke and, of course, Hillary Clinton).

And therein, I think, lies the central problem in the Obama presidency, as probably in any presidency as they operate in modern times. As Obama liked to say when I wanted to avoid as President-elect commenting on some subject (like the slaughter in Gaza): “we have only one President at a time.” That’s true but the one President that we have has multiple responsibilities for all aspects of the public’s business and he cannot, for a very long time, say Scarlett O’Hara style, “I can’t think about that today, I’ll think about that tomorrow.” While he can’t be thinking about and making campaign jaunts around the country to tout solutions to the nation’s environmental, health, education and numerous other problems, he does have “aides” each of whom is charged with thinking and acting about those problems each and every day. For all of Bush’s conceit about being “the decider” or Obama’s as being the one who provides the governing “vision” that determines actions of his administration, the country IS heavily dependent on his cabinet and other staff appointees for the “thunder” of specific recommendations about policies both domestic and foreign. This seems to be an exoneration of sorts for those of us who have “quibbled” about those appointments: we get some of our own “shock of recognition” when we recognize that Clinton-era appointees and even those three Republican appointees on which Obama prided himself last night are more than likely to represent far more continuity than change in the policies that got us into such quagmires of seemingly insoluble problems at home and abroad.

So please, Barack Obama, keep your clothes on when you appear in public; or at least limit your body display to the “pecs and abs” you showed off in the your pre-inauguration vacation while Israel was pounding the hell out of Gaza. You’re very cute, have a nice smile and a nice relaxed way of referring to the nation’s press corps as “guys” (no “ladies and gentlemen”). But let it go at that: and please, let the nation’s business go forward on the many fronts that it must proceed, without doing the “it’s the economy, stupid!” bit which is really great for campaigning but lousy for governing. Instead of chasing off to Elkhart and Fort Meyers for more campaigning, who about staying in D.C. and doing the “vision thing?”

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Jerry D. Rose – Editor, The Sun State Activist