My week started with an elegant lunch at our faculty club, at which our university president detailed practical consequences of the current financial crunch. I'm not revealing a confidence to say that we'll feel some pain. Across the country, university endowments are down. The credit crunch creates countless logistical problems. Students have greater need for loans which are suddenly harder to get. Inside our hospital, more patients are losing health coverage or shifting from nice private insurance to Medicaid. That hurts our bottom line.
Of course our university will be fine. We are in an incredibly stable industry. We have a multi-billion-dollar endowment. Many have it worse. Our students doing field work around Chicago tell of more renters facing eviction, for the usual reasons, but also because a notable number of landlords have financially imploded. On the personal front, I hear that giant sucking sound of my 401(k) losing years of hard saving in just a few weeks. Several friends are having trouble selling their homes. I'm suddenly very, very grateful that I have a tenured job.
As a nation, and as individuals, we are headed for hard times. Our next president will take office facing an economic crisis, having to preside over two wars, fighting to reverse a historic decline in our nation's global standing.
In so many ways, we face a reckoning for having squandered the times when we had it good. We enter this recession with a large overhang of public debt accrued through irresponsible and unbalanced tax cuts. We enter an era of high fuel prices having failed over a generation and more to address this obvious environmental and national security problem. We face decades of poorly-designed, poorly-maintained physical infrastructure exemplified by levees that broke in Katrina. Rattled into unwise policies by the 9/11 attacks, we face new threats having squandered a period of unprecedented supremacy. We have spent huge sums on the military. Yet we so badly mismanaged our planning and force structures that we compel overtaxed servicemen and servicewomen to serve multiple repeated tours. We might have created strong friendships and strong international institutions, to help us in a financial crisis, but we did not. Instead, our next president must build these relationships after our humiliating financial mismanagement has brought large losses across the globe.
The times are daunting. Yet they also pose a historic opportunity. The polls and betting markets suggest that Barack Obama will probably be our next president. We can't let up, but Senator McCain is being overwhelmed by an economy and party record too bad to defend, and by a Democratic nominee too good to defeat by the usual Republican means.
Senator Obama has run an astonishingly strong race. He brings charisma, but he brings a lot more. He brings an energized and disciplined organization that stayed on an even keel through the Rev. Wright crisis, that didn't get rattled by the bubble of Governor Palin, that remained steady through the string of late Hillary Clinton victories this Spring. He made some missteps, but stayed away from gas tax holidays and other gimmickry. The contrast with Senator McCain's erratic campaign could hardly be greater.
My first defining moment of the campaign occurred last Fall, though I wouldn't know it until later. I was at a small fundraiser headlined by David Plouffe. People asked how the campaign could possibly overcome Hillary Clinton's 25-point national polling lead. Plouffe calmly reported that he didn't care about any national poll, all of which would change anyway after Iowa. He outlined pretty much everything that subsequently occurred. At the time, I wondered what he was smoking.
My second defining moment took place watching the second Presidential debate. Senator Obama said simply, without euphemism or grandstanding, what needed to be said about American healthcare. Joe Klein, who has been great this year, summarized it best.
If Barack Obama is elected president of the United States on Nov. 4 -- a prospect that is beginning to seem likely now -- it may turn out that he closed the deal with a simple answer to a not-so-simple question posed by Tom Brokaw in the second presidential debate: "Is health care in America a privilege, a right or a responsibility?" ....
Obama began his response with a simple declarative sentence: "I believe that health care is a right for every American." The rest of his answer could be used as a template for how to deal with a complex issue in a town-hall debate. He began with a personal story: his mother, dying of cancer at age 53, having to fight her insurance company, trying to prove that her disease had not been a pre-existing condition. He broadened that into a general proposition about the proper role of government: "It is absolutely true that I think it is important for government to crack down on insurance companies that are cheating their customers." And finally, he transformed the issue into a metaphor for the entire campaign: "That is a fundamental difference that I have with Senator McCain. He believes in deregulation in every circumstance. That's what we've been going through for the last eight years. It hasn't worked, and we need fundamental change."
In these anxious times, that's a compelling message.
We have a huge opportunity over the next 24 days, not only to win, but to win this thing right, and to build a positive mandate for activist government. Tens of millions of Americans--forced to confront an upside-down mortgage, precarious job security, uncertain or lacking health coverage--are looking anew at the virtues of social insurance, whereby we use instruments of government to address risks that few of us as individuals, and no private market, can reliably tackle alone. I suspect some Chicago stock brokers are looking differently upon the struggles of the Pennsylvania steelworker or the woman with diabetes who lack insurance coverage, for whom economic crisis is no less painful but comes as less of a shock.
Some say that we must temper our aspirations because of the economic crisis. I disagree. Recession will drive millions of Americans into the ranks of the uninsured or onto Medicaid. Public hospitals and safety-net providers will be stressed at precisely the moment that states and localities are forced to enact new budget cuts. The necessity and the opportunity for a major breakthrough could hardly be greater. This goes beyond healthcare. We have huge social needs. We must repeal regressive Bush-era tax cuts to the wealthy, because we need the funds.
We must also use this time to address misplaced priorities in our personal lives and in our unwise and unsustainable consumer culture. We've been riding a consumption treadmill on which we put too many $5 lattes and costly toys on our VISA cards. We have borrowed too much for $45,000 weddings and granite-appointed kitchens while claiming we can't help 45 million uninsured fellow citizens. Our children marinate in a dumb media environment that perpetuates all this.
We also need a stronger call to service, overseas through the military, Peace Corps, and other public service, and here at home. I spend a lot of time at social service agencies, public health departments, schools, and hospitals that serve people who need help. Outside academic medical centers, I see conspicuously few graduates of the elite universities pitching in to help. For too long, we have denigrated and under-paid the people who teach our children, nurse us when we are sick, keep our schizophrenic loved one from becoming homeless. Far too many of our most privileged young people migrate to law firms and Wall Street. We all know this. Lawyers and investment bankers certainly do. That's one reason the attacks on Barack Obama as a community organizer fail to gather traction.
The New Yorker magazine captured what I believe in their elegant endorsement this week:
At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader's name is Barack Obama.
I've never been as proud to support a Presidential candidate as I am this year. We need to work hard over the next 24 days. I think we'll run through the tape as winners. We'll need that running start. We have much work to do.