US Elections

The politics of patience

By Nina Blackwell in San Francisco

13 July 2009

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In an interesting turn of events for the Obama Administration, it seems like more and more each day we see new headlines of doom and gloom about the state of the economy, the President’s ratings and his congressional agenda. If you didn’t know better, you would be forgiven for thinking right now that Congress will not be able to agree on a healthcare reform proposal, that President Obama’s honeymoon with the voters is over and that the economy has simply gone from bad to worse. Problem is – nothing is ever that simple.

We are all at risk of guilt in making these kinds of assessments about politics – we’ve been trained to want immediate, hassle-free results. But President Obama was right this weekend to urge the American people to be patient on the economy. Bringing the entire global economy back from financial Armageddon and into a place of positive economic and job growth cannot and will not happen overnight.

The President certainly has a task ahead of him. Enough time has now passed for people to believe that the nation’s current economic problems are his alone (as opposed to those of his predecessor) and the Administration is probably now ruing the fact that they were forced to pitch the stimulus package as something of an immediate solution in order to get it passed and to maintain the confidence of the voters. They also can’t have been happy that the President had to take an important but distracting overseas trip which could have given the impression to the American people that he was taking his eye off the ball at home.

The President and his team know the seriousness of the task ahead – getting healthcare reform passed, reassuring people that they are on top of the economic situation and addressing their fears about the future. They are also taking on challenges of historic proportion, so they are right to appeal for patience. They also know they can’t ask for people’s patience for too long before it and their savings begin to wear thin.

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