O would some power the giftie gie us

So far the best commentary on President Obama’s State of the Union address the other night that I’ve read has been from Canadian Colby Cosh:

Indeed, a Haitian asked to consider the “terrible choices” faced by Americans would probably say it wasn’t really suffering at all—just childish resentment at the mere existence of economic scarcity. (I understand that there’s a recession on, but what prior generation of Americans didn’t have to struggle to realize its ambitions? When have the non-rich not faced difficult choices and opportunity costs?) Apparently the word “principle” may now be regarded, not as a term denoting permanent maxims of action, but as a fine-sounding synonym for “feelings”.

Well, Barack Obama couldn’t literally feel one percent of the combined emotional force of American insecurities and dreads, or he’d keel over dead. What he really hopes to do, when he starts spinning anecdotes about the letters he’s received and the people he’s talked to, is to convince us that he has somehow integrated those feelings intellectually. Yet I wonder if he has, when I hear him say that Americans are more alike in their fears than in their practical circumstances. Though they “have different backgrounds, different stories, different beliefs,” he said, “the anxieties they face are the same.”

That’s followed by something I think is a genuine insight:

Surely, after all, it’s our anxieties, to at least some degree, that make us vote for different political candidates. We’re all opposed to crime and terrorism and injustice and prejudice and pollution; we may disagree on the specific solutions, but we also disagree on which of these things we need to worry about RIGHT NOW. The debate over health insurance reform—with one side conjuring images of an army of outcast fellow-citizens enfeebled by pestilence, and the other yelping about death panels and creeping socialism—could not demonstrate this more clearly.

That’s what I wish that President Obama had set out to do in his speech and what I was prattling on about yesterday. I wish he had reminded us that we are more united than divided, that our problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, and that, if we face those problems squarely and together, they can be overcome.

But I don’t think that’s what he did.

If we look around us with clear and open eyes, I think it’s obvious that to a very great degree the reforms of the New Deal have succeeded. We don’t have the breadlines of the Great Depression. Thousands of banks haven’t collapsed. There isn’t still the palpable sense of panic that was evident for a few months last year.

Although our institutions are durable enough to avert collapse, they still aren’t constructed in such a way that they’ll promote future growth and expansion. I think there’s reason to believe that they never will be. The challenge is to prevent crashes without preventing prosperity at the same time.