By Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture
Everyone is all abuzz about Frank Rich’s New York mag column: Obama’s Original Sin. “The president’s failure to demand a reckoning from the moneyed interests who brought the economy down has cursed his first term, and could prevent a second.”
He’s quite late. TBP readers should recall this November 2nd, 2010 post, The Tragedy of the Obama Administration.
I am republishing it here as a reminder of how behind these ideas the MSM is:
The Tragedy of the Obama Administration
On election night six years ago, I wrote The Tragedy of the Bush Administration. In it, I despaired that:
“Once in a generation, the stars align for a political leader. There is this perfect moment – too often based on some enormous danger of long-lasting consequences for generations to come.
Once every half century, the perfect combination of leadership and threat, of challenge and response meet. The leader – imperfect, fallible, yet ready to rise to the occasion – grabs the brass ring.
Think Winston Churchill fighting the global threat of the Nazis, Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence, JFK’s dare to send a man to the Moon . . .”
The rest of that piece went on to lament how George W. Bush was granted that rare opportunity to grab the brass ring, to rise to the occasion — and failed miserably.
Here we sit, not half a century later as originally surmised, but a mere six years later. I once again find myself lamenting the opportunities wasted by a US President in response to a great cataclysm. In the case of President Obama, it was his response to the financial crisis. The opportunity for greatness presented itself, and was . . . ignored.
Read the rest here: Read It Here First: Obama’s Original Sin | The Big Picture.
