The Fromson File

Dear Mr. President,

After three hours of watching television Monday evening that began with another of your polite and reasonable appeals to the nation, it’s clear that the talk, the debates, the interviews about the financial crisis engulfing most Americans assuredly is doing nothing to excite your supporters and in fact is making most of us feel brain dead.

C’mon Mr. President, if the constant meetings with John Boehner and associates do not seem to be pulling your cord, then take a deep breath and cease being the conciliator.

Remember way back when you pursued the Democratic nomination for president, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani addressed a group of Republican delegates by using a sneer to cite your experience as “a community organizer.” The crowed booed and hooted at the mention of your name as “a community organizer.” Now we who have covered a lot of politics in our lives knew exactly what Giuliani and his audience were driving at. They knew you had earned your spurs working in the troubled inner city of Chicago, alongside my old friend, Saul Alinsky. Giuliani’s remark was nothing less than a piece of racist trash. But who cared. The press wasn’t there to cover it.

Fast forward to the present time: Those guys on the other side of Capitol Hill, coupled with a pack of ambitious presidential candidates who want to replace you, along with those silly little women from Minnesota and Alaska who aspire to make their beds in the White House, have the audacity to believe they can defeat you. So what? Just because cable television and even National Public Radio gives them unwarranted air time does not legitimize their candidacy. What that’s all about is ratings, getting politicians to scream at each other.

The Republicans clearly will do anything they can to defeat your re-election bid. Just listen to one of their principal spokesmen, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Your defeat is his obsession. So stop kidding yourself or us. The senator from the blue grass country is leader of the pack. So you might as well challenge them to a bare knuckle fight. It is plain nonsense to hear them talk about speaking in behalf of the American people when you would suffer from eye strain trying to find any credible African Americans or working-class or unemployed Americans who ever appear on Capitol Hill as part of the GOP leadership.

All we ever see on television when the GOP bunch appears is an assortment of white, button-down cheerleaders who never have stood in line for an unemployment check in their lives. If only you and the ever so polite Washington journalists would ever get it through your heads, just throw their notebooks down in disgust and stop talking to each other, we might realize some progress on debt reduction and all the other stuff that preoccupies the so-called dialogue with the American people. That stuff means jobs and particularly jobs with some specificity.

To hear or watch the overall cast of Washington’s talking heads on Sunday Mornings or the daily cable shows must cause you either to scream or laugh at them. I’m waiting for an intelligent couple of producers to put a brake on these television stars and tell them to stop talking to each other and instead engage in discussion that makes absolute common sense to most Americans. I’ve talked to farmers, steelworkers, teachers and soldiers in my lifetime of reporting and believe me, they are a lot more intelligent than some of our anchormen and women give them credit.

What truly concerns Americans I talk to regularly is the need to put the country back to work. Jobs are what grate most unemployed Americans. They affect the worth of their homes, the amount of food they can put on the table, the lives they once were accustomed to living, the quality of the schools where they can send their children. It means being able to hold their heads high. Nobody, but nobody wants to stand in line at an unemployment office. Most of the unemployed worry about the medical bills for their families. How many of those glib members of Congress have ever had to cope with that problem?

Everyone talks about jobs, but neither the politicians nor civic leaders seem able to offer any specificity. I know that serious people may agree with my notion to construct a nationwide rail system powered by electricity that would go a long way toward dealing with our unemployment crisis. But these friends also concede that it is politically unfeasible at this time because of the troubled economy.

That’s why I harken back to the era of President Dwight Eisenhower who invaded the Defense budget to cover the cost of building the federal highway system in the 1950s.

Today, we could buy rail car designs from France, Germany and Japan, then turn them over to Detroit and every former assembly plant of the auto age. You could count on the United Auto Workers to entice thousands of unemployed and highly-skilled members to turn out new high speed rail cars. Cities can arouse a lumbering labor pool to modernize tracks and rail stations, build shopping plazas and parking lots that would generate enormous employment where it is needed.

Not only would Americans be put back to work en masse, they would be instrumental in spurring the construction of regional rapid rail systems on the West Coast and through heavily-populated areas of the East Coast. Obviously, all of this would take time but the American people want some vision originating from Washington and that requires your vision and passion, Mr. President. The availability of a federal rail system might well prompt tens of thousands of Americans to abandon their gas- guzzling cars, reduce traffic from our freeways, and our need for oil from the Middle East. It could spur a return to dependence on rail traffic and finally bring back some of the jobs industry has shipped overseas. In short, we might see some light at the end of the tunnel and put an end to the jobless economy.

That and protection of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are uppermost in the minds of many Americans. While I was waiting to see my cardiologist yesterday afternoon, I glanced around the waiting room, and what I saw was eight patients, average age 78 to 80, one in a wheel chair, waiting for one of the physicians who are partners in the practice of the man who saved my life more than once a decade ago. Dr. Nicholas Diaco and I frequently growl good humoredly and vehemently about politics and the cost of medical care. That doesn’t stop him from seeing me and a constant stream of aging Americans at his Santa Monica office. He’s an outspoken Republican and we are far away in our political tastes. The good doctor has been married a number of times, while my wife and I recently celebrated our golden wedding anniversary to mark a loving marriage.

Every day, I have learned from talking to many acquaintances seeking medical treatment or working out on the exercise gear at our nearby YMCA. What’s evident to me at least is a streak of common sense that reveals the level of impatience and frustration most of my friends share with the haggling in Washington. They’re bored with the ongoing debates over debt reduction and all the other mumbo jumbo that has been punctuating their ear lobes for several months. Many are retirees and are fed up with Republican threats to reduce the funding of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Some of these aging but loyal Americans know that death and taxes are inevitable. They accept from experience that the rich get richer and the middle class is aching. But they’ve heard that story before and are confident that the country somehow will pull out of its present tailspin. They’re convinced that even while some may have misgivings about you, Mr. President, but they say they intend to vote for you anyway. They wish you had the courage to get out of Afghanistan and Iraq knowing, of course, that the process may be underway. They have serious doubts about trying to graft democratic values onto the Arab world and they are fairly certain that you will be re-elected for a second term in the White House. But they wish you would bare your teeth and growl at your tormentors in the Republican Party.

Americans love and respect those who stand up and fight for what they believe in. They yearn for you to get angry, passionate and combative the way President Harry Truman did back in the days when he shocked the nation and took on “the do-nothing Congress” during a campaign swing by train across the country. The GOP, the press and the public had just about had written him off in his re-election campaign. Hah, were they shocked!

Americans want you to do battle with your opponents the way you did when you were seeking the presidential nomination three years ago. A dose of candor might cause the public opinion polls to jump like you might never before have imagined. Grrrr, Mr. President, Grrrr.

Tags:   barack obama · Debt Ceiling · Dwight Eisenhower · Harry Truman · John Boehner · Media criticism · Mitch McConnell · national debt · Rudy Giuliani1 Comment