I am still home sick today and have been forced to watch a ton of cable news. It occurs to me that cable news might go out of business during the Obama presidency. After all, the boy who cried wolf is eventually IGNORED.
The reckoning began with Morning Joe suggesting about himself: "Maybe we don't know what we're talking about."
The chattering class and even the progressive blogosphere is obsessed with minutae while the general public cares more about results. I believe that the elites just don't get it. I was talking to my 72 year old aunt yesterday and she kept shaking her head while saying: "That young man is about to push through an $800 billion recovery package in less than a month. Incredible." I think that this would be the assessment from most of the people who I know.
Now I notice that cable news is up in arms about the Geithner "plan." I watched CNN and CNBC flailing their arms saying "details" are needed NOW. Meanwhile, Tim Geithner has been in office for two weeks and the administration got in three weeks ago.
I loved reading President Obama's response to Terry Moran's question in an interview to air tonight on Nightline:
TERRY MORAN: So, Treasury Secretary Geithner today has laid out the plan for the banks, and judging by the reaction in the markets Wall Street really doesn't like it.
PRESIDENT OBAMA:Well, you know, Wall Street I think is hoping for an easy out on this thing and there is no easy out. Essentially what you've got are a set a banks that have not been as transparent as we need to be in terms of what their books look like.
And we're gonna have to hold out the Band-aid a little bit and go ahead and just be clear about some of the losses that have been made because until we do that, we're not going to be able to attract private capital into the marketplace. And so, you know, I think that you have two choices in this situation: you can prolong the agony and shareholders will be happy until they're not happy, and that could be a year from now or two years from now, or in the case of Japan, eight years later.
Or you can just go ahead and acknowledge that yeah, there's, there's a lot of work that has to be done to put these banks back on a firmer footing.
http://abcnews.go.com/...
So once again while cable news loses its head, President Obama will keep his.
Andrew Sullivan makes a point that I concurr with:
It seems to me that one reason we are all a little dismayed by the somewhat dreary compromise in the stimulus bill and the lack of detail in the Geithner proposal or the painful inheritance of Bush's torture program is that we want closure and clarity now. We have been conditioned, in a way, to rhetorical absolutism, to declarations of clear intent, to the notion that an idea clearly expressed solves everything. This was how the Decider decided. But that didn't turn out so well, did it?
What Tim Geithner offered today was an outline of a plan. The details will be filled in over time. They will be offered after much deliberation and thought. I have been lucky enough to know President Obama having worked for his congressional, senate, and presidential campaigns. What I know about him for sure is that he is deliberate, thoughtful and NEVER OVERREACTS. Details of the Geithner plan will be revealed and folks will have plenty of time to offer their critiques of those details. In the meantime, it is time for Wall Street and for the country to "put away childish things."