The Choice: Recovery vs. Drift and Decline

Each day you can feel the media and the public grow slightly more aware of the gravity of the economic problems facing America and the world.   We are all still getting our arms around this economic moment, and like Paul Krugman's column today, the emerging conventional wisdom is the recovery is going to be long and hard - longer and harder than any other recession since the Great Depression.  I feel, each day, that it is more and more apparent that we are living in no ordinary time - that the decisions made by our leaders in the days ahead here and across the world will be ones of great consequence.  Ones that will lead to a prosperous and peaceful 21st century; ones reinforcing the drift of the moment, the inability of our politics to face our challenges forthrightly; ones that could indeed make matters much much worse. 

Tuesday night the President will address the nation from the Capitol.  Once again the nation, and the world, wlll be watching.  It will be a critical opportunity for our new President to lay out the challenges we face and the solutions he envisions.  I hope he takes the opportunity to more clearly define the choice we face.  For I don't think the choice is between forward and backward any more, or between progress and failed old ideas.  I think it is a graver choice, a starker choice, a much more serious choice - one of recovery, global stability and national greatness versus continued drift, global chaos and national decline.  

As the saying goes times of crisis are also times of great opportunity.  It is increasingly clear the task of the Obama Presidency will be a great one - to prevent the world and the US from sliding into economic and political chaos, to chart a domestic and global path for recovery, and to update the successful but aging geopolitical architecture forged by FDR and Truman for a new day and a new century.  No small tasks these.  But these are the tasks that are in front of us now.  To put it simply - it is time to remake and renew the world, to offer a "new politics" on a global scale.  

If history is any guide creating this new global architecture that allows us to better manage the collective challenges in front of us won't be easy, or without pain.  Mistakes will be made, years and nations lost.  But it is now the great challenge facing our nation, whose role in the world is different from the rest.  And it will now be at the very center of our politics for perhaps decades to come.  I am anxious to see how the President talks about all this on Tuesday night, the most important night yet of his already historic Presidency.