It Changes So Fast
Every so often you’re walking around, humming Broadway tunes, believing you have a solid future with your company, knowing in your heart that people are good and that mankind is here for a reason and that the temperature in the pool is just right and then it comes to you: Things are really screwed up.
Now is such a time.
Maybe it’s WorldCom. Maybe it’s the Catholic Church. Maybe it’s the Palestinian suicide bombers, the sad murder of Danny Pearl or the possibility that Pakistan and India might just put an end to their name-calling and pick up the red telephones and nuke one another into extinction.
Maybe it’s the Dow Jones, the S&P, the Nasdaq. Maybe it’s our decimated 401(k) portfolios and the billions lost in the markets. Maybe it’s Arthur Andersen and the shredding, or Ken Lay taking the Fifth or the off-the-books fictions that blew it all apart. Maybe it’s failed roll-ups, consolidated companies that can’t work together and a world where all our media seem to come from one source.
Maybe it’s the Internet bubble, a world glued together by broadband that now lies in tatters. Maybe it is more about the people involved: 25-year-old CEOs with stock options and big cars and casual clothes every day of the week. Maybe it’s that we believed in them all.
Maybe it’s ammonia in the water, air quality in the Smoky Mountains and Kyoto up in smoke. Maybe it’s the floods, the fires, the return of El Niño, the ice shelf splintering like firewood. Maybe it’s more theoretical: It could all be about the lies, the corruption, the greed and not trusting anyone in authority anymore. Maybe it’s more basic: The economy’s bad, times are tough and a dollar can’t buy what it used to. Or, you could say it’s all about how we feel in response to all of this. We are anxious and timid, frightened and upset. We have lost our confidence and our swagger. Not to mention our money.
One day George Bush skates into office, the next thing you know somebody has rearranged his furniture. The guy certainly has got his work cut out for him.
Bush may have lost the popular vote, and the Supreme Court may have named him president, but it’s fair to say that, once elected, the nation grew to love him. He embodied American toughness, Texas hardness and a straight-shooting, anti-intellectual, gung-ho approach to problem solving. After 9/11, save for a few useless liberals, the country united behind the man in unanimity.
Utterly out of his control, however, was the world. It now whipsaws his administration, plays to his weaknesses and threatens his presidency. Suddenly, he and his vice president are being profiled as the corporate villains whom we now revile. To bring back investor confidence in recent weeks, Bush has advocated tough rules on directors of corporations, rules he has acknowledged breaking himself when he was in the private sector. The vice president’s old company, Halliburton, is now being examined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for various cost overruns.
But it’s not just the economy, stupid. It’s everything. All of it. The whole ball of wax. There come those moments in politics when suddenly, with little warning, the apparently unconnected dots conspire to shift moods and feelings in big ways that render officeholders completely helpless. With elections for Congress less than four months away, that spells trouble for the Republican Party. One would venture to say that it could also spell doom for George Bush in 2004. But the truth is that just as the trouble arrived swiftly, so can it evaporate instantly. A year is an eternity in this game.
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