The thing to remember about the cataract of woe that has befallen our country is how fast things can be turned around.
We may be in retreat overseas, with riots simmering in Missouri and the economy stuck in second gear.
With the right policies, the right leadership, all that can be overcome. It can be turned around, and fast — a fact we’re not hearing pointedly enough for my taste.
I like Rick Perry, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio. But none of the GOP contenders is capturing this simple point — that we can pull out of this dive quickly.
The best making of that point I ever heard was the valedictory speech given by the editor most associated with the Reagan Revolution, Robert Bartley of The Wall Street Journal.
Bartley gave the speech here in New York in November 2002. Beset with cancer, he’d decided to step down from the editorship of America’s biggest newspaper.
Since he’d held the job for more than 30 years, the Journal hosted a banquet for him at the Hotel St. Regis. The former Fed chairman, Paul Volcker, was there, as was the Cold War heroine Midge Decter. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sent congratulations.
In one of the toasts, Henry Kissinger conceded that Bartley had been right to take a harder line than Nixon on the Soviet Union. Jack Kemp toasted Bartley’s leadership of the tax-cutting movement.
Theodore Olson, who had won the Bush v. Gore lawsuit that cleared the way for George W. Bush to claim the White House, spoke of Bartley’s commitment to the Constitution.
Then the great editor rose for his valedictory. The stench of 9/11 was still over Manhattan. Our war strategy had not yet been fully formed. Things were grim.
Bartley sounded a jaunty note. He said he didn’t want to hear about the good old days — since our troubles were nothing compared to what we faced in the 1970s.
He was referring to defeat in Vietnam, Soviet expansionism, the collapse of the gold-based monetary system, the rise of world inflation, economic stagnation, the Arab oil embargo, war in the Middle East, soaring unemployment.
“My message today,” he said, “is that things could be worse. Indeed, they have been worse.” Optimism, he said, pays.
“In human affairs, nothing is ever solved completely,” he said. He was for the steady application of sound policies, confident that economic and political freedom would triumph.
It’s not my purpose here to suggest we lack for editors of Bartley’s ilk (editors he trained are in newsrooms all across the land). It is my purpose to mark his absolute optimism.
And that of the president he backed, Ronald Reagan, who ran on the slogan “morning in America.”
This is the missing element in today’s politics.
In 2008, President Obama promised hope and change. But he lacked the policy chops. The GOP today has the policy chops, but nailing the optimism is key.
The candidate who does that — and the point about how quickly things can be turned around — will be the one who emerges from the GOP scrum.
Bartley stood for two big things. One was a military buildup to meet the Soviets. The other was economic growth.
Reagan took office in the wake of a recession (in 1980) and on the eve of another (1982). In the latter recession, unemployment soared to 10.8 percent, and much higher in some parts of the nation.
Yet once the tax cuts came in, wow did the economy respond. At the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker choked off inflation by pushing up interest rates above 20 percent.
And the value of the dollar on Reagan’s watch soared. (Measured in gold, it rose 38 percent to one-405th of an ounce of gold.)
People began to feel richer. Soon we had close to full employment. Within nine years of when Reagan was sworn in, the Soviet Union was gone — voosh.
Under President Obama, the dollar has lost a third of its value (it’s up from its low but still down to barely more than a 1,300th of an ounce of gold).
No wonder people feel poor. Unemployment is still above 6 percent, higher if you count people who’ve given up looking for work.
What I keep thinking about, though, is the point Bartley stressed — how fast things changed once the right policies were brought to bear.
Find the candidate who can give voice to that optimism, and that is the candidate with the winning formula.