Obama moving in the right direction

WASHINGTON — It’s a dull, boring and utterly wimpish word, “moderate.” An equally tiresome one, and one that has lost just about all traction in recent American life, is “modest.” Add “modulated” to those two and I’ve probably lost whatever readers I might have had when this column started.

But I would like to suggest most humbly that those three “M” words might be the ones that will characterize where Barack Obama and his administration are moving. And that, my friends and fellow citizens, is the best thing that could possibly happen to us.

As I have long said, our new president is irrevocably a moderate. Just read the arguments in his well-modulated books and speeches: He states carefully and persuasively, in the FDR mode, that we must do as a nation whatever “works” in the economic realm. Not at all without morals or ethics, he is nevertheless open and pragmatic in facing a recent past during which the Democrats moved to the multicultural leftist limits after the 1960s and the Republicans moved to the neocon and free-market rightist limits after the 1980s.

And that, in effect, is exactly the way he has been acting these first three weeks. Reaching out to the Republicans (and naming three of them in his Cabinet), putting down Democratic extremists, trying desperately, day after day as he travels the girth and grid of the country, to explain to the American people where we are.

It may not be as thrilling as his campaign, but it is appropriate to the situation in which we find ourselves — it is appropriately moderate, and thus, ultimately workable.

Bipartisan plan

Indeed, while their numbers are few, the GOP and independent moderates who have joined Obama and the Democrats in their quest to rescue the economy are impressive. It will not be forgotten — and it may well lay the basis for future work between the parties — that senators Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania were key in crafting the bipartisan economic-stimulus plan in the Senate.

It is also noteworthy that President Obama, from all reports, aims not to challenge his Wall Street interlocutors, including those who have driven the American financial world into such distress with their greediness, so much as to set up policies and situations that will change the culture of America’s financial world.

This is the purpose behind his populist announcement establishing executive pay limits to hold the financial industry accountable to taxpayers. The idea is that that will mark a beginning to changing an entrenched corporate culture that has long endorsed ridiculously huge bonuses and perks that bear no resemblance to corporate performance.

Then we come to the second “M” word — modesty — even more unlikely in today’s world. Yet it begins to exert its influence. For at the same time that the president and his men and women were working toward change in the financial world, another event, this time in sports, put modesty, so to speak, back on our journalistic radar.

Forgive me if I am not moved by the words of New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez, popularly known as “A-Rod,” when Sports Illustrated revealed that the sports hero had taken illegal performance-enhancing drugs, apparently testosterone and an anabolic steroid, from 2001 to 2003. But what he did say was revealing of the debased spirit of our once noble sports world.

‘Very stupid’

Admitting that he had done something “very, very stupid,” Rodriguez then said in a televised interview, reminiscing about the time he had signed a 10-year contract worth a major league-record $252 million: “When I arrived in Texas in 2001, I felt an enormous amount of pressure. I felt like I had all the weight of the world on top of me, and I needed to perform — and perform at a high level every day. I did take a banned substance. For that, I am very sorry and deeply regretful. And although it was the culture back then and Major League Baseball overall was very — I just feel that — you know, I’m just sorry.”

Hey, this is sports, not war, not losing your parents or your home or your child to typhoid, or cancer, or AIDs. The “weight of the world” on top of him? Let’s get real.

Universal Press Syndicate