Thoughts on the Presidential Race

Here are a couple good political commentaries for the presidential race. The first one turns a critical eye to John McCain:

Negative attacks — on either side — somehow seem less salient when you’re watching your retirement savings dwindle. Voters want ideas, not punches, no matter how deftly delivered. A candidate will appear risky only if he appears to be unable to think and lead the country out of its recession.

The second one puts the same challenge to Obama:

Obama has dealt deftly with the economic crisis — at least in a political sense. Unlike McCain, he was fairly calm during the first days after Lehman’s collapse and the government bailout of AIG.

. . .

But it’s not clear that he has had any better ideas — or put them forward more aggressively — than Paulson and Bernanke when it comes to dealing with the crisis in the credit markets. It’s not clear that he has pushed ideas that would have dealt with the crisis more effectively.

I agree that “[v]oters want ideas” and that a candidate with “better ideas . . . than Paulson and Bernanke” would be pretty impressive. But I disagree with the second commentator.

Expecting a politician to have better ideas about the financial crisis than professionals like Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke seems pretty disingenuous to me. But the thing everyone wants to avoid, a panic, tells us what is important: someone who can remain “fairly calm” in the face of recent events. That’s probably why Franklin Roosevelt famously said, during his first inaugural address, given during the Great Depression, that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” When the way forward is not clear, would you rather have someone who tends toward the erratic, or someone who keeps cool and stays on course?

As Obama pointed out during the most recent debate, “it’s never the challenges that you expect. It’s the challenges that you don’t that end up consuming most of your time.” What we learn from Obama’s approach to the financial crisis is a matter of substance. When those inevitable unexpected challenges arise, he will approach them coolly and rationally, which is what we need in the Executive branch.

The question of who is best to occupy the Oval Office has much less to do with specific strategies planned out in advance. We all know the saying about best laid plans. Instead, the important matter is how the candidate will face the unexpected. When everything falls apart, is it more important to have someone who will always have the best ideas, or someone who will refuse to panic?