If It's Inevitable ...

Twenty years ago, there was a Republican candidate for governor here in Texas who was widely expected to be elected, but he had a penchant for saying and doing inappropriate things that ultimately cost him the office he sought. His name was Clayton Williams.

Of course, it didn't help him that his opponent was Ann Richards, one of the last nationally prominent Texas Democrats. But that wasn't what doomed his candidacy.

No, Williams sank his own ship, in no small part by making insensitive comments, like the one he made early in 1990 comparing bad weather to rape. "If it's inevitable," he said, supposedly as a joke, "just relax and enjoy it."

That episode popped into my mind today as I was reading a column by Bob Herbert in the New York Times.

Herbert often seems to me to be the last real advocate for those who are hurting. He has the passion — and the insight — others do not have.

"We're not smart as a nation," he writes. "We don't learn from the past, and we don't plan for the future. We've spent a year turning ourselves inside out with arguments of every sort over health care reform only to come up with a bloated, Rube Goldberg legislative mess that protects the insurance and drug industries and does not rein in runaway health care costs."

Herbert's colleague, Paul Krugman, warned, in a column yesterday, against repeating the mistake of 1937 "when the Fed and the Roosevelt administration decided that the Great Depression was over, that it was time for the economy to throw away its crutches. Spending was cut back, monetary policy was tightened — and the economy promptly plunged back into the depths."

Krugman is an economist, and he seems to have more faith in what government can do to improve conditions than Herbert does, but both warn of bad times to come if the government isn't more aggressive in its approach. The government doesn't seem capable of that.

Barack Obama doesn't have the "feel your pain" empathy that Bill Clinton had. And his defenders are more concerned about whether racism plays a role in his rising disapproval numbers and whether the jobless and/or homeless are blaming Obama or George W. Bush for the bad economy.

And Obama's foes prefer to play politics instead of offering constructive suggestions, even though their constituents are suffering — and many will slip irretrievably through the cracks before this year is out. When that happens, I think many people will just give up. I get the sense that this is only going to matter to politicians of both stripes when someone calculates how many votes they have lost as a result.

The political bean counters will always be with us, it seems to me, like the roaches that supposedly will survive a nuclear war.

Face it. Our elected leaders are not paying attention to the suffering that I believe many Americans will conclude is intolerable. They may not be making insensitive jokes, like Clayton Williams did in 1990, but that is mostly because the majority of them are professional politicians (unlike Williams, who was a businessman) and know better than alienate blocs of voters.

It seems inevitable that the dismal economic conditions will be with us for quite awhile, but few will be relaxing and enjoying it.