The New York Times’ Frank Rich: Obama is right—the people are to blame

Barack Obama's inauguration has brought out the worst in a good many people, especially from within the environs of American liberalism. The liberal pundits either invent an imaginary ‘progressive' Obama or come forward to express agreement with his fundamentally right-wing views and policies.

In his weekly comment Sunday, New York Times columnist Frank Rich, taking his cue from Obama's inauguration speech, asserts that the American people share the blame for the financial crisis. Rich writes that "Obama wasn't just rebuking the outgoing administration. He was delicately but unmistakably calling out the rest of us who went along for the ride as America swerved into the dangerous place we find ourselves now."

Rich continues: "Feckless as it was for Bush to ask Americans to go shopping after 9/11, we all too enthusiastically followed his lead, whether we were wealthy, working-class or in between. We spent a decade feasting on easy money, don't-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a metastasizing celebrity culture."

After enumerating a number of crimes of the financial elite, Rich returns to his theme: "In less lofty precincts of the American economic spectrum, the numbers may be different but the ethos has often been similar... egular Americans took on all kinds of debt wildly disproportionate to their assets and income. The nearly $1 trillion in unpaid credit-card balances is now on deck to be the next big crash."

He notes that in his inaugural speech Obama issued a "somber" call for sacrifice, and, after citing the president's reference to "workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job," Rich adds, "There will be-there must be-far larger sacrifices in that vein yet to come." He concludes: "While it's become a Beltway cliché that America's new young president has yet to be tested, it is past time for us to realize that our own test is also about to begin."

This is extraordinary stuff. Aside from its sycophancy and the excuses it offers for Obama's banal and empty speech, Rich's column gives genuine voice to the sentiments of selfish, upper-middle-class circles.

(New York Times columnists couldn't agree on the literary quality of Obama's inaugural. While Rich headlined his piece "No Time for Poetry" and argued that "this speech was austere, not pretty," Times op-ed writer Stanley Fish opined that Obama "carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate." The prose style, Fish tells us, "lends itself to leisurely and loving study." While the aesthetic evaluations differ, there is a similar degree of groveling in both cases.)

According to Rich and his ilk, the American people share responsibility for the policies of the financial elite. Presumably then, the various equally guilty social elements should all have benefited.

In reality, the American working class has suffered a protracted, decades-long decline in its social position, while the very rich have engorged themselves on the nation's wealth, much of it by semi-criminal means, opening up a vast social chasm.
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