Post Office Tipping Point: Romney to the Rescue?

By Mary Claire Kendall

Madonna of the Trail outside Bethesda Post Office, 
which was closed in 2012

The mess President Obama has gotten our nation into has reached a clearly definable tipping point: The United States Post Office will just disappear in December if something is not done and fast to put it on a solid financial footing.

The agency is so low on cash, reports the New York Times, that it can’t make a $5.5 billion payment due this month. It has never been so precipitously close to collapse.  (I knew something was radically wrong when I couldn’t find a mailbox in downtown DC to save myself!)

While Republican presidential candidate Governor Rick Perry of Texas subtly hints he will be “Superman” coming to America’s rescue, what we need, in this instance, is former Governor (and front runner) Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, “Turnaround Artist”—his skill documented in his book about how he rescued the Salt Lake City Olympics—to design a plan for saving the Post Office. 

 

Gary Cooper Commemorative Stamp
From the Legends of Hollywood series
Copyright: 2008 USPS. 

Romney could bring the kind of creativity and business savvy needed to breathe new life back into the Post Office that he brought to creating Staples while at Bain & Company, as one of the founding partners—where he took struggling businesses and turned them around.  Perhaps he could devise a public-private partnership that would streamline the service for greater efficiency and cost savings and maximize profits from its iconic stamp collection celebrating American life—famous writers, artists, scientists, stars, statesmen, educators, et alia.  For instance, the Post Office’s marketing tool of stamps featuring notable African Americans—a sterile list from 2004—is wholly inadequate, and properly conceived and executed could reap huge financial rewards.

Edward Hopper Commemorative Stamp
Copyright: USPS 2009. 

It’s just a question of applying good old American know-how in a focused, determined, effective way.

Such a gesture would touch the hearts of every American, who cherishes their community post offices—replete with memories from childhood, standing in line, securely clutching their mother's hand, into adulthood, hopefully clutching that job application—and would be a big boost to his presidential campaign.

It would also be worthy of that iconic Madonna of the Trail standing in front of the Post Office in Bethesda, Maryland—just outside of Washington, D.C.—representing resolute determination and steadfastness in the face of great odds—precisely what’s needed to meet this and every other daunting challenge facing America.

The Madonna is one of twelve monuments commissioned by the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution that dot the National Old Trails Road, extending from Maryland to California—roughly the trail the candidates will follow in 2012, a trail now littered with reminders of American decline under almost three years of Obama’s wanting “leadership.”  Also known as the Oceans-to-Oceans Highway, this 2,448 mile long highway began in New York City, traversed Baltimore and Bethesda, eventually wending its way through the southwest, along what became the famed Route 66 highway, and finally ending at the shores of the Pacific in California. 

All twelve monuments were dedicated in 1928, and now, 83 years later, are presiding over a crumbling America, of which the Post Office’s decline is a clear and startling example. 

The Post Office survived the telephone, the telegraph but may not survive the Internet and Obama, who ironically marshaled the power of the Internet to win—resulting, it seems clearer day by excruciating day, in America losing big. 

But, hope—and help you can believe in—is on the way in the form of competency, experience and heart such as Romney possesses.

###

Heck of a Job, Obama!

By Mary Claire Kendall

As we mark the 6th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it's increasingly clear, the really big storm headed our way is economic... 

It's the lull before the storm—the perfect storm. No, not another Irene or, even worse, Katrina.

The really nasty storm that awaits us is economic.

As everyone focused on Irene, our growth rate for the second quarter weighed in at a paltry 1%—revised downward from the reported 1.3% at the end of July.

People crowd Wall Street after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
Credit: The Authentic History Center, Michael Barnes.

The stock market’s gyrations—reminiscent of the volatility preceding “The Crash of 1929,” compared then to Coney Island’s “Cyclone” roller coaster—is reflecting fear over our seriously ill economy, still laden down with massive debt and corruption that favors “too big to fail” institutions, whose misdeeds during the 2008 financial meltdown have been rewarded with more favoritism at the little guy’s expense.

Before President Obama escaped to Martha’s Vineyard—instead of a more humble location where he could have listened to and felt Americans’ pain—the market was down 635 points, up 430 points, (then came S&P’s downgrade), down 520 points, up 423 points, and down 419 points—in just two weeks.

Obama’s plummeting polls, in turn, are reflecting dissatisfaction with his anemic response to the anemic economy.

But, now, we’re assured, he started developing that jobs plan on lush Martha’s Vineyard, which he’ll unveil early September. What about January 2009? Why not then, when it was job one? What? He needs golfing on Martha’s Vineyard to get creative? Thus, all we got was that boondoggle trillion dollar stimulus we were assured was needed to keep the unemployment rate, now 9.1%, below 8%?

Meanwhile, Americans are battening down the hatches to try to weather this perfect storm barreling our way from Europe, collapsing under the weight of its own dismal growth and debt-laden consequences, making growth less likely and the vicious cycle prefiguring global economic collapse—in the absence of leadership—more likely.

Leadership, you say? Yes, leadership! The absence of which Ruth Marcus was one of the first to broach six months ago in her “Obama’s Where’s Waldo Presidency?” piece, noting, “On the biggest issues, the president is often hard to find.”

Everyone was aghast. But, she was only stating the obvious. By now, it’s a steady drumbeat, with Mort Zuckerman recently writing about Obama’s “competency crisis” in the Wall Street Journal.

Admittedly, to some, the need for Obama leadership is still a foreign concept. As Jonathan Capehart mused on “Morning Joe”—also on Friday, August 26—what can the president do to create jobs?

It all calls to mind the Saturday Night Live spoof of the 2008 Hillary-Obama debates. Whereas she was treated to boxing gloves, Obama was asked, Are you comfortable and do you need another pillow?

It’s confounding that in the midst of incalculable suffering, given Obama’s apparent cluelessness over how to nurse the ailing economy back to health—the unemployment rate among 16-24 year-olds, April-July, alone, was 51.2%, highest since 1948, when that statistic began being calculated—that anyone would give Obama a mulligan.

Notwithstanding, I would say, no, Obama can do nothing to create jobs—unless he transforms himself and does what great presidents do, namely: inspire the nation with a driving dream; eliminate job-choking regulation; lower job-killing taxes; support community banks that lend money to small businesses that create most jobs, instead of big banks courtesy zero percent interest rates, that, the Fed just announced, will be maintained through 2013—the same community banks that, because they know how to make responsible mortgage loans, hold the key to cleaning up the mortgage mess; reform health care the smart way by putting patients first instead of bureaucrats—government and insurance—and getting the incentives right.

But, this would require, well greatness, and really and truly falling in love with America.

And, that might be too much for a president who only inspires coddling.

Postscript: On Friday, September 2, the Labor Department reported zero jobs were created in August—such a dismal number not seen since 1945!  

###

"Where Are The Jobs?"

By Mary Claire Kendall

Unemployed men queued outside a Depression soup kitchen opened in Chicago
by Al Capone, in an effort to clean up his public image.  The storefront sign
 reads: "Free Soup, Coffee and Doughnuts for the Unemployed."   
February 1931. 306-NT-165.319c. (american_cities_129.jpg) 
Credit: Unknown. Source: American Archives.

This column, originally published on July 16, is as relevant as ever.  The situation continues to deteriorate, with "zero" jobs reported in August, a number not seen since 1945; while Obama is still talking about infrastructure projects and job-creation tax credits as the road to recovery. Now packaged as "The American Jobs Act,"  he announced it to great fanfare at a Joint Session of Congress on September 8. Unfortunately, as employers, Americans at large, Republicans and even Democrats, are signaling, his vague plan, costing $447 billion - paid for by small-business-choking tax hikes - fails to revive the private sector's job creating engine. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, has a detailed plan, released September 6, which focuses squarely on the private sector's central role in creating jobs. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), likewise, spoke to Obama's government-as-prime-mover myopia in remarks to the Economic Club of Washington today. "The president's proposals," he said, "are a poor substitute for the pro-growth policies that are needed to remove barriers to job creation in America."  

Washington, DC, July 16, 2011—“Where are the jobs?,” House Speaker John Boehner tweeted in the recent “twitter town hall” hosted by President Barack Obama.

It's a fair question.

Two days later, the government reported the unemployment rate edged up to 9.2% in June, from 9.1%, while “real unemployment” was 16.2%. Just 18,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy—far less than expected, dashing hopes of a fast rebound.

As George Will recently wrote, “Is this the best we can do?”

Obama, in typical fashion, answered Boehner by blaming Republicans—this time for not supporting big “infrastructure and public works programs” to create jobs, the need for which he reiterated in Rose Garden remarks following the dismal jobs report.

Of course, no one argues against the need for repair and construction of roads, railways, bridges, tunnels, sewers, etc.

But, clearly we can do better at reversing the downward trajectory in which over 40 million Americans don’t have a job (14.1 million) or sufficient employment (over 26 million), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—as housing gets weaker, Case Shiller Index recently confirming a double dip in prices.

Long line snaking around building for jobs fair in Atlanta in August 2011.
Credit: Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal & Constitution, via Associated Press.

The first order of business would be to realize that, in Calvin Coolidge’s famous words, “The business of America is business.”

Or, to put it in modern parlance, “It's the private sector, stupid!”

But, the overriding fact is Obama believes government, not the private sector, should be the main jobs engine and solution to the interlocking housing crisis. This, in spite of the fact that the private sector is generating what growth there is. The payroll processing firm ADP reported that 157,000 jobs were created in the private sector in June—still a long way to go before closing the yawning 40,000,000 jobs gap.

Admittedly, some of Obama’s rhetoric is starting to give the nod to the private sector:

“Government,” he said in last weekend’s radio address, “has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can't afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.”

Unfortunately for him and the rest of the country, it’s a little late; besides which, such rhetoric turns off his liberal base.

It’s an unenviable position to be in.

As Karl Rove summed it up in “Why Obama Is Likely to Lose in 2012”: “…he faces four serious threats. The economy is very weak and unlikely to experience a robust recovery by Election Day. Key voter groups have soured on him. He's defending unpopular policies. And he's made bad strategic decisions.”

A line outside the State Temporary Relief Administration in New York City
 on November 24, 1933.  Credit: Associated Press.
During the Great Depression, national unemployment rate reached 25 percent, 
13 million people were unemployed and 100,000 businesses failed.  
Now the effective unemployment rate is approaching 20% 
and some 40 million have insufficient or no employment.

Like Herbert Hoover, heedless of the Great Depression’s economic reality, Obama, until recently, was telling Americans prosperity is just around the corner; albeit now he’s signaling we've got a long way to go before we turn that corner. Indeed we do. As Martin Feldstein, Harvard Economics Professor, Chairman of President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers and former President of National Bureau for Economic Research, recently wrote, the economy’s near-term outlook is “weak at best.” Yet, “fundamental policy changes will probably have to wait until after the presidential and congressional elections in November 2012.”

Ironically, Hoover could not see his way clearly to supporting direct cash assistance to starving, jobless Americans, when there was none; whereas, Obama cannot see his way clearly to unleashing definitively private sector job-creating energies, when there's an abundance—even though it would stimulate a tax revenue gusher to melt the debt and fund his cherished infrastructure projects.

One of the only small businesses in America
not burdened by the heavy hand of Washington regulation, 
albeit  Montgomery County, MD could be more biz-friendly.

Hoover was resoundingly defeated in 1932—one of 10 incumbents, out of 31, who have lost re-election since our nation's founding.

Obama is on track to become #11.

His only hope, it seems—absent a miracle—is that Republicans, like Democrats in 2008, will nominate someone who is charismatic and inexperienced. Unfortunately for him, however, the Obama “experiment,” as Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney calls it, has inoculated even Republican primary voters against that possibility, as a recent Iowa poll demonstrated.

Voters clearly want out of this Great Recession.

"The line of 4,000 hopefuls stretched from a fifth-floor hotel ballroom
 to the cold street below, snaking around the block."
 New York Daily News,  March 6, 2009, Credit: Watts/News.
 How many of these folks are still unemployed or underemployed,  
or, discouraged,  have simply dropped out of the labor market, their  
99 week unemployment benefits  having long ago run out?

"The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for unemployment 
benefits earlier this month jumped to a 26-year high.  And by the looks 
of these lines at job fairs  across the country, who knows when it will  get better."   
 New York Daily News,  March 6, 2009,  Credits: Sullivan/Getty.  
Of course, as we now know from the perspective of almost three years
 under Obama's leadership,  it's not gotten better, it's gotten worse - much worse.

Published for the first time on American Politics and Policy, Wednesday, September 15, 2011.

Hooverville, 1932.  Credit: Unknown.

Originally published in AND Magazine, 7/16/11.