President Obama, Governor Paterson and Ayn Rand

Last night as I was listening (or trying to listen) to Obama’s vaporous victory speech, I heard a steady procession of young people walking up Third Avenue cheering and yelling “Obama” over and over. For all practical purposes, it was just the kind of display that attends a World Series or Super Bowl victory by a New York team. This is understandable given the way that the presidential campaign is understood by the average person. Their candidate is like the home team and the primaries amount to playoffs leading up to the championship game.

I almost felt like putting on my clothes and going down to the street to ask people why they were celebrating. What does the average young person living on the Upper East Side think that they will get from an Obama presidency? If they believe that he can’t be anywhere as bad as McCain, they are certainly correct since that is a sine qua non for the continued functioning of the 2-party system. If after Obama took office, he named Alberto Gonzalez to the Supreme Court, the system will blow up in his face. Instead, he will probably nominate some corporate hack like Stephen Breyer.

Other than the expectation that Obama will be better than McCain, I wondered what else would they hope for? Obviously the number one issue is the economy. Since many of these young New Yorkers probably work in FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate), they must fear for their jobs. But it is doubtful that Obama will be able to stave off unemployment even if he had the desire to do so, given his professed free market pieties. Even FDR found it impossible to break the back of the Great Depression. In the final analysis, it was war production rather than the Civil Conservation Corps that put people back to work.

Did they think that Obama was going to finally pull out of Iraq? Since he is likely to retain the services of Robert Gates and David Petraeus, this seems unlikely. Some of the more perceptive takes on Obama’s handling of national security issues have been blogged by Robert Dreyfuss on the Nation Magazine website. Here is his latest:

Barack Obama will be getting off on the wrong foot, to put it mildly, if does what seems likely now: allow Robert Gates to stay on a secretary of defense.

For reasons that are unclear to me, many in Obama’s inner circle seem to believe that it’s important to bring so-called “moderate” Republicans into the president-elect’s national security team. That is an awful idea, for two reasons: first, even though many of the names being floated — such as Gates, Dick Lugar of Indiana, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska — come from the traditional wing of the GOP, and they are not neoconservatives, they are almost guaranteed to push for an expansion of the US military budget and a bigger armed forces. And second, by doing so Obama would be conceding many critics’ argument that Democrats are somehow not suited to control the national security apparatus.

Gates has reportedly already been working on the transition to an Obama administration and he certainly hasn’t done anything to damp down speculation that he is a candidate for the job under Obama.

Dreyfuss, an expert on the Middle East, also worries about whether Obama will deliver on the promise to get out of Iraq. In fact, he debunks a portion of an Obama speech dealing with Iraq that even had me bamboozled:

In his most recent speech, yesterday in Sarasota, Florida, Obama didn’t mention at all his plan to end the war in Iraq. He said nothing — yes, nothing — about withdrawing US forces. Here is the full text of what he said about Iraq in that speech:

When it comes to keeping this country safe, we don’t have to choose between retreating from the world and fighting a war without end in Iraq. It’s time to stop spending $10 billion a month in Iraq while the Iraqi government sits on a huge surplus. As President, I will end this war by asking the Iraqi government to step up, and I will finally finish the fight against bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. I will never hesitate to defend this nation. From day one of this campaign, I have made clear that we will increase our ground troops and our investments in the finest fighting force the world has ever known. Watching our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines fight in Iraq and Afghanistan has only deepened my commitment to invest in 21st century technologies so that our men and women have the best training and equipment when they deploy into combat and the care and benefits they have earned when they come home.

I won’t stand here and pretend that any of this will be easy – especially now. The cost of this economic crisis, and the cost of the war in Iraq, means that Washington will have to tighten its belt and put off spending on things we don’t need.

Let’s analyze that.

First, he doesn’t reiterate that he is pulling US forces out. Instead, he appears to say that the key is to get Iraq to pay for the war, to get the Iraqis to use their surplus. That may appeal to budget-conscious US voters, but — especially with the price of oil dropping fast — Iraq, which is a poor, Third World nation with a devastated economy, isn’t going to pay for the war.

Second, he says that he wants “the Iraqi government to step up,” meaning, presumably, to fight its own war. That, of course, is exactly what President Bush can been saying, namely, that the US will “stand down” when the Iraqis “stand up.” Problem is, the Iraqis need to be handed an unconditional timetable that doesn’t depend on what they do or don’t do. Iraq doesn’t need President Obama to “asking” it to step up.

Third, and most troubling, Obama says that Americans will have to tighten their belts because of the “cost of the war in Iraq.” Doesn’t that mean that the war will continue?

Laying in bed working through these thoughts, I suddenly realized that it was one o’clock in the morning-long past my bedtime. I figured that the best way to get past the thoughts was to turn on WFAN, the all sports talk radio station that surely would be focused on the NY Mets utterly inexplicable decision to retain the services of Luis Castillo rather than on world politics.

As it turned out, the overnight host Tony Page, who is African-American, started his one a.m. show by announcing that he had a special guest: David Paterson, the African-American governor of New York who took over from the disgraced Elliot Spitzer who was caught purchasing the services of $1000 per hour call girls. Page told his listeners that there was more to life than politics and that he wanted to discuss Obama’s victory with Paterson, who is a big NY Mets fan and an occasional guest on WFAN.

That’s when I turned off the radio and went to bed. I did not to hear for the 10,000^th time that night about what an historic victory it was. I get it already.

Taking the subway to work this morning, I thumbed through the pages of the Village Voice, a New York weekly that is only a pale shadow of its illustrious past when it had contributors like Alexander Cockburn and Jules Feiffer. As I turned to Tom Robbins’s column, which is one of the few that still has some substance among the Generation X fluff that dominates its pages, I encountered Governor Paterson once again. It is worth quoting at length:

Governor Paterson Means Business

Spitzer’s successor disses his bad old radical self

By Tom Robbins

The Republicans’ toughest rap in the election’s final days was that Democrats and their leaders want to plunge the nation into “class warfare.” Of course, this is laughable. Everyone knows that Democrats don’t have the guts to wage class warfare. There is no better evidence of this than in Albany, where the party of the people has a new African-American leader who gets all wobbly these days whenever someone suggests taxing the rich.

Last week, Governor David Paterson announced that, thanks to the Wall Street meltdown, the state faces some $47 billion in budget shortfalls over the next four years. No one’s ever heard these kinds of numbers before. But the accidental governor insists that he will cut his way out of this morass rather than impose any new taxes. Since much of the state’s spending is on education, health, and assistance to those less well-off, this means that Albany must start whacking away at those parts of the budget. The governor has summoned legislators to do so at a special session on November 18. He has refused to name his own targets, but he is adamant that that’s the way to go.

“Spending cuts are the only ones we can achieve right now,” he said last week, immediately after a trip to Washington to push for federal aid. “We can’t tax anybody.”

Not that Paterson is opposed to people voluntarily paying more taxes if they so choose. Take gambling, for instance. Proving that he is an agile fiscal player, the governor recently called for turning lovely Belmont Park into a massive gambling emporium, something called a “racino.” This came just a week after he approved 4,500 video gambling machines for Aqueduct Racetrack just down the road. It will generate millions in new revenues, the governor said.

Back when he was a lowly politician from Harlem and his party’s minority leader in the State Senate, Paterson saw this business of government-induced gambling quite differently. “Gambling is the tax on the addicted,” he said in 2003 when then Governor Pataki called for putting thousands of these same dollar-sucking machines into city OTB parlors to raise revenues. “And believe me, that is job-killing, and family-killing.”

Of course, that was before Paterson could see the big picture, and before he had to worry about getting elected in his own right to the job he now holds. To do so, he believes he must prove to business leaders that he is not that radical from Harlem he pretended to be for so many years. What better proof than to give thousands of working-class New Yorkers the opportunity to smooth out any $20 bills they may still have in their pockets and feed them into these brilliant new machines?

The governor has also scored points with the business class by rigorously insisting that “everything is on the table” when it comes to cuts. This includes slices to school budgets in the middle of the school year. Even Senate Republican leader Dean Skelos-desperate for teachers’ union support for his members’ re-election-ruled out this approach. Whatever you think about the union, most parents get a bit concerned when school districts start cutting staff while kids are sitting in the classroom. Paterson dismissed this complaint as mere “poetry.”

He got literary again in Washington, where he began his testimony last week by citing novelist Ayn Rand, patron saint of capitalist entrepreneurs. Paterson praised Rand and invoked her advice that “the greatest country in the world was founded on the basis of individuals, where people were encouraged to adventure, not to be complacent.” He said that “an infection of greed and mismanagement” had distorted that fine trait. But his chief message to business leaders was this: New York’s governor reads Ayn Rand!

The Fountainhead did not appear to be on his reading list when he was still that elected official from Harlem, one of the state’s poorest districts. The same year that he lanced Pataki’s gambling gimmicks as a tax on working people, Paterson called for a tax on the rich to help close what was then an $11.5 billion budget gap (slightly less than what Paterson projects for next year). He believed then that a 1 percent surcharge on incomes over $300,000 a year, and an added 1 percent bite on those above $500,000, were perfectly fair.

And he got his way. He helped the legislature impose-over Pataki’s veto-a temporary, post-9/11 surcharge bumping the 6.85 percent top income-tax rate up to 7.7 percent on incomes over $500,000.

These days, the governor winces when legislators suggest that such a hike is again in order. Some people believe he is only performing his designated role in Albany’s Kabuki dance of the budget, where all is shadows and gesture. If so, he’s doing an excellent job.

Mark my words. This is the same thing we can expect from President Obama, even if he doesn’t quote Ayn Rand.