Your Opinion: Public ignores partisan inaction

Dear Editor:

We have 9 percent unemployment because the global financial system collapsed, not because federal inspectors are overly concerned about coal particulates in the air.

Our president will give a jobs speech Thursday but he has nowhere to go. It will be a "news" item and might rally the base? It will achieve nothing.

Our two political parties cannot agree on the most fundamental problem facing America. That would be how to get America going again. In fact, the parties are only focused on who will win the 2012 elections.

The Republican script to President Obama's job speech was already released by Speaker Boehner on Aug. 17. It was entitled, "Statement on Announcement of President Obama's Upcoming Speech on Jobs." Consider that for a moment: Where else but Washington would you see a news release responding to an event that hasn't occurred and statements that haven't been uttered?

When politicians agree that only the upcoming election matters, nothing will happen to give citizens relief.

There will be no significant cooperation on substantive issues. Speaker Boehner will do nothing to hurt his party's candidates by handing President Obama and the country a major economic accomplishment.

Boehner controls the House of Representatives and that means the president and the U.S. cannot move forward until the 2012 election is over. That is 13 more months of assured political stagnation.

Washington understands this. The interest in the president's speech is just a function of the fact that people who discuss politics and policy for a living need to seem like they are doing something through the long summer months.

The administration needs to look like it's acting to create jobs, the media need to appear to be reporting news, the pundits need to generate opinions about it all.

We could exhort the president to be more like Truman or FDR and battle out of this dead-end situation. We could lambast the Republicans for lack of character or using us all as bait to play their games. Do you see anything changing? Instead we will get months more of the dreadful primaries where the media pretend this all matters. Most readers here will blissfully ignore this drama.

I am reminded of the phrase "the banality of evil" coined by Hannah Arendt as she sat through the 1963 trial of the Nazi Adolph Eichmann. Ordinary people can do evil things with thoughtless precision.

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