Frank Rich, Barack Obama…. & Reading the National Wind

Every now and again Frank Rich writes a column in which he articulates a national psychological turning point, and does so just a beat or two before anyone else has managed to put the thing into words, although the sense of the wind-change is already widespread and palpable.

A past instance that comes to mind is the column he wrote in August of 2005 when Cindy Sheehan refused to leave Crawford, Texas, until President Bush came out to talk to her. Rich noted that during Sheehan’s campout protest, something in the American psyche clicked into a different gear with regard to the Iraq war. Bush didn’t talk to Sheehan. Sheehan (and the road show that surrounded her) eventually left Texas and, for a time, became something of a caricature.

But that wasn’t the point. At issue, was the shift in the national mood about Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Rich correctly sensed a new border had been crossed during the weekend that the president ignored the grieving mother. Perfectly expressed or not, Sheehan’s anguish became the final and fateful trigger for an American mental/emotional sea change that had been a long time coming.

This Sunday’s column about the building rage among average Americans is another one of those zeitgeist-flagging moments. It should not be ignored. Yes, there is real hope running through the American psyche right now. But, as Rich notes, there is also a very potent fury abroad in the land….and it is growing:

Here’s how the piece begins:

SOMEDAY historians may look back at Tom Daschle’s flameout as a minor one-car (and chauffeur) accident. But that will depend on whether or not it’s followed by a multi-vehicle pileup that still could come. Even as President Obama refreshingly took responsibility for having “screwed up,” it’s not clear that he fully understands the huge forces that hit his young administration last week.

The tsunami of populist rage coursing through America is bigger than Daschle’s overdue tax bill, bigger than John Thain’s trash can, bigger than any bailed-out C.E.O.’s bonus. It’s even bigger than the Obama phenomenon itself. It could maim the president’s best-laid plans and what remains of our economy if he doesn’t get in front of the mounting public anger.

[SNIP]

Obama’s brilliant appointees, we keep being told, are irreplaceable. But as de Gaulle said, “The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.” You have to wonder if this team is really a meritocracy or merely a stacked deck. Not only did Rubin himself serve on the Obama economic transition team, but two of the transition’s headhunters were Michael Froman, Rubin’s chief of staff at Treasury and later a Citigroup executive, and James S. Rubin, an investor who is Robert Rubin’s son.

A welcome outlier to this club is Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman chosen to direct Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. But Bloomberg reported last week that Summers is already freezing Volcker out of many of his deliberations on economic policy. This sounds like the arrogant Summers who was fired as president of Harvard, not the chastened new Summers advertised at the time of his appointment. A team of rivals is not his thing.

Americans have had enough of such arrogance, whether in the public or private sectors, whether Democrat or Republican. Voters turned on Sarah Palin not just because of her manifest unfitness for office but because her claims of being a regular hockey mom were contradicted by her Evita shopping sprees. John McCain’s sanctification of Joe the Plumber (himself a tax delinquent) never could be squared with his inability to remember how many houses he owned. A graphic act of entitlement also stripped naked that faux populist John Edwards.

The public’s revulsion isn’t mindless class hatred. As Obama said on Wednesday of his fellow citizens: “We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success.” But we do know that the system has been fixed for too long. The gaping income inequality of the past decade — the top 1 percent of America’s earners received more than 20 percent of the total national income — has not been seen since the run-up to the Great Depression.

This is why “Slumdog Millionaire,” which pits a hard-working young man in Mumbai against a corrupt nexus of money and privilege, has become America’s movie of the year. As Robert Reich, the former Clinton labor secretary, wrote after Daschle’s fall, Americans “resent people who appear to be living high off a system dominated by insiders with the right connections.”

Average Americans—both Republicans and Democrats— are no longer content to take the word of the economic “geniuses,” and the trust-us-we-know-what’s-good-for-you pols who have gotten the country into the worst mess of our lifetimes—and then, in the name of fixing things, seem to have acted only in the best interest of themselves and their corporate cronies.

Even those without PhDs in economics have suddenly awakened to the fact that they can do the math. They—we—have done it, and are appalled at what we have discovered has been done in our name…and with our money.

If Americans sense more of the same inside-the-all-knowning-bubble crap coming from Obama’s administration, it will not be pretty.

Let’s hope Barack Obama is taking note of the wind-change too. Our country’s health and well-being truly depends upon it.

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P.S. The scribbling on the photo above is meant to be metaphorical so please don’t send me messages about what I do or don’t know about real poverty as opposed to middle class discomfort. I get it.