Green shoots in stasis

Our back yard has a dead zone, a corner that gets too much water and too little light.*  Early this spring, it became clear that two plants back there, a skip laurel and a holly (I think blue princess but I forget...) -- each of which had thriving twins not far away -- were at death's door, the holly two thirds brown, the laurel spotted and nearly bare. Below, the two sick plants, followed by the healthy holly twin (with healthy laurel in background).

We consulted with a neighbor of gardening genius.  He had us move each of the ailing plants 2-3 feet to improve their access to light, build up the soil (earlier, he'd steered us toward putting in a drainage channel and the thriving uphill holly to soak up some of the excess water), and fertilize. We also treated the laurel with an anti-fungal spray.

Both plants stabilized.  Healthy growth stopped turning brown or spotted. Each put out a few green shoots.

Broder notes that Obama is patient. But Broder isn't.

Ah, marshalling facts to fit a hypothesis. It's challenging for us all.

David Broder this week advances an unexceptionable hypothesis: that Obama takes a long view of fundamental problems and is willing to work toward solutions with patience and persistence. Obama told us as much early in his presidency: he seeks on several fronts to move the battleship a few degrees. 

But do Broder's yoked examples of slow-acting initiatives make sense?

Take health care. More than a year ago, Obama outlined a vision of a redesigned system, covering far more people at substantially lower per capita cost. He was notably sparing in how to get there, and for many months it was not clear that Congress would take up the challenge. In the end, a law was enacted that addressed exactly that goal. But it will be four years at least before its key components are in place and another four beyond that until its financing mechanism will really be tested.

Take the economy. The "emergency" measures designed to deal with the manufacturing calamities and the overall housing and economic crises Obama inherited were quickly passed in 2009. But none was expected to show results at that moment. For month after month, there was no sign that the downward spiral had been slowed, and only now, more than a year later, are there enough positive signs -- in employment, in sales and in profits -- that many economists are willing to talk about recovery.

For month after month there was no sign that the downward spiral had slowed?  How fast exactly does Broder think that emergency measures might have arrested a near-depression?  Remember all those charts showing that world trade had fallen off a steeper cliff than in the Great Depression? In fact, stabilization came remarkably swiftly. 

The banks underwent their stress tests in May 2009, raised the required $75 billion swiftly, and rushed to pay back TARP funds. Chrysler and GM emerged from bankruptcy at breakneck speed, in June and July respectively. The stock market bottomed out in March 2009 - two months after Obama took office - and has been on a straight upward trajectory ever since. Real GDP grew at a 2.2% clip in the third quarter of 2009 and by over 5% in the fourth.  Unemployment has lagged, and the prospect of a jobless recovery is a major worry.  But by consensus estimates, the stimulus saved 1.5 million to 2 million jobs in 2009 and is on course to create more jobs this year.

What kind of financial crisis legislation would have shown results "at that moment" of passage?  Broder is a bit old to raise retrospective specters of instantaneous results -- even as he praises "a president who is not driven by a compulsion to provide instant gratification."

Fireside Chat 2.0: Obama's weekly address

A few days before the election, I celebrated Obama's "ability to present a complex idea in understandable terms - to break it down, to present it as a narrative or a lay down a cause-and-effect chain." He continues to do so in his weekly addresses, posted on Whitehouse.gov.

Today, after defining the stimulus as "only a first step on the road to economic recovery," he lays out a four-part economic agenda to complete that journey -- stemming the tide of foreclosures, getting credit flowing again, reforming a "broken regulatory system," and getting "exploding deficits" under control once the economy begins to recover. Nothing rhetorically remarkable in that outlay. The explanation of how it all fits together, though, is vintage Obama:

No single piece of this broad economic recovery can, by itself, meet the demands that have been placed on us. We can't help people find work or pay their bills unless we unlock credit for families and businesses. We can't solve our housing crisis unless we help people find work so that they can make payments on their homes. We can't produce shared prosperity without firm rules of the road, and we can't generate sustained growth without getting our deficits under control. In short, we cannot successfully address any of our problems without addressing them all. And that is exactly what the strategy we are pursuing is designed to do.

Anaphora -- the five-times-repeated "we can't do x without y" -- binds a complex cause-and-effect chain together here. The rhetorical effect is to get the listener's buy-in to the whole package, while getting across the staggering array of crises that Obama is proposing to tackle systematically and simultaneously. By appealing to our ability to grasp the causal connections in a complex problem, Obama projects his own ability to do so.