Matthews' reflections on first 100 days: America makes big changes
Posted: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 11:07 PM by Sam Go
by Chris Matthews
The unspoken story of the last hundred days is the one about America itself.
This is a protean country; It changes with conditions. It grows when situations develop. It has a remarkable - I would say exceptional - ability to meet a crisis, one that separates us all from the other countries of the world.
Look at how we do things. We face a crisis. We make a decision. We set a new direction. Look at how definitive we are at this: The Great Depression came along. We dumped a president who couldn't deal with it. We picked one who could. We let him do what he was elected to do: Take action!
We did it again in 1980. Dealt a hand of high inflation, high interest rates -- both in the double digits, with the added humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, we discarded one president and selected another. We gave that new president pretty much a free hand to make his changes.
We did it again in 2008. Faced with a deepening recession, we picked a new president, again like the two I mentioned before -- Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan -- men who would normally not be at the top of our list. We elected Barack Obama.
The pattern is deep and understandable -- that is, if you understand this country. Faced with a crisis, we made a big decision. We dumped our previous notions of who should be our president - picked the extraordinary candidate and gave the new president the backing he needs to set the new direction.
America is not good at certain things. We are not great at long-range planning. This is not the land of long novels, classical music, or other such disciplines that require long-term commitments and vision. We are terrible, for example, at dealing with the problem of long-term debt or facing the economic projections on such programs as Social Security and Medicare.
What we're great at -- I would argue - is turning on a dime. Faced with a crisis, whether it's Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or a deepening recession, we move! We do it!
We make big changes and don't look back.
The big reality of this period in American history, in fact right now, is that nobody is sitting around, rubbing their hands and saying, "Gee, I wish we still had Bush," or "Gee, why did we pick an African-American president?"
No, the American character is to make the big decision and go with it. See if the new guy can do what he said he could do.
That's the question for the next 100 days and the 100 days after that. America is a great country for a couple of great reasons. One, every group that's ever come here does better than where they came from. Two -- just as this is the country where you can become not just what but who you want to be -- the country is able, especially when things are tough, to make the big move, to accept the need for change, yes, to rise to the occasion.
