DAY One is coming to America. This will be the 44th Day One in American history and few others have been anticipated with such a mixture of fear, hope and great expectations. The fear has been caused by the loss of jobs, homes and the global financial crisis and the hopes and expectations are that on Jan. 20 when Barack Obama becomes the 44th President of the United States there will be a change for the better in America, and that change will start on Day One. Much has been made of Day One, so people can be forgiven for looking forward to it with so much expectation. Throughout the primary and national election campaigns, candidates talked about their ability to be ready to lead on Day One and painted disparaging pictures of their opponents' probable Day One activities. Those who thought that on Nov. 4 they had elected a new president and that Nov. 5 must be Day One were quickly disabused of that idea because it turned out that there was “only one president at a time,” even though the nation, and the world, was clearly in the middle of an economic crisis and even though the “one president” being referred to had gone out on hurricane duty at the beginning of September (thus conveniently missing his party's national convention) and had never really come back. “The only one president at a time” mantra was, however, selectively chanted: It was repeatedly invoked as the Israelis rampaged through Gaza, but was quietly dropped when the issue was the size and composition of the stimulus package that will hopefully kickstart the economy and prevent another Great Depression. The lesson seemed to be that on the really important issues, there actually could be two presidents at a time. But in a few days, when we all wake up on Day One, it will be only one president all the time, and that will be No. 44 – Barack Obama. There have not been many moments in American history when facing uncertain and perilous times, people (some, let us make it clear, not all) have had such high expectations of an incoming president. Obama likes to nurture the Lincoln connection: Lincoln is the only other president from Illinois; the composition of Obama's cabinet has been likened to Lincoln's so-called “Team of Rivals”; and Obama will take the oath of office on Lincoln's Bible, the only president to do so except, of course, for Lincoln himself. However, Obama, who, like Lincoln, will travel to Washington by train, will enter the city with people having much higher expectations of him than they had of Lincoln on Day One. Lincoln was forced to leave the train at Baltimore and for his own safety entered Washington unannounced and in disguise. Little was expected of him, and his Secretary of State, who was a senator from New York, and whom Lincoln had defeated to become the party's presidential nominee, thought that he would really be the power behind the throne. Is there a familiar echo there? Millions may gather to watch Barack Obama be inaugurated and the inauguration balls will go on all night long in Washington and around America. And then we have Day One. For a while it looked like there would be an economic stimulus bill for Obama to sign on Day One, but that has now been put off to sometime in mid-February. There may very well be an executive order closing Guantanamo, with the caveat that it will actually be some time before it can be completely shut down. One of the first orders of business for Obama will be lowering people's high expectations and he may find that raising expectations is actually a lot easier than lowering them. In raising expectations, he was aided throughout his campaign by a nation weary of the last eight years and eager for a change. He saw early on that the smart thing to do was to sketch out for people the promise of “change you can believe in” and let them fill in the finer details in whatever way suited them best. But then, suddenly, in September, just two months before the national election, the economy began to implode, and change, for most people, came to mean fixing things so that people would not lose their jobs and their homes and life would be like it used to be. Although that was not necessarily the change that Obama had had in mind for the many long months since his campaign began, nor was it a change that he was particularly equipped to deal with, it was the change that the crisis of the moment required, and arguably that was the crisis that got him elected. So now on Day One, Obama has got to deal with the great expectation that he can solve the nation's, and ultimately the world's, financial problems. Having raised expectations in order to get elected, how does he lower them in order to enable people to face the future more realistically? In his Jan. 8 address to America on the economy he peppered his speech with the word ‘crisis' and painted a picture of a future of double-digit unemployment, a “generation of lost potential and promise”, the nation losing its competitive edge, and, in short, a bad situation becoming dramatically worse. He and his economic team have returned to this theme, again and again, in the interests of explaining why the economic stimulus plan is so important and why we must “act with the urgency and seriousness that the moment requires” or face “the consequences of doing too little or nothing at all.” While this kind of language may help to lower expectations, it also, counterproductively, lowers confidence as well. Most economist agree, and Obama has himself stated, that the underlying problem with the economy is the lack of confidence of the American consumer, whose buying activities account for 70 percent of GNP and whose appetite for goods and tolerance of debt stimulate economies worldwide. The language of fear, while lowering expectations, can only serve to underline and deepen that lack of confidence. People need to believe that things will get better. People need to believe that there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Furthermore, the more that Obama tells the American people that the solution to all of the economy's problems are in one basket, namely the stimulus program, and the more that program is seen to be bogged down in Congress; is seen to be not working immediately (which it cannot do); and the more that experts appear on TV, as they are already doing, criticizing one or another part of the package, then the more holes are made in the basket that, people have been told, contains the fragile solutions to the loss of their jobs, homes and economic future. Such a situation can only lead to another downward spiral in consumer confidence. As we all know, Obama is capable of giving inspirational, confidence-boosting speeches, indeed few are better at it, and we can be certain that he plans to give them, but the more speeches he delivers laden with the language of fear, the more shallow any future inspirational speeches will sound, and the less chance that he will have of boosting the nation's confidence on Day One.
