Wednesday’s London Guardian newspaper carried a full report under the banner heading “Barack Obama battles left and right for debt ceiling agreement,” documenting the manner in which he was playing the role of “mediator in direct talks to prevent government bills going unpaid, interest rates soaring and US stocks plummeting.”[1] The paper then briefed its UK audience on the unfolding political drama in Washington, the detail of which is well known to any political junkie based here in the United States. And buried deep in the article was this comment from Ron Haskins: “the Democratic party on average is further left, and the Republican party on average further right, so they are trying to cut a deal between folks who are more driven by their ideologies and principles.” The Guardian, that is, treated its UK liberal readership to the standard “plague on both their houses” interpretation of what is going on in Washington DC right now – the kind of interpretation David Brooks deploys too[2] – the “ it is all so much more complicated than either pure free-marketeers or simple-minded Keynesians seem to grasp” argument.  In the hands of either Hoskins or Brooks, The Guardian’s interpretation is one designed to make us grateful for the courage and foresight of a centrist political leader who is willing to demand the surrender of sacred cows on both sides of the aisle. It suggests that political division is the main problem in play here, and that rising above politics is its only solution.

The job figures for May were truly ghastly. In a month in which the economy needed to add 150,000 jobs simply to keep pace with the growth in the labor force, the private sector created 83,000 jobs and the public sector actually lost 29,000. Nearly 14 million Americans remain involuntarily unemployed.

When the President came to Winston-Salem in North Carolina last December, and first laid out his “sputnik moment” analysis of our contemporary situation, the whole emphasis of his address that day was on the need to strengthen our educational base in order to compete effectively in the global economy of the twenty-first century.

If it is true that those whom the gods would destroy they first send mad, then currently we are in serious trouble in Washington DC. For in the political theatre we have just witnessed – around the shutdown of the federal government – there has been madness aplenty: a madness indeed which, unless quickly and effectively challenged, will inevitably rewrite the entire Obama play, to his immediate detriment and to our long-term cost.