Today is an historic day on many levels…
For all of it’s shortcomings, one of the outstanding virtues of our political system is the way it lets us smoothly transfer power and authority from one set of elected leaders and legislators to the next. We simply take for granted something so many other countries struggle to realize – political stability.
That tradition will continue today with the swearing in of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. This is certainly an historic event happening at a pivotal time for our nation:
While we face challenges on many fronts globally, what is probably weighing most heavily on Americans’ minds right now are the economic challenges we face right here at home. We have witnessed an incredibly rapid unraveling of our economic infrastructure, with many peoples’ dreams for the future being put on hold by a present reality of uncertainty, hardship, and fear.
Turning this around will be the first great challenge for President Barack Obama’s new administration. He is well aware of the urgency of the task in front of him, and has picked an impressive economic team to join his cabinet. They are people with both sharp minds and deep experience.
But that won’t be enough…
While it is possible to impact our economic health though things like tax policy, trade policy, and monetary policy, they are all really just tools to tune and maintain it. If we want to change the overall direction of our economy, we instead need to rebuild the intangible foundations it is built on: trust, positive sentiment, and personal security.
And those aren’t things you can simply regulate or legislate…
If the accelerating boom/bust cycles we have observed over the past decade have taught us anything, its that economic health is a viral phenomena. As things move in small steps – either positively or negatively – the zeitgeist of the moment is picked up and reported by the media. The ‘all day news cycle” amplifies it and creates a feedback loop that accelerates it along whatever path things were already moving.
We live in the age of the ‘viral economy’…
In a viral environment, a change in direction requires a countervailing event to happen – an event that dissipates momentum and flips the trend around. Our economy desperately needs this to happen. We need some kind of change to rekindle hope and optimism in the future.
That’s the only way we can pull out of the slide we are in…
Barack Obama’s rise to become our first African-American President was built on a viral wave of support inspired by his eloquent call for change. He based his entire campaign on a belief in the power of the ‘long tail’ of the American electorate – the power of individuals to create the conditions needed for change to spread and take root.
Throughout his campaign, President Obama demonstrated what can be accomplished when the power of individual initiative is catalyzed by inspirational leadership. He made people feel empowered and optimistic. He made them feel energized and open to something new and different. He challenged everybody to take responsibility and do something at a local level that – in aggregate – can impact everyone at a national level.
As a nation, we need that type of leadership now more than ever.
This is Barack Obama’s moment to inspire us again…
