James Fallows, opening up his long "think piece" on President Obama's first (and possibly only) term:
In the late 1990s, when his fellow University of Chicago professor Barack Obama had just run for the Illinois State Senate and long before a newly inaugurated President Obama named him to his Council of Economic Advisers, the economist Austan Goolsbee was on the most terrifying airplane trip of his life. He was traveling on Southwest Airlines from St. Louis back to Chicago’s Midway Airport. The plane got into a thunderstorm, and for a while many passengers thought they were doomed.
One jolt of turbulence was so strong that a flight attendant, not yet strapped in, hit her head on the airplane’s ceiling. After another sudden drop, the lights went out on one side of the cabin. The violent ups and downs kept getting worse. Two rows ahead of Goolsbee, a professional-looking woman in her 50s began wailing, “We’re going to die! We’re all going to die!” “Everyone was looking around and on the border of panic,” Goolsbee told me recently. “I was kind of wishing someone would start yelling, ‘No, we’re all not going to die!’”
At last the plane made it safely to Midway. As passengers filed off, Goolsbee spoke with a strapping young man who had been sitting, ashen but stoic and silent, in a window seat next to the woman whose nerves had broken. He was a high-school football player coming to Chicago on a college recruiting trip. “Quite a flight,” Goolsbee said to him. “This is my first time on an airplane,” the young man replied. “Are they always like that? I can see why people don’t like to fly.”
Goolsbee’s punch line to the story is that during his two years in Washington, “I was that kid.” He and his colleagues were trying to devise policies to cope with the worst worldwide economic crisis in living memory, in the most contentious political environment in nearly as long a time. He would ask himself, Is it always like this? He could see why people didn’t like politics and government.
But when I heard the story, my thoughts turned immediately in another direction. Goolsbee may have felt like that kid, but to most of the world, the more obvious comparison would be to the man who hired Goolsbee, Barack Obama. Four years after being sworn in as a freshman senator, occupying a position of executive authority for the first time in his life, Obama was, at age 47, instantly responsible for guiding the world’s superpower and its allies through an emergency that had left far more experienced leaders wailing the political and financial equivalent of “We’re all going to die!”
Fallows uses the story as an analogy about the President, but I think the more telling line is in the second paragraph: "I was kind of wishing someone would start yelling 'now, we're all not going to die.'"
In other words, rather than actually offer up a contradictory opinion, Austan Goolsbee sits there and waits for someone else to do it.
And that, really, is a pretty good sum-up of why Goolsbee is about the last person one would probably want in a crisis.
And PS... what's this fascination with strapping young men?
LOL, I mean I know why I like "strapping young men" but really.
Posted by: jinb | February 11, 2012 at 04:07 PM