Lincoln once said he knew he did not so much control events as was controlled by them.
This is a typically humble statement from our most gigantic President, and one of his most telling.
What it means, among other things, is that no President can control great trends and events, he can only react to them. What we hope for in a President is a man whose makeup will allow him, will force him, to react in the ways we hope are right.
So President Obama took office and faced an economy streaking straight for the financial cliff, and he pressed to take action which would avoid the next Great Depression by looking at the inaction of President Hoover and the Republicans of the 1930's. Cries of "Just let the powers of the marketplace correct this mess!" and "Just keep your government hands off the economy and allow the markets to self correct! Let individual entrepreneurs, let the unleashed horses of free enterprise lead the way!" rose up from the Republicans, just as the same cries met Franklin Roosevelt eighty years earlier.
And Mr. Obama correctly saw all this was bunk. And he understood the cry from Republicans-- that this whole mess was caused by "government regulations" in the first place was utter bunk. The Republicans wanted to blame the whole thing on the housing crisis and the housing crisis was caused, you guessed it, by the government through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Of course, what made Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dangerous in the first place was the part of them which was rooted in free enterprise, where managers did not get straight government salaries so much as production bonuses. But never mind the quibbles--Obama could see the truth and he could react, at least as much as his office would allow, which was not entirely enough, given the staunch opposition of the Republicans, whose leader flatly stated he would do nothing to save the economy if it would mean saving Mr. Obama.
So the President cannot shape or control the future, he can only react.
And he cannot even see the future, because none of us can.
Consider this about the future, and mankind's limited ability to imagine the future. Did anyone ever predict the coming of the information age? Where would such a prediction come from? Well "futurists," I suppose, or "think tanks," but mostly from science fiction writers. That's where people have a free range to imagine, to project, to look forward through the mists.
But, now correct me if I'm wrong, the science fiction of the 1950's, 60's, 70's and even the 80's was filled with projections about revolutions in transportation, physical exploration, health, production of goods and robotic services, but nobody ever thought about the importance of the simple ability to share information. Nobody seemed to focus on how important information is or could be.
Now, of course, there was Dick Tracy's two way wrist radio, but, for the most part, everyone missed this simple key, from Presidents to Congressmen to science fiction writers.
Oh, of course, there were glimmers about the possibilities of communications via two way television. Science fiction showed a version of Skype, but that was simply taking the newest technology, television and imagining using it in an interactive way. But that was never given a central place as in, "This is where the future lies." It was always a sort of laugh line. Look, people can see each other when they talk--they'd better be dressed!
We did have some salaried government men working on the internet, not because they were visionaries of a new age, I suspect, but because they wanted a way to distribute command centers, if one got nuked. And then there was microtechnology coming along from the space program (a government program) and transistors then little sand particles which could conduct current, and then a bunch of computer programming geeks writing software and and a lot of things came together until one day, some smart boy said, "I'm a visionary. I see a computer on a desk in everyone's home." And even he had no idea about smart phones, automatic tellers, aerial drones and all the rest.
The future coalesces from too many different directions, like so much cosmic dust. No one man, not even our greatest political man, Lincoln, can predict it or manage it.
But we've got one man running for Lincoln's office who is humble enough, and smart enough, to react to what's out there.
Let's hope the rest of us are smart enough to know who he is.
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