Long Time, No Write

It has been a very, very long time since my last post, and I apologize for that. It’s been crazy busy here, but I do have something new to share and more to come. The “more to come” is another article to be published soon in a major financial publication. The topic is one I addressed at Barron’s, the Christian Science Monitor, and CNBC back in 2007: Americans relocating outside the US.

In anticipation of the publication, I have put together a simple video and website that I will share with you in advance of their “sort-of-official” launch when the article is published. The video is a quick but good overview.

The website, as mentioned in the video, is America Wave. The essay that has already caught the eye of some at this early stage is OWS or LUS?

In the future, I will be making my best effort to re-energize this blog and offer my hardy crew of subscribers something more than silence! You deserve better.

Thanks for your patience. I’ll be back!

The Fields of Armageddon

I have not written here for some time. I have focused on my own business, my other blog whose audience is rapidly growing, and the websites that I operate. They keep me busy enough and, quite frankly, the farce going on in the North Atlantic, both sides of “The Pond”, has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous to the disgusting.

This morning, I received an email from a friend. She is European by background, but became an American citizen years ago, so she knows both sides of The Pond from experience. She’s on the road a lot, so she happens to have written from Britain, but she didn’t mention the current riots. She is an enthusiastic American citizen now and she wrote regarding the US.

She sent me an article from the American Left that she had read slamming America’s religious Right. It claimed that the religious Right was seeking “dominion over the earth”. Good grief. In any case, the gist of the article was that this vast global conspiracy was on the verge of that very “dominion”. She asked for my reactions.

I wrote her as best I could. Since I have not written here for a long time, I thought I might as well pass it along. So here goes, minus her personal information of course…

Same old, same old. Representative of the lost puppies of the North Atlantic. Demonization takes no holidays. Take the worst examples from your opponents, continuously repeat words like “dominion”. Stir up the emotions at your end of the spectrum. Same stuff I read from the Right about the huge Muslim conspiracy to take over the world. You don’t read things like that, but I get sent both.

The two ends of the political spectrum in North America and Europe are busy organizing their Holy Crusades for the battles to come on the fields of Armageddon as the Forces of Light meet the Forces of Darkness for the Final Conflict that will determine the fate of the earth. Like I said, same old, same old. It’s getting tiresome and that is an understatement.

What you sent is a standard polemic style used by people who can only inspire through fear. The “middle” is lost. It has no leaders, no spokespeople, no guiding principles, no vision, just emptiness. The two extremes control the rhetoric. This article shows no research or understanding of either the political or religious history of the United States. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to inflame, not inform, just like those coming out of the Right. The Right and the Left are tearing the North Atlantic’s 14% (and falling) of the global population to shreds. No hope, no vision, just fear, fear, and more fear.

No one on either extreme bothers to reference the mass of data collected continuously in the US from the American people on politics, religion, the economy and so forth. It is the stability of American opinion over five decades that is most obvious. What is also obvious is the failure of the political elite to understand what’s going on and deal with it constructively. They have not lost touch with their money (heaven forefend!), but they have lost touch with the people. As a result, the center has to keep “tossing the bums out” and then be confronted with a new bunch of bums. It is becoming more and more evident that they are all bums. But there is no third alternative with which to replace them, so it’s political whiplash now and for the future.

The 20th century is dead. The US and Europe are no longer the global leaders. They are the emperors without clothes and it is very obvious to those outside. The North Atlantic has lost its common sense and, with it, its credibility.

I work with Latin Americans from a variety of nations as Panama is seen as the place to be these days. In the past, they used to talk about US politics and leaders. No more. I haven’t heard Obama’s name raised for nearly a year. Likewise, Latin Americans are well aware of what is going in the UK right now, they just don’t talk about it. The North Atlantic is becoming little more than a bunch of freak shows at the circus. Something to scare the kids and amuse the adults, but nothing to be remembered a week later.

The attitude here is simple. When the people up north decide who they want to be when they grow up, we’ll pay attention. For now, we are too busy making our own futures and we are discovering that we need the northerners less and less. We give them attention only when there is a clear reason to do so. The North Atlantic is the new Soviet Union. They can’t do much to help us, but they can hurt us, so we attend to them when they look like they’re going to hurt us. Otherwise, we have better things to do.

The US and Europe are neither loved nor hated. The opposite of being loved is not being hated. It’s being ignored. That’s the real story for the rest of us.

Extremist, fear-laden polemics like the one sent are the hallmark of what passes for “political discourse” in the North Atlantic these days. They have no credence outside the North Atlantic. Others, China for one obvious example, have their own demons, but the demons of the North Atlantic are their own and no one else’s.

Eventually, leaders will arise in the north to fill the current voids on both sides of the Atlantic. Who they will be and what they will represent is the question that no one can answer right now. I hope they come from neither extreme, but I wouldn’t place any bets on it yet.

For the moment, we have to settle for mediocrity (not bad, not good, just mediocre). That will not do for the long run, but it’s what we have for now. The future cannot be predicted, but I would suggest keeping an eye on Europe. There are no “European leaders”, just a variety of mediocre national leaders, each with his or her political agenda, and no consensus. If there is a Right and a Left that are really scary, that’s where you can find them, not in the US…yet.

In the meantime, life goes on in the rest of the world and I am thankful to be part of that.

The Other “Population Bomb”

After a long pause, I created this post specifically for Future Brief. However, I found that this blog service does not support the code necessary for a couple important interactive graphs, but another blog I operate does support that code.

As a result, today’s post is really a link to the other blog where it can be viewed properly. My apologies for the inconvenience, but all it takes is one more click.

Déjà vu all over again

In my last post, I shared one result of the ninth survey my firm has taken of American attitudes toward relocation (moving for an extended period) outside the US over seven years. There is much more to share. I and some friends are doing our best to choose the best way to present it. Among other things, but perhaps most importantly, I will be reporting a major shift in attitudes toward global relocation on the part of young American adults. Forgive me it it takes a little while to complete our analysis and get it in proper form to share with you.

However, one of my friends (34 years old) sent me (66 years old) a YouTube video. The subject line of his email was “get a load of this shit!” Aptly put, more than he knows. He may guess, but he cannot really know how much this affects me. Déjà vu all over again, indeed. In a sea of red flags, it’s one more. But it should resonate with many of my generation. We used to dance too.

I shared this video with some friends in my age group, and this is what I said.

Yeah, deja vu all over again. This brings back memories I never wanted to have to revisit in real time. It disgusts me. If my generation, of all generations, trivializes this without getting the point, or we just turn our heads back to a spreadsheet with dollar signs and ignore what’s going on around us, as others did before us, we deserve what I genuinely hope we get. In good old-fashioned American slang…a two-by-four, upside the head.

And to think, I sit here with hard data staring me in the face that “fits” with this video, indirectly for sure, but it fits. I don’t care where you stand on the political, social, or economic spectra. Right, left, or in-between, the sense that our government is as much or more our enemy than our friend is much more wide-spread than it ought to be, way more. But the feeling is there and for good reason.

So go ahead and laugh at it or otherwise trivialize it, if that’s your choice. It’s a free country, I think. In any case, I wanted to share it.

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Future Brief will be updated as time allows. If you find it interesting, you are welcome to drop by whenever you like. But if you would prefer to save a little time and effort, feel free to subscribe either to the email alerts or RSS feed in the upper-right corner of the page and the system will automatically let you know. Thanks for visiting!

The Globalization of Americans

I have a small piece of proprietary data to share with subscribers today. It won’t be published on those sites that usually republish my posts. It’s small, but it is a hint of more to come.

As many of you know from my writing elsewhere, especially Barron’s, that I and my American firm have surveyed the American people on the subject of relocation overseas on several occasions over the years. We have the only database of this kind in existence. We use the services of a well-established, well-respected professional opinion survey firm [IBOPE-Zogby, formerly Zogby International] to implement these surveys of a statistically-valid sample of the American population.

From 2005 through 2007, we completed seven surveys. The last 2007 survey served as the basis of my article at Barron’s, my interview with Erin Burnett at CNBC, and so forth. In June of 2007, the US public was still quite optimistic. The term “sub-prime” had not entered their vocabulary, the real estate market still seemed strong, and there was no talk of a “global financial crisis”.

We did another survey in March of 2009. Now the US public was fully aware of the financial crisis and of the collapse in real estate values in the US. By coincidence, the stock market fell to its lowest levels since the crisis began in late 2007 during that month. We had gone from “good times” to “bad times” in less than two years. As I expected, the number of those who had made the decision to relocate and were actively planning relocation fell sharply. We have several categories for people responding. This is the smallest group. Five groups who are at different stages of interest (including those who plan to buy real estate, but not relocate) were quite stable. It was the people who were on the verge of moving who had taken the hit.

Two months ago in March, I decided to contract one more survey to see if things had changed. I wondered if the percentage actually in the final planning stages of relocation had returned to the level of 2007 (which was also the average for all seven of the earlier surveys), or at least had risen since 2009. The graph below shows the results.

That was a big surprise. We had never had a shift of such dimension. The one from 2007 to 2009 had held the record, but it was blown away by the latest survey. That 2.5%, by the way, represents nearly 3 million households (around 6.5 million people).

The survey results are also broken down by 23 different variables including income, age, marital status, gender and far more. I wanted to know if there was one variable that had made the difference or several. The results of my analysis have been accepted for publication at Barron’s, but since Barron’s is a print publication with severe space limitations, it could be weeks before it is published. My editor kindly has allowed me to share the results elsewhere, as I see fit, without losing my “place in line” for publication at Barron’s. We will see. I am considering various possibilities, but I do expect to be sharing at least some of the results with you in times to come. For now, I will leave it at this.

There has been a dramatic shift, one that caught me completely by surprise. I like that! The public never fails to amaze me and they have done it once again!

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Future Brief will be updated as time allows. If you find it interesting, you are welcome to drop by whenever you like. But if you would prefer to save a little time and effort, feel free to subscribe either to the email alerts or RSS feed in the upper-right corner of the page and the system will automatically let you know. Thanks for visiting!

Thinking Retirement? Two Questions For You

Ever since I wrote Next – The Retirement Bubble for Barron’s a couple years ago, the end of traditional retirement has been a subject of special interest to me. I have a short post up today at my Retirement Bubble blog that is short and as sweet (or not) as you like. I want to share it here too.

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The book is The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 by Roderick Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris and just published by the Cambridge University Press. Although it provides the impetus for this post, I have not yet read the book, although I have read the research paper which provides the basis for the book. That doesn’t help, as the authors did not address the specific subject that interested me today. They raise a question of importance. I don’t know how they answered it and I only know it was raised thanks to a reviewer at Amazon. Still, it caught my eye. Here is Amazon’s review in whole, emphasizing the portion of the sentence that so intrigued me.

Humans have become much taller and heavier, and experience healthier and longer lives than ever before in human history. However it is only recently that historians, economists, human biologists and demographers have linked the changing size, shape and capability of the human body to economic and demographic change. This fascinating and groundbreaking book presents an accessible introduction to the field of anthropometric history, surveying the causes and consequences of changes in health and mortality, diet and the disease environment in Europe and the United States since 1700. It examines how we define and measure health and nutrition as well as key issues such as whether increased longevity contributes to greater productivity or, instead, imposes burdens on society through the higher costs of healthcare and pensions. The result is a major contribution to economic and social history with important implications for today’s developing world and the health trends of the future.

Perhaps the authors do intend to direct this to the “developing world” (aka, the people making money) and not the “developed world” (aka, the people wasting money), but they have neatly summarized one of the critical issues that led me to write Next – The Retirement Bubble for Barron’s.

Looking beyond ourselves and considering the world we will have to live in for the rest of our lives and our role in it, this does pose a challenging question, doesn’t it? I could run on for a couple dozen paragraphs on this topic, but I am not going to do it. Instead, I am going to pass it along to you. I am going to ask you to accept one thing…that you may live substantially longer than you think you will today, let’s say ten to twenty years longer. Just put aside any doubts about that and accept it. Now, each of us needs to answer two questions. First:

Will my longer lifespan make me more productive or impose a burden on society through the higher costs of healthcare and pensions?

I think you can guess which of the two will make you more popular in years to come and I hope that would be your choice anyhow, but indeed, if your choice is productivity over imposing a burden, then that provides you with the second question:

What am I doing right now or plan to do very soon that will help me answer that question successfully?

That’s it. That is today’s post. Food for thought.

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Future Brief will be updated as time allows. If you find it interesting, you are welcome to drop by whenever you like. But if you would prefer to save a little time and effort, feel free to subscribe either to the email alerts or RSS feed in the upper-right corner of the page and the system will automatically let you know. Thanks for visiting!

Why we aren’t as dumb as they think we are

I write another blog, The Retirement Bubble, where I occasionally write on a topic I first raised in an essay at Barron’s in 2009. It has drawn more traffic than anything I have written there before and emails arriving suggest that it struck a chord with some folks. I want to share it with you too.

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Today, I would like to take a look at what is passing through the minds of adult Americans when it comes to retirement. Yes, there are plenty of statistics indicating that the average American has nowhere near enough money to retire, but it is what they are thinking that is most important to me. That is what determines their actions now and in the future, not just what a “financial planner” thinks is appropriate. The good folks at Gallup provide a number of survey results to the public at their site and sprinkled among them are those that focus on retirement. Let’s look at a few.

First, forget the planners, do non-retired adults think they are prepared for the financial demands of retirement?

It’s easy to look at a graph like the one above and get wrapped up in the year-to-year changes, but do me a favor. Just look at the numbers on the far left, then the far right. This is a very dramatic change. The two lines have not traded positions exactly, but they are clearly closing in on that. No wonder some people think the world has turned upside-down.

On a year-to-year basis, there is something else interesting going on. The dots between lines are placed to generally represent the time of year during which the poll was taken. As you can see, they were taken during the first half of each year, typically April. Note the rather dramatic shift in both lines from 2004 through 2005 and how that continues into early 2006, before slowing.

The stock market bubble had collapsed a few years earlier so that was not news, the real estate indices told us that the real estate market just began to turn over in late 2006 and the term “sub-prime crisis” hit the headlines later in 2007. Only then is it assumed by many of the so-called experts that most Americans started to understand that yet another bubble had popped and well into 2008 before the general public really began to get a grip on the severity of the crisis.

How strange. Before there were trillion dollar deficits, before there were “stimulus bills”, before there was a Tea Party, and while the real estate market was in full bull mood, adult Americans were already getting worried about their retirement finances. The 2004-5 period where the two lines start their dramatic shift was not a period of “crisis mentality”.

You know, just maybe the general public is not as dumb as they are made out to be by some of the “experts”. Sure, there are always people who get it all wrong, but as a group, they may be showing us that they’re more sensible and sensitive than they have been credited with. I like that thought. And who knows? Perhaps we have a “leading indicator” here, one that indicates what is coming rather than just what has happened already. If so, the recent dip from last year to a new high on the negative side and just one point short of a new low on the positive may be a leading indicator for the future. Not a pleasant thought, but something to consider.

The other factor I want to consider today is the “when” of retirement. That is affected by finances, obviously, but it is a lot more complex, including many other factors beyond money. This first graph is not surprising, given everything we have been through over the last decade.

It seems so simple and straight-forward. Well, human life is never quite that simple and straight-forward. Gallup also breaks the retirement age goal into three parts – those expecting to retire before 65, those expecting to retire at 65, and those expecting to wait until after 65.

As with the first graph, just focus on the first values and the final value. The change from the two surveys of late 1995 to the most recent in 2011 is dramatic, very dramatic. This is a very different picture than we get from the first “age” graph, although they cover the same period of time. Glance back and forth between the two. Exactly the same question is asked in both cases, but the second graph provides us with a lot more information than the first. That’s good to remember. When any the response to a question is boiled down to one average, you lose a lot. That “smooth” transition in the first graph looks a lot more rocky and troubled in the second, doesn’t it?

This is especially important to remember when a question looks extremely simple, but common sense tells you that answering it can be a very complex process for the person answering.

Now, let’s look at exactly the same information from the same surveys shown immediately above, but in yet another format broken down into a little more detail.

Results provided in a table rather than a graph seem more difficult to get a grip on, but tables like this one have “lines” too. Start at the bottom of each column and work your way up twice. The first time just to get a sense of the flow. The second time a little slower to see a little more of the rise and fall. Those columns are your “lines”. It’s a little more difficult to visualize the results, but it also provides more data. Above all, it’s the “line” under Over 65 that stands out most clearly.

In past posts, I have talked about the necessity for us to grasp the severity of the crisis and its effect on our futures. From that will come a change in behavior and the sooner, the better. Well, it appears that the change is not only underway, but that it began before the crisis was a crisis. The difference between the 2008 survey as the crisis became obvious and the 2011 survey is nowhere near as dramatic as the change from 1995. But ignore 1995. That was a long time ago. Just focus on the difference between 2002 and 2011. I think that’s pretty darn impressive too.

The purpose of an exercise like this is two-fold. First, we get an idea of what is going on in people’s minds. Second, we can look back to the past and follow at least some of the shift over time. This allows us to challenge any assumptions we might have had of what folks were thinking in the past. I know I had to stop and consider how much earlier the shift was underway than I would have guessed before. And there’s a third “fold” too. Maybe we gain a little more respect for the public, and for ourselves, in the process.

I want to take this last paragraph to thank all of you who left such kind comments to my last post, definitely including those who sent emails separately. I very much appreciated every one of them! But I have to apologize. I disappear, then I suddenly reappear, then I disappear again! Well, there are reasons for all that. Among others, I have been doing quite a bit of original research of my own and some of it will be relevant to our discussions. In any case, this post helps bring us up to speed with American retirement planning in the real world (i.e., our heads), not just the theoretical world (someone else’s head).

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Future Brief will be updated as time allows. If you find it interesting, you are welcome to drop by whenever you like. But if you would prefer to save a little time and effort, feel free to subscribe either to the email alerts or RSS feed in the upper-right corner of the page and the system will automatically let you know. Thanks for visiting!

Thank You

I need to take a moment to express my appreciation to the US Navy Seals for their successful removal of Osama from this world. They do not seek recognition, indeed they strenuously avoid it, but they deserve it, as do all who helped. Gentlemen, whoever you are and wherever you are, thank you.

The blather is already underway. The effects on markets, the effects on US-Pakistani relations, the impact on Al Qaeda, the potential for “blowback” from terrorist groups, the conspiracy theories, the demands for “proof”, which politician deserves the “credit”…it’s all as predictable as the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening. I will leave that to others.

Today, I just want to say what a relief it is to see the US get a job done. The Afghan War, the Iraqi War, the Libyan War just drag on and on. It is not a surprise and taking out one individual, no matter how difficult, hardly compares to winning a war with tens or hundreds of thousands of participants in nations that have no effective leadership. But that does not take the bloom off this rose for a minute. We needed to bring his career to an end, dead or alive, and it is done, finished, over with. The US can no longer pretend it calls the shots for the majority of the planet as it once did, in effect. Those days are gone. However, we did need to show that we could face a dangerous, challenging task everyone knew we had to complete and complete it. That has been done for all the world to see.

Yes, I am well aware that terrorists are very likely to strike, if they can, and soon in an attempt to restore their “credibility”. I am well aware that minutes after posting this brief commentary, I may have to read reports of the deaths of innocent people, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time by proponents of a fascism that is all the more repugnant when presented as the work of God. But fear of retaliation is never an excuse to complete a task as important as this one. It is not as if failure would have made the world a safer place.

Let me finish as I began. Thank you, Navy Seals and everyone else who helped bring an end to what needed to end.

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Future Brief will be updated as time allows. If you find it interesting, you are welcome to drop by whenever you like. But if you would prefer to save a little time and effort, feel free to subscribe either to the email alerts or RSS feed in the upper-right corner of the page and the system will automatically let you know. Thanks for visiting!

Odds and Ends

American politics. Disparaging terms like “playpen”, “zoo”, and others may spring to mind, especially to those who live outside the US and can view it from outside, but that is not fair. The US is a nation in search of itself, again. This is not the first time. The only real question is, what will it find when it finds itself? In any case, I could waste several posts on this topic, but I have better things to do. So I will just toss out a few comments and be done with it, at least until it forces itself back on the agenda.

Obama – His strength lies in the weakness of his opposition and that weakness is based on a lack of focus. Focus will eventually come, but Democrats may provide it before Republicans do.

The Opponent From Within – Now that Naomi Pitcairn and friends have gotten the ball rolling by singing, We paid our dues, where’s our change?, the Democratic left is moving toward its all but inevitable challenge to President Obama’s renomination. Their candidate? The best bet at the moment to actually launch a public campaign is their quadrennial lost cause, Dennis Kucinich, but someone else may step up, perhaps Naomi Pitcairn? In any case, he or she will provide an alternative for any Democrat wishing to protest Obama’s policies. That could be very damaging to the President.

Clinton – I take Hillary Clinton at her word that she has no intention of running for the Presidency in 2012. For her to be a candidate, the Party would have to come to her. She will not volunteer to let them do to her once again what they did to her in 2008. Some politicians are gluttons for punishment; some are too intelligent for that. I think Hillary has shown herself to be much too intelligent for that. But if Democrats make it clear they aren’t happy with Barack, who else of national stature do they turn to? Who else can oppose him while legitimately claiming to have done everything possible to help him? If things start to fall apart for Democrats, who else can hope to put them back together?

The Other Side – When it comes to electrifying the electorate, none of the Republicans seem up to it at the moment. After a sufficiently expensive and nasty brawl for the next year, should that be the case, the last man/woman standing might find electrification hard to come by. For now, this is an internal Party affair. The rest of us can only wait and take another look in a few months. This picture will change, perhaps more than once. For now, it’s just a blur.

Bloomberg – A man who considered a run in 2008 and now in his third term as Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg cannot be ruled out. Although, like Hillary, he insists he is not a candidate, that can change and he won’t have to resign his post to do it as she would. Plus, he’d be running as an independent with the financial means to compete from the moment he made the decision. If I were a Republican or a Democrat, I would ignore Michael Bloomberg at my own peril. Whatever, he sure would trump Trump.

Enough. There are more “odds” up there than “ends”. I intend to return my focus where it belongs and where it is every day in any case – to the global scene. America plays an important part in that scene, but only a part and not as critical as it once was, not by a long shot, regardless of what Americans might want to think.

Like Europeans, Americans are tying themselves up into knots politically, economically, and socially. How it will all play out on either side of The Pond is an open question, but the rest of the world has to get up every morning and get to work building their futures. They are doing just that. So will we, one of these days. Sooner rather than later, one hopes.

For the moment, the US is forced to chase its own tail. Eventually, it will catch it and take a good bite. When the pain subsides, maybe that will finally force it to stop, think, and act as the great nation it has been and can be again.

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Future Brief will be updated as time allows. If you find it interesting, you are welcome to drop by whenever you like. But if you would prefer to save a little time and effort, feel free to subscribe either to the email alerts or RSS feed in the upper-right corner of the page and the system will automatically let you know. Thanks for visiting!

Eight Days Later

Eight days ago, I expressed my serious irritation with President Obama for appearing to be unable to make up his mind what he wanted to do with regard to Libya. My distress was directly related to the need to confront fascists with a clear response, backed up by action, not just words. If the decision was not to attack, so be it, but make that clear. If it was, as it appeared to be at the time and indeed was, a decision to attack, then get to it and stop appearing to be confused and indecisive (dithering and dallying, to use older English words). The worst thing you can do when confronted with a fascist at war is to talk and not act.

Some said it might be because our government knew something we didn’t know and was taking its time for a good reason. Well, it turned out to be a matter of a severe disagreement among advisors that required President Obama to make a decision and, finally, he did.

Now it is underway with the typical results of military action, particularly in the early days…uncertainty as to the outcome. However, despite my approval of their having finally made the decision to stand by the principles they say they represent, I now have to deal with the other great problem – the lack of effective leadership.

Europe is a mess. European “Union”, hardly. I think the analysts at Stratfor summed it up in their analysis today:

Europeans are not united in their perceptions of the operation’s goals — or on how to wage the operation. The one thing the Europeans share is a seeming lack of an exit strategy from a struggle originally marketed as a no-fly zone akin to that imposed on Iraq in 1997 to a struggle that is actually being waged as an airstrike campaign along the lines of the 1999 campaign against Serbia, with the goal of regime change mirroring that of the 2001 Afghan and 2003 Iraq campaigns.

That is not “mission creep”. That is mission confusion.

As for the US, once again, President Obama has failed to communicate effectively with either his party or his employers, the American people. The Democrats are splintering. Their liberal-left (“progressive”) coalition is unraveling at this point. On the one hand, we have Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider arguing Why The War In Libya Is America’s Most Principled War In Decades while Leslie Gelb at the Daily Beast complains about The Horrible Libya Hypocrisies.

Gelb’s essay is led by a sentence that should be deeply disturbing to anyone who supports President Obama.

Neocons and liberal interventionists stampeded Obama into imposing a no-fly zone against Libya—despite the absence of vital U.S. interests there.

Good lord, do those who told us that Barack Obama was an intelligent man who stood head and shoulders (or more) above George W. Bush now treat him as if he is some sort of doofus, dumbie, nitwit who can be “stampeded” into a war? I suppose this is one way of trying to release Obama from too much of the guilt that Gelb thinks is appropriate, but it’s a very sad note and another indication of the crumbling of the coalition that first brought the Senator Obama of 2008 to the forefront of Democratic politics and, eventually, to the White House. And now it appears that Dennis Kucinich once again is laying the foundation for another attempt at the Democratic nomination in 2012. An unhappy left-wing now has its excuse to bolt.

I believe that Barack Obama is a very intelligent man, whether I agree with him or not. His failing is his continuing inability to communicate with the people he needs to have behind him, whether Democrats or the American people as a whole. Without communication, a leader loses his followers. With as much stress as we now all face on this planet, that communication is incredibly important. But I do not fault President Obama alone. He has plenty of company in Europe. In one sense, President Obama leads a coalition government every bit as shaky those led by David Cameron, Angela Merkel, and others. They all have too much in common, but not the right stuff.

This is why I am so hesitant to write on the politics of the Old World of the North Atlantic. Whether you agree with their various leaders or not, the simple fact is that you cannot ignore the astounding disarray, both among these leaders and among their supporters. Metaphorical words like “circus” and “zoo” come to mind much too easily.

If I were to advise any of these leaders, I would suggest they sit and read the words of another American President during a very difficult time. Only two months after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt led a nation where there was no question about America’s “involvement” in the war we call World War Two. Despite the unity of his party and Congress in entering that war, there were those who criticized the decision and many who feared the results of that decision. Understandably, Americans wanted to know why it was happening and what the plan was for its implementation.

On the 210th anniversary of George Washington’s birthday, February 23rd of 1942, President Roosevelt delivered one of his famous “fireside chats”. He spoke to the American public by radio. There was no way to read his face or to see graphs, maps, charts and so forth. The average adult American of that time had an eighth-grade education. He could have chosen to give a “cheerleader” speech, relying on patriotic emotion to gain support. Instead, he chose to treat the American people as intelligent adults. I read his presentation today and I wonder when we will have another American President who can communicate even half as effectively as he did. Note: Roosevelt uses the term “United Nations”. He is not referring to the UN we know. That was the term at that time for those we now call the “Allies”.

No, the Libyan War is not World War Two. That’s not the point. The point is to communicate. The point is to lead.

So it is that I recommend to you that you take a few minutes to read Franklin D. Roosevelt’s address to the American people on that winter day 68 years ago. If someone out there has Barack Obama’s ear, perhaps they can pass this along.

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