MISSOULA, Mont. — Under the Big Sky on election’s eve, the cold gold cottonwood leaves catching the late October light, Lolo Peak holding its first dusting of snow, the season feels ritualistically right.
But a free-floating edginess clings to the air, a sense of possibility over the prospect of a new president, and righteous anger that things are going to be very bad for a long time.
I can’t shake this line from Jon Tester, the freshman senator from Montana. Since the $700 billion bailout was first introduced, his office has been flooded with calls and letters — uniformly unforgiving toward the Masters of the Universe who destroyed the American economy. Tester said people “want to see the executives that drove Wall Street into the ground in orange suits picking up cans along the side of the road.”
It’s a comforting image, in a comeuppance sort of way. Imagine all those hedge fund managers and soft-skinned bonus brats stooped over litter through the long night of a Montana winter.
For now, the villains have been identified, though they have yet to be paraded through the village square. Polls show banks and Wall Street are blamed for the most staggering blow to the economy since the onset of the Great Depression. By two-to-one margins, people blame Republicans over Democrats. But they also blame their neighbors — you and me — for taking on too much debt.
If Americans are walking without a skip in their step, and maybe with a pitchfork in one hand, you can’t fault them. Gallup found that one in five people say their finances have already been hurt “a great deal.” On Tuesday, consumer confidence fell to the lowest level since the Conference Board started tracking popular sentiment 41 years ago. A bare 11 percent say the country is headed in the right direction.
We are not a nation of whiners, despite what Phil Gramm has said. (And he’s a prime candidate for road crew.) But where does this jet stream of anxiety go after the election?
During the Great Depression, it found its violent outlets. In Iowa, farmers stormed a courtroom in mid-session, demanding that a judge not sign any more foreclosure notices. The judge was dragged from the courthouse and taken to a nearby hanging tree. His life was spared only when the mob’s cooler heads (an oxymoron?) prevailed.
In Congress, at the time, taxes were raised on the wealthy, with a whiff of genuine class warfare in the air and cries of “Soak the rich!”
And the wise men of finance offered few nuggets of hope, only a clunker or two of infinite despair during an age the poet W.H. Auden called “the low, dishonest decade.” The economist John Maynard Keynes was asked if there was ever a worse time.
“It was called the Dark Ages,” he said. “And it lasted 400 years.”
Our battery-life of pessimism is not that long, and never will be. As dark as the End of Days-Bush Era has become, most of us see some sunshine in the forecast. The Pew Research Center Poll this week found that 64 percent still believe in this sentence: “As Americans we can always find ways to solve our problems and get what we want.”
But there will be blood, from Main Street to the mall. You see it every hour: businesses closing, folding, cutting back, projects delayed and canceled, young entrepreneurs putting their dreams back in the attic, people walking away from houses with nothing but bad memories.
And yet, Wall Street has not answered for its misdeeds, its reckless gambles, having set aside nearly $20 billion to pay in bonuses for 2008. You’ve just destroyed the economy — here’s your reward! Even the bankrupt Lehman Brothers managed to sock away $2.5 billion in future bonuses before filing for Chapter 11, according to Bloomberg.
We want shelter from the storm and a pound of flesh. But how much time will a new president have? A year? A hundred days? A month? The expectations cycle, like our culture, moves at the speed of a text message.
Franklin Roosevelt, the high standard for changes by a new president, got out of the gate like Seabiscuit on a sugar-cube high. In his first week in office, he was urged to nationalize the banks, as Bush has done in large measure. Instead, Roosevelt closed the banks for most of a week, and when they opened again, he assured all Americans, they were safe — now backed, for the first time, by the faith and credit of the United States.
It’s debatable whether he saved capitalism, as many historians have said. But Will Rogers certainly got it right: “If Roosevelt burned down the Capital, we should cheer and say, ‘Well, we at least got a fire started, anyhow.’”
Somebody has to start a fire. That’s what Americans will be looking for after next Tuesday. And quick. Otherwise, expect people to begin fitting executives in fluorescent orange vests for penance work on the side of the road — or worse.