The ‘new normal’ doesn’t have to be

Published 7:57 pm Saturday, January 11, 2014

When Friday’s disappointing jobs numbers came out, the White House made all the right noises — expressing concern, pledging to work toward job creation. The administration didn’t go as far as announcing — yet again — any sort of a “pivot to jobs.” But overall, the response was tepid.

“As our economy continues to make progress, there’s a lot more work to do,” the White House said. It then called for an extension of unemployment benefits.

It’s clear the Obama administration accepts the current malaise as the “new normal.”

Perhaps many Americans share that acceptance. But one American wouldn’t have — in fact, as Ronald Reagan faced down the “stagflation” of the Carter years, he assured the country that our “best days are yet to come.”

We’ll celebrate Reagan’s birthday next month, on Feb. 6. Looking back, Reagan’s faith in and hope for this country provide a keen counterpoint to President Barack Obama’s vision of a lesser America.

“[The Democrats] say that the United States has had its days in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith,” Reagan said in 1980. “My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view.”

He truly did.

“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it,” Reagan said in his farewell address in 1989. “But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.”

Such words make the left cringe; Obama himself overtly rejects the view that America is anything special.

“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” Obama said in 2009.

When facing the crisis in Syria last fall, however, Obama called on that Exceptionalism.

“But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act,” he said. “That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional.”

And then Obama promptly failed to act — as if he was trying to disprove his own point.

Is it too late? Is America’s ineffectiveness, at home and abroad, truly the “new normal”? It may seem so; a majority of Americans now define success as “not falling behind,” according to a National Journal poll.

But Reagan wouldn’t see it that way. History is hope.

“What brought America back?” he asked in 1986. “The American people brought us back — with quiet courage and common sense; with undying faith that in this nation under God the future will be ours, for the future belongs to the free.”