The last six weeks, I have been in a holiday frenzy followed by the obligatory post-holiday funk. My kids went back to school Monday, my hubby went back to work, and my classes start on Saturday. So I’ve been glumly trying to get as much done as possible before my semester starts. Needless to say, blogging hasn’t been on the top of my priority list.

But today, a headline caught my eye. An Associated Press article on the Yahoo! front page: “Cheney says no one saw financial crisis coming” (Reichmann, 1/8/09). Holy cannolli! I’m a freakin’ financial genius and just didn’t know it?!

According to soon-to-be-but-not-soon-enough-ex-VP Dick Cheney, no one saw the economic crisis looming. In fact, “nobody anywhere was smart enough to figure it out.” I am torn: I’m flattered, incredulous, and frustrated.

I’m flattered that Dick Cheney thinks I’m smart. See, I wrote a blog entry back in April saying that we needed to “call a recession a recession” (http://jpricemahoney.com/page/3/) And I’d actually seen it coming for a while even before I wrote the article. I watched my friends, neighbors and students lose their jobs and their homes. To paraphrase George Bailey, they’re the folks who do most of the working, paying, living and dying in this country (It’s a Wonderful Life, Liberty Films, 1946). It wasn’t hard to put two and two together: if the regular ol’ Americans were hurting, it wasn’t long before the pain hit everyone. So even though he doesn’t know it, Mr. Cheney paid me quite a compliment.

I’m incredulous because I cannot believe for an instant that I am more financially astute than every member of the Bush administration. As ridiculous as many of their decisions have been, they must have people who know more about economics than I do. At least I hope so! I never took more than Intro to Microeconomics as an undergrad! Don’t they have real-live economists working for the White House? Or is the view from Capitol Hill so skewed that they really could not see what was happening to “the real America.” (OMG - did I just quote Sarah Palin?!?!)

Finally, I’m frustrated. Not just because no one would listen to me or the MANY other people who were also frantically waving from the beach of a desert island, trying to get the attention of the Republican yacht offshore. I’m also frustrated because I see a pathetic pattern. We’ve had three major financial crises in the past 80 years. October of 1929: the stock market crashed in what is traditionally known as the opening act of the Great Depression. It followed 8 years of Republican economic policies hammered through by Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. October 1987: after 7 years of Republican economic policies hammered through by Ronald Reagan, the stock market crashed again. This crash was followed by an extremely gradual recovery that was so slow in the Northeast, it forced many people (my husband and mother-in-law included) to leave their homes to look for work elsewhere.

And now we have September 2008. Is it a coincidence that the stock market crash and subsequent economic disasters are following 8 years of Republican policies? Again, the conservatives have created a financial nightmare. The American people have responded, again, by electing a Democrat. Barack Obama will spend at least four years trying to clean up the sludge left behind by his Republican predecessor just as FDR and Clinton had to do. Obama might get a second term, and maybe by then, he’ll have the economic breathing room to put through some of the actual policies he had hoped to accomplish. We’ll see.

So thanks for the compliment, Dick. I guess your Republican campaign machine wasn’t kidding nine years ago when it tried to convince the American people your boss was just an average guy and not one of those awful liberal elites. Unfortunately, the United States needs leaders who are better than average and certainly better than you. I’m praying Obama and his administration will be better than average. At least smarter than I am.  Hopefully, much smarter.