Why Obama’s conservatism may not prove good enough
By Martin Wolf
“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Thus wrote the Sicilian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa, in The Leopard. This seems to me the guiding principle of the Obama presidency. To many Americans, he seems a flaming radical. To me, he is a pragmatic conservative, albeit one responding to extraordinary times. In his own way, Mr Obama is following the path trodden by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Nowhere is his conservatism more obvious than in the handling of the economic crisis. What we have seen unfolding, from the president’s choice of Lawrence Summers and Tim Geithner as his principal policy advisers, to last week’s “stress tests”, is classic conservative policymaking. The aim is simply to get the show back on the road. As Mr Obama told The New York Times: “I’m absolutely committed to making sure that our financial system is stable.”Stability is a quintessentially conservative aim. Many radicals on the right and left insist that undercapitalised banks should be recapitalised right now. But Mr Obama sees this as far too risky.
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