GEYER: Mistakes we can’t afford

OPINION:

COMMENTARY:

I have to admit that, yes, I have indeed made foolish mistakes during my lifetime. I once put Ukraine out in Central Asia in a column. I once told my superbly honest mother there were no apples left at the store (I just didn’t want to go back for them). And once I told a guy in Chicago, my hometown, that I was in love with him when, well, no need to go into that!

But when Alan Greenspan, king of economic kings and emperor of the prosperity of the entire world and perhaps beyond, announced coolly last week, “I made a mistake,” the simple dumb grandeur of it sent a chill down my spine. Not a lot of fuss or fury or tears, just those four simple words.

“I made a mistake,” he said in hearings on Capitol Hill over the financial tragedy rapidly enveloping us, “in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders.” Instead, the 82-year-old former chairman of the Federal Reserve finds himself today in a “state of shocked disbelief.” For his were no ordinary rube mistakes like mine. He would not bring down merely a city, a county, a bank, a nation or even a continent. Alan Greenspan’s mistake could have easily brought down the world — and may still do so.

What we know now, to our sadness, is that all the American empire-building of the last quarter-century, the legacy of the Reagan Revolution, was built on a financial house of cards. The Reagan people looked so serious, so sober, so … so nonideological. But the truth is that they were all highly ideological; they truly believed that the markets would naturally correct themselves. They believed in magic — no regulation or human care or suspicion needed!

That, of course, is why, when I interviewed Alan Greenspan seven years ago here in Washington — just a personal chat really, and most enjoyable — I should have suspected more his highly ideologized nature when he spoke for an abnormal amount of time about his admiration for Ayn Rand, the goddess of individual ability and laissez-faire capitalism with no controls; to her, selfishness was the consummate virtue, altruism a vice. I always wondered when I listened to these conservatives — could they believe this nonsense?

The McCain campaign has tried hard to pin the leftist “ideologue” label on Barack Obama — thus, the ridiculous attempt to tie him up with graying old Weatherman Bill Ayers — but it doesn’t stick at all. In fact, Mr. Obama is the very personification of pragmatism, of employing what has proved to work, of working from an ethical basis and then building what works from there. In fact, since there is no evidence at all that Mr. McCain would truly break from the Republicans’ love affair with “the market,” it turns out Mr. Obama is the real moderate here.

A part of his book “The Audacity of Hope” is especially revealing in this respect, and I have found myself looking at it over and over. Mr. Obama argues that a middle-ground way is the only path between today’s Republicans — pushing for lower taxes, ever fewer regulations and an even smaller safety net — and the Democrats — forced to fight a rearguard action, moving backward toward the New Deal of the ’30s.

Instead, he argues, “our history should give us confidence that we don’t have to choose between an oppressive, government-run economy and a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism. It tells us that we can emerge from great economic upheavals stronger, not weaker. Like those who came before us, we should be asking ourselves what mix of policies will lead to a dynamic free market and widespread economic security, entrepreneurial innovation and upward mobility…. In other words, we should be guided by what works.”

In an excellent piece in Sunday’s New York Times, Jodi Kantor writes of Mr. Obama, “Mention a theory and Mr. Obama asks how it translates on the ground” — he is “a professor with little interest in abstraction.” To me, on the other hand, Mr. McCain comes across as an able and intelligent man but a man out to win, at almost any cost; he carries about inside him the pains of the unfinished war, which is a heavy burden that sometime, somewhere, must be relieved.

But we don’t have time as a nation and as a people for any more mistakes, or for the inner passions that would lead to more of them. We have a vastly overburdened military. And as Defense Secretary Robert Gates himself has warned, our military has greater influence in foreign policymaking than the diplomatic corps. A new report by the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Stimson Center finds that the next U.S. president will need nearly 50 percent more diplomats to carry out a successful foreign policy, but the Foreign Service is hemorrhaging talent to the private sector, leaving a shortage of diplomats for this critical period.

So the new president, whoever he is, must not only act but reconstruct his instruments of power from the bottom up. There will be little time, particularly in the beginning, for rehearsing great acts. It would seem that rather too many people have been making mistakes.

Georgie Anne Geyer is a nationally syndicated columnist.