As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on November 3, 2009:

By Michael Singh

One lesson of the financial crisis is that short-termism has plagued U.S. business; too often it plagues U.S. politics and policy as well. The Obama administration has been both victim and perpetrator of this offense. On the one hand, the Obama administration (like most new administrations) has been the target of the short-term thinking prevalent in political and media circles, which judges progress in weeks and months, even against problems which have persisted for decades or longer. On the other hand, the administration itself has exacerbated this problem by raising expectations that many of America’s problems in the world could be solved with a simple shift in tactics, and to make matters worse often exaggerated its own tactical differences from its predecessors.

This latter tendency seems to flow from one of this administration’s most curious characteristics — its fixation on the past. When you are in government, your critics typically want to focus on the past, picking apart your record to find failures or inconsistencies, while you would rather focus on your plans for the future. As citizens, this is precisely what we want of our officials, while as a society we may want — and need — to grapple with our past, we need policymakers to glean what lessons they can from it and look forward. After all, we are powerless to change the past, and duty-bound to shape the future. Nevertheless, the Obama administration seems caught in the past, continuing one year after the 2008 election to define itself by its repudiation of predecessors’ policies rather than a clear articulation of its own vision for the future.

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