Sitting Ducks, Pt. II: Reagan Re-Ducks (Redux)

 Well we're living here in Allentown

And they're closing all the factories down

Out in Bethlehem they're killing time

Filling out forms

Standing in line 

--Allentown, Billy Joel

When the facts change, I change my opinion. 

What do you do sir?

 --John Maynard Keynes

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We spent time in Athens, Ohio, home of Ohio University (OU).  Athens has a permanent population of 21,342, with about the same number of students attending the university; Athen County has a population of about 65,000. 51.9% of the population of Athens County, a former coal mining community, live below the poverty line; over 94% of Athens Co. is white.

$333 million in Federal Stimulus money has been spent in Athens since the inception of that program, or $111 per year (data from Athen's Visitor's Guide.)  Ranger thought to juxtapose the privations of a small Midwestern town with the $45 billion spent since 2007 on the MRAP vehicles alone.

Remember when a presidential race was won with the phrase, "It's the economy, stupid?"  This truism defeated a President (George H. W. Bush) who doted upon foreign policy versus the economy of his nation. While 2012 United States languishes in the same condition as then, President Obama leaves his foreign policy to Secretary Of State Clinton and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And foolish as this seems in terms of not addressing the dire needs of the nation which elected him, it may be savvy politicking: Whoever can out-Reagan Reagan will win.  Romney (and whomever the Republican machine would have tapped for candidate) must design himself as a Nuevo Reagan ... Reagan Redux.  The Democrats are also charged with meeting this bar, and Obama is coming fashionably close to out-gunning Mittens.

Considering what a sub-standard president Reagan was, his iconography is all the sadder.  But the Democrats have not found a viable contender to the Reagan brand and electioneering is acting, and no one out-acts an actor.

Of course, regardless of who out-draws whom, 50% of Athens County will still meander in the miasma that is poverty.  In this way alone, perhaps, they will share the situation of their elected leaders: Both will be signing checks on accounts with insufficient funds. 

(As an aside, the quick check cashing storefront in Athens features a colorful children's Playskool table and chair in the lobby; children should not have to be in fast cash establishments which charge their parents usurious 30+% interest.  It is not a good teaching point.)

No astrologer is needed to tell us too many of us are drawing on an NSF account.