For a truly scary costume today, someone needs to figure out how to dress up as ‘The Economy’.
Andrew Sullivan penned, as always, an insightful piece – Boom goes the Acme bomb … and misses Obama (paywalled) – about President Obama’s political resilience in these turbulent times. The political rival ‘Acme Bombs’ were sort of Obama’s ‘Under Toads’, more noise and bluster than truly dangerous. But Obama does face a true ‘Under Tow’ of the structurally challenged Western economy in the wake a many punctured dream bubbles…
“The real question is whether even this silver lining is enough to save Obama. It is increasingly clear we are living through the worst economic climate since the 1930s, and it isn’t going to get much better before the next election. American incomes have essentially flatlined since the mid-1970s, with all the gains of the 1990s being sucked away by massively inefficient private healthcare insurance. The attempts to hide this ending of the American dream failed. The tech bubble was a delusion; the housing bubble was fake, not real, wealth. The peace dividend of the end of the cold war was wiped out by 9/11 and the subsequent wars. What we are left with is an economy that makes Americans richer than most other human beings, but no longer on the permanent up escalator. Indeed, the middle class seems to be in a slow slide downwards.”
The Zombie Economy will continue to feast on the mortally wounded dreams of many Westerners for many Halloweens yet to come.
Leadership and Management / Turning Adversity to Advantage 
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