{"id":348,"date":"2011-07-27T18:36:56","date_gmt":"2011-07-27T19:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/blog\/?p=348"},"modified":"2022-03-08T14:02:28","modified_gmt":"2022-03-08T19:02:28","slug":"trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/trust\/","title":{"rendered":"Trust"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I don\u2019t understand the debt crisis in Washington. I\u2019m not an economist. But I do understand the election of 2012. And I know that whoever wins this week\u2019s debate in D.C. will forge ahead in next year\u2019s races.<\/em><\/p>\n

To put events in perspective I turned to my usual source of wisdom on this matter, Julius Caesar\u2019s ghost.<\/p>\n

Hail, Caesar! What is your wisdom about elections?<\/em><\/p>\n

Two things win elections: money and trust. Without money you can\u2019t compete but without trust you can\u2019t win. In Latin the words are pecuniae and fides. Pecuniae, money, comes from the word for cattle but fides, trust, points to higher things. In Rome Fides was a goddess with her own temple. Fides points to foedus, the word for a solemn pact of friendship. No Roman would ever rank pecuniae over fides.<\/p>\n

What about<\/em> scientia, the Latin for \u201cskill\u201d? Don\u2019t you need that too to win elections?<\/em>
\nYou can buy skill. But you do need to have good judgment \u2013 prudentia<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Does President Obama have the prudentia, the pecuniae and the fides he needs to get re-elected?
\n<\/em>
\nIf he wins in 2012 he will have the prudentia. Now he is raising all the money he needs for his campaign but the state of the economy is spinning his gold into dross. The public \u2013 now they don\u2019t have pecuniae. And they are looking for someone to blame. If Obama wins the debate in Washington this week, they will blame the Republicans and the Tea Party in Congress. If Obama loses, he risks losing the trust of the nation.<\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t that a bit overheated? Surely you don\u2019t think that Boehner\u2019s dullness is prevailing.<\/em>
\nDull is cool and, when it comes to politics, cool beats hot. The president is struggling. You could see it in the anger in his speech this week. Obama may be right to feel anger \u2013 Caesar makes no judgment \u2013 but he is wrong to show it. I refer to the words that my friend, Gaius Sallust, put in my mouth in his Catiline\u2019s War<\/em>: \u201cMen with great power have no privacy: the higher the office, the less the freedom of action. For others, it is called rage, for those in power it\u2019s named arrogance and cruelty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is it too late for President Obama to turn things around?<\/em><\/p>\n

Certainly not. The President is the guardian of the nation. The people want to trust him; he must show them how. A talented leader can reverse his fortune. Caesar, in fact, once stopped a mutiny with a single word. \u201cQuirites,\u201d he called the soldiers \u2013 \u201ccitizens,\u201d instead of the word he normally used \u2013 \u201cCommilites\u201d or \u201cfellow soldiers.\u201d In other words, he fired them. That was enough to make lambs of lions and end the mutiny.<\/p>\n

What word should the president use?<\/em>
\nOnly Caesar can win with a single word.<\/p>\n

And with that, the conqueror turned and strode back to Hades.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"excerpt","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","castos_file_data":"","podmotor_file_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[395],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}