The presidential race is getting under way and candidates are already launching their campaigns. It isn’t too soon to be considering what kind of candidate would be best for our economy.
Only a portion of the answer is contained in the shopping list of positions and programs that each candidate brandishes. The greater part is in a candidate’s capacity to see past our country’s flaws and love it for what it is and what it can be. That would not seem to be a direct economic issue, but it is — and it is particularly important at this time.
The relationship between flaws and love is a blurry one. New York, for example, is not an easy city to love. It can be attractive and exciting in a way that no other city even approaches, but its list of faults and character flaws would choke one of the hansom cab horses the current mayor wants to get rid of. It is dirty, almost in a determined way that puzzles visitors but reflects residents’ attitude as much as anything else. The city’s administrative apparatus is constantly drifting into casual affairs with corruption, and even at its best has a looney side that people have come to accept as part of its personality.
New York City has an outsized impact on our economy, and an outsized ego to match. Its residents, especially in Manhattan, are driven less often by limousines than by consuming competitiveness. It is the financial capital of the country and the world, and no one can afford to forget it. In fact, there is very little in New York City that people can afford. Still…it is the energy center of our market economy and some people love it.
Gordon Jenkins loved New York and lived there for several years. He was a consummate musician and composer who fell in love with the city that wrote something on his heart. He was living in Manhattan when the city celebrated VJ day, the end of World War II, and the jubilation combined with the pace and energy of the city to urge him capture its spirit in music.
The result was the initial version of “Manhattan Tower,” an orchestral suite embedded with voices and songs that describe nothing less than falling in love with a city. Included among the songs within the suite is one entitled, “Happiness Cocktail,” whose lyrics describe the needed ingredients. Unintentionally, in a few lines it also describes what a political campaign at its best can be. It concludes with, “If the dreams you dream aren’t coming true; and happiness seems overdue; Give me your hand and I’ll tell you what I’ll do; I’ll make a happiness cocktail just for you.”
The city that Gordon Jenkins fell in love with was a happy one; happy that our side had won the war; happy that our values of “truth, justice, and the American way” had prevailed, and confident that they would guide our future. In its multi-storied way, the city represented a happy country. To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s self-description, America was a happy country; New York just gave it its roar.
But that was the 1940s and 1950s. We were not a perfect country then and New York was not a perfect city. But we somehow found enough in ourselves to recognize that we were a good country and could become even better. Today, presidential candidates from both parties face an unhappy population that besides having its values parsed unto death has endured a wrenching recession and years of a joyless recovery — a country and an electorate that really needs some happiness and will reward the candidate who can deliver it.
The role that happiness and self-confidence played in the burst of creativity, innovation, and economic growth we enjoyed in the post-war decades is not well understood and neither plays a significant role in current economic models, even though they might be the factors that are undermining the effectiveness of our monetary policy. But the close relationship between our outlook and our prosperity seems more than a coincidence, especially since we know the critical role that self-confidence plays in everything else that we do — from learning to dating to personal achievement.
As a practical matter it is simple foolishness to long for the past, recent or ancient. But that shouldn’t stop us from longing for a candidate who sees something to love in our country and in us — a candidate whose confidence in us is contagious; one who knows we can do anything we put our minds to. We want and need a candidate who knows that our self-confidence is the key to the economic growth, prosperity, and yes, happiness that now seems so elusive.
James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant. He also writes a column for the monthly Herald Business Journal.
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