When I was in high school, in order to add extracurricular compost to my future college application, I volunteered to help out on freshman orientation day. It was perhaps the single most pointless student body function in a heap already piled high with similarly useless events. One would think that our job was to give our stories of often painful and embarrassing progression through a school that we either loathed or had come to loathe us. You’d think that we were charged to give practical pointers to these nervous tweens to help them through what they’d later define as the most difficult years of their lives. If that was ever the aim, then the execution could not have been more contrary. We got a motivational speaker.

When I hear President Bush give a cursory mention to challenging times or Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson remaining optimistic in the face of what might shape up to be the worst U.S. economic turmoil since the Great Depression, I think of that motivational speaker. Just as prospective high-schoolers were more apt to take cues from a Teletubby on how to conduct their lives, so to is America unlikely to subscribe to this kind of rapt governmental optimism any more. At a point of crisis, Americans don’t need a grinning oaf talking about how he was able to ask a girl to a dance by employing a sequence of mini-goals. They need someone to give them answers and a clearly-defined course toward digging out of these tough times. When gas prices are soaring and even non-discretionary spending on food and heating oil are on the increase, just telling people that it’s only temporary isn’t enough. You have to tell them why it’s only temporary and if you can’t do that, you have to lead them through the dark times.

The economy is a tough animal to approach in the top echelons of government. If you publicly state that the economy is spiraling the drain, then you could exacerbate the problem by diminishing consumer confidence and prompt skittish investors to dump stocks. Thus, I certainly don’t expect Bush to throw up his hands and say “fuck it, we’re screwed,” but on the other hand, his perpetual scattershot optimism is almost as dangerous. Bush and clockmasters of the financial gears at the Federal Reserve and Treasure are shuffling dangerously close to Herbert Hoover’s blind enthusiasm and reticence during the 1930s in the wake of Black Tuesday. You can’t argue that brighter days are ahead when a consensus has built over the past months arguing that things are looking grim, and they’re going to stay that way for quite a while. Subprime home foreclosures are expected to reach two million by 2009. Just this past week, the Fed had to make the invisible hand visible and bail out Bear Stearns, a longtime titan of Wall Street. The dollar is posting record lows against the euro and 12-year lows against the yen on the currency exchange.

In such a climate of record lows and disturbing highs, a balance has to be struck between economic Novocain and raising the white flag to national financial ruin. It starts with acknowledging the weight of the problem and addressing the possibility that it’s not just a reincarnation of the downturns we saw in 1991 or 2001. The current economic woes facing the U.S. are a peculiar and new set of circumstances. Although housing busts and credit crunches have occurred across the world in countries like Japan and Sweden, the U.S. has not yet had to deal with them at this magnitude in recent memory. And more importantly, with the most powerful economy in the world based so intrinsically on easy credit and bedrock consumerism, these economic obstacles are going to hit us far harder. And while our President may not publicly make it known, more and more Americans are FEELING it firsthand.

If the days of the United States shrugging off adversity solely on the basis of “we’re the U.S., we can do anything,” are not over, then they’re certainly numbered in low digits. Positive obfuscation does not work any more and it’s time to cease the practice before it’s too late. Mr. Bush, it’s time for you to lead.