what do politicians hate more than anything else?

Doubt. Doubt = weakness, and weakness = electoral failure.

So it’s a minor miracle when a politician reaches the right conclusion and, despite his doubts, acts on it:

SANTA FE — The Bill Richardson who announced a repeal of the death penalty in New Mexico on Wednesday was not the same Bill Richardson who usually shows up for face time with the news media.

The Richardson who usually hosts the media goes out of his way to convince you of the rightness of his decision. He is confident, bigger than life and even becomes jocular at times; he is a master of the room.

The Richardson who sat before a phalanx of news media Wednesday was anything but. At moments he appeared still to be working out the issue in his head and doubt occasionally crept in to darken his face.
…
“I believe it’s the right decision. My conscience feels good, but I am still troubled,” Richardson said, by way of explaining his decision to repeal the death penalty.

He paused.

“I still wonder if… I know we did the right thing, but I am not totally, totally convinced that every argument that I have just said to you is accurate,” he said.
…
One of the women with whom he had met Monday — the day he opened his office to the public — was the mother of Dena Lynn Gore, the little girl Terry Clark raped and murdered. Terry Clark is the only man New Mexico has executed since 1960.

“It was a very poignant moment,” Richardson said. “To the families of victims … I say to them, I hope I made the right decision. But I can assure you that the punishment that is now policy — life imprisonment without parole — is a very severe punishment. That is why I wanted to go see it today myself in the prison.”

But then the doubt crept back in.

“My decision probably is not one associated with perfection,” he said.

As I’m sure Richardson knows, it is the impossibility of perfection in any human endeavor which makes the death penalty indefensible. While years in one of those lifer cells may be worse than death, you can still return freedom to a wrongly convicted innocent. You cannot return life.

I am strangely cheered by Richardson’s uncertainty. Our politicians are generally full of bluster and certitude, and the mess we find ourselves in is proof of the destructive capacity of righteousness. To err is human, and much of what Geithner and Obama and Bernanke have been doing for the last two months have been motivated by the MSM’s demand for decisive action and the appearance of control.

It’s why Congress was willing to sign off on Hank Paulson’s $700 billion bonfire without meaningful review of his “plan,” and it’s why Geithner keeps shoveling cash on the burnpile in the vain hope that at some point the fire will exhaust itself.

But fire doesn’t work that way. As long as it has oxygen (greed), it never stops being hungry. And the executives Geithner and Obama seem so desperate to retain in the Bailout Club are rapacious enough to consume every dollar the Fed can create.

The whole country needs to do as Richardson has done: step back, survey the wreckage, and make the decision that does the least harm to the greatest number of people.

We all want revenge at one time or another – and in this country (and around the world) perhaps now more than ever. For Richardson to eliminate the death penalty now, when so many are filled with rage and fear over crimes committed against all of us (albeit financial crimes that have never carried capital penalties), gives me hope that perhaps we can pull ourselves out of this Stygian quagmire without scapegoating the least among us.

In the Great Depression, the mass of Americans learned that the Horatio Alger hero was a chimera, that rags-to-riches stories were myths created by the wealthy to make us all believe that we too, someday, might be fabulously rich, and so must preemptively quash taxes and regulations that would stymie our lives once we walked through that golden door.

Joe the Plumber is living proof that Ronald Reagan’s resurrection of this myth still has a stranglehold on the American imagination – as is Larry Summers. But the scales are falling from our collective eyes, and we need to forceably remove them from Obama’s. Maintaining the stability of the economic system for it’s own sake may be decisive, but it’s also propping up the rotten capitalist laissez faire system that got us here in the first place.

We are going to have to build something new out of these ashes, and the collective political will – and anger – of the U.S. electorate is ready to get behind massive change if only our political leaders would have the courage to step into the unknown, and to make the right choices despite their doubts.

It’s the most dangerous and frightening thing a politician can do. Obama’s no chickenshit, but he does like stability – and Geithner, Summers et al love the status quo.

It would be interesting to wonder which way things will go if it wasn’t so goddamn frightening and personally damaging. I’m guessing my 20% paycut will come before the end of the month.

Time is not on our side.