…recants from his recent piece criticizing the President’s budget as way too liberal. Now he’s back in the Obama saddle again, and all it took was a little phone call from “four senior officials” of the Obama administration. And a dozen red roses, no doubt.
They mean well, they told Brooks. And they’re not really liberals, after all. And the deficit won’t be that bad. Promise.
On the other hand, is Whoopi Goldberg starting to have second thoughts about supporting The One? She’s been doing the tax math and doesn’t like the way it’s adding up.
I’ve been wanting to write about other things besides Obama. Truly, I have.
But I keep coming back to that topic because it seems vital to get it right—and now, before things slide out of control.
Speaking of sliding out of control, here’s a little musical interlude:
But I digress.
Now back to the main event: so, what’s up with Obama? (certainly not the stock market). Some middle-of-the-roaders who thought he was one of them seem shell-shocked. They need a support group, and maybe a twelve step program as well.
As for me, I’m disappointed but not surprised; I, along with many others, felt there were just too many signs that Obama would be taking a Leftist course despite his soothing centrist words and demeanor—although I’d still be happy if I turned out to be wrong.
I’ve found that it’s always good to believe that people mean what they say, even when they’re politicians. The problem with Obama is that, even more than most, his campaign was a combination of lofty but general rhetoric and contradictory specifics. He truly did try to be all things to all people, and succeeded with enough of them to get elected.
Sorting through all of that was difficult for most voters. What’s more, it required time and attention. But the signs that Obama would be one of the most liberal and even Leftist presidents in history were clear to those who were looking.
There was his voting record, for starters. In addition, his friends and close alliances, as well as many of his statements back when he wasn’t running for president (at least officially; I’m not sure there ever was a time he wasn’t running for president in some sense), indicated the same. Add to that his stint as a student of the Alinsky approach, as well as being a teacher of Alinsky’s methods, ample evidence of far Left leanings and a plan to put Alinsky techniques to work on the American public.
Seizing (and even deepening) a crisis and feelings of panic in the populace, and making use of those emotions to pass a liberal agenda, is pure Alinsky. The heart of that particular Alinsky suggestion is here:
[People] must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future.
There’s that word ubiquitous word “change” again. What had seemed so amorphous and featureless an idea (purposely vague) during the campaign, but which had Obamaphiles chanting in spellbound wonder, was most likely a focused and targeted page out of the Alinsky playbook rather than an accident.
What else was a plan, and what accidental?
Powerline’s John Hinderaker doesn’t know, and neither do I. Perhaps no one except Obama and his close associates do. I have never been much of a conspiracy theorist and I’m not one now. But the evidence pointing in the direction of Leftist intent and awareness, and purposeful deception about that fact, is becoming more compelling every day.
Hinderaker quotes those who set out the case that Obama is “deliberately damaging the economy and gutting the stock market…[to] make more people dependent on the government and pave the way for a far-left regime.” But then he draws back from concluding that they are correct. This is his reasoning:
Obama can’t possibly want to be a one-term failure. That’s what happened to Jimmy Carter, and Obama must know that it will happen to him, too, if his policies are perceived as dragging down the economy.
More likely the explanation is that Obama is an economic illiterate, and subscribes to the idea–which I think is rather common among Democrats–that what the government does has little impact on the economy.
John, I hope you’re right. But I think you’re wrong. I’m not sure that his goal is to deliberately damage the economy, but I sense that Obama doesn’t much care if he breaks that particular egg in order to make his welfare state omelet—in fact, it tends to go with the territory, as he must know.
And, if Obama is a true Leftist, as I believe he is, he (a) doesn’t mind if he only serves one term, if he guides America closer to a socialist destination; and/or (b) thinks that his policies will placate enough Americans, who will be grateful for the help and the money and who buy his line that the rich are the enemy, that they will actually give him a second term.
I don’t think Obama is an “economic illiterate,” despite the fact that he lacks business experience. As many people have pointed out, he is a smart man, and the basics aren’t all that hard to master. Also, it’s difficult to believe that, with economic advisers such as Larry Summers (who used to actually be a centrist, a real rather than a rhetorical one), he’s not being told the probable negative consequences of his economic proposals. And anyway, what’s the rush? Why not concentrate on getting the stimulus going first, if he cares about the current economic crisis, rather than just using it as an opportunity to turn America Left before it knows what hit it?
I can only come to the conclusion that Obama doesn’t care about the fallout for entrepreneurship or for productivity. His goal is his version of “economic fairness”—that is, equality of outcome rather than opportunity.
Once again, he warned us—at least those who were listening to the details. I wrote the following back in August of 2008 [emphasis mine]:
Some of Obama’s slightly-less-publicized statements are the ones that concern me most.
Case in point: in this WSJ column by William McGurn, the author points out that for Obama, taxes are not just about collecting revenue. What are they for? Fairness.
Obama was being quizzed on his proposal to raise the capital gains tax. When Charlie Gibson of ABC noted that the empirical evidence indicates that increasing the capital gains tax tends to lead to a decrease in actual revenue collected, Obama’s answer was, “Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”…
Obama’s brand of liberalism seems most interested in the appearance of fairness, and appears to view the economy as a zero-sum game. To help some people, you must take money away from others. The idea of a rising tide floating all boats””or of a capital gains cut stimulating the economy in a way that yes indeed, does benefit the rich but also benefits the entire financial system in a way that ultimately helps the middle class and even the poor””is often considered a nefarious and duplicitous scheme hatched by (who else?) the Republicans. That it often (though not always) conforms to reality is a mere detail, because the rich are by definition bad and need to be taken down a peg.
Obama has hit the ground running with his plan to undo the policies of the most “nefarious” Republican of all: Ronald Reagan. This is no accident, either—not that it’s something he overtly campaigned on. But he took advantage of the crisis—and has amplified it, I believe—the better to make good on a promise he made to himself back in the early 80s, when he was a lowly Alinskyesque community organizer (quoted from his 1995 book “Dreams from My Father”; emphasis mine):
Obama said he got into community organizing in Chicago in 1983 to “pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds.”
Note that Obama is not voicing a mere disagreement with Reagan’s policies. He is characterizing them as evil. I believe that his entire public career has been an attempt to undo Reagan and establish the “trickle-up” economics of socialism, whatever happens to our economy in general. The fact that this might be the worst of all possible times in economic terms to do this is something he is ignoring, as well, because he feels the American people are emotionally ready for it. He must strike while that iron is hot.
It’s probably no accident, either, that Obama sent that Churchill bust back to England almost as soon as he became president. He doesn’t want the old man’s visage around staring at him and reminding him of quotes such as this
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
[NOTE: Why the weird painting? It’s surrealist Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory,” his most famous work.
Plus, what we’re going through is starting to seem surreal, don’t you think? And time’s getting short on blocking Obama’s attempt at a radical transformation of American society into a Euro-style welfare state.]
What important military defeats has America ever known? If you don’t count the South in the Civil War, we have a single one: Vietnam.
The consequences of that defeat, in a land so far away, were easy for Americans to ignore or whitewash, or to pin on our conduct during the war itself rather than our decision to abandon the South Vietnamese to their fate.
The Left, for example, has always blamed America’s actions during the Vietnam war—and especially the bombing of Cambodia—for the ascendance of the brutal Pol Pot regime and its later killing fields (see this article, especially pages 6-7, for an argument against that controversial theory, as well as an explanation of its journalistic origins). The Left has also consistently minimized the suffering of the people of South Vietnam when the North took over. To the Left, the Northern Vietnamese Communists weren’t so bad, and the Cambodian Communists (who even they have to admit were pretty nasty folk) would never have succeeded but for the actions of the US in fighting them and their North Vietnamese allies.
Not only does the Left whitewash the consequences of the American defeat in Vietnam. I’ll go even further and say that to the Left, the Vietnam pullout was actually a victory—for them. It’s something they had promoted for a long time, and they finally won. What’s more, except for the rare Vietnam revisionist historian, their version of history won; it has come to dominate the texts and the press. And so the Left neither wanted—nor needed—to look at the negative consequences of the defeat for others.
Vietnam has been the template for the Left in most of our subsequent wars. They tried to repeat the experience in Afghanistan, but it didn’t quite work because that country’s American casualties, and the length of time we were in active fighting there, were insufficient to generate enough revulsion on the part of the American public.
But Iraq was going very well for the Left for quite a while, much in the Vietnam mode. It went on for a long time and was more bloody. And, although casualties were nowhere near those sustained in the Vietnam conflict, American sensibilities had become more delicate in the ensuing years, and tolerance for death in wartime was much lower.
In Bush, as in Nixon, the Left was gifted with a president who was vulnerable to personal attack, and both men played into the Left’s hands in various ways (Bush through his tendency to strut and his relative inarticulateness, Nixon through his paranoia and ultimately Watergate). In both wars the press changed from initial (although somewhat wary) enthusiasm for the war to outright condemnation (see this and this for a discussion of Vietnam and the press).
Vietnam was not just the template for the Left’s approach to war, it was the template for defeat without consequences. But there were negative consequences; just not for the Left. Not only did our withdrawal from Vietnam negatively impact the people of South Vietnam and Cambodia, it offered encouragement to those who would challenge the US, by letting them know that the American people lacked the stamina for a long fight. Thereafter, enemies assumed they might have a good chance of wining against the larger and more powerful US through a three-pronged strategy: (a) wear us out while (b) simultaneously allying with the Left in this country to spread propaganda points, and (c) counting on the US press to ultimately join forces with the Left in that endeavor, either through ignorance or design.
The Iraqi insurgents and terrorists expected to win in a manner similar to North Vietnam. It was reasonable of them to assume that they would, and in fact they came perilously close. The Democrats, the Left, and the press played their parts to perfection. The 2006 Congress had become controlled by Democrats, and was eager to be part of the production.
The stumbling blocks turned out to be a few Democrats, most of the remaining Republicans, and especially the stubborn Bush. The former managed to block some of the legislation the majority of Democrats wished to pass, and Bush vetoed the rest. Bush remained committed to the surge, and appointed the brilliant General Petraeus to be in charge of its implementation.
And so there remained enough time left for the surge to succeed beyond the Left’s and the Democrats’ wildest dreams. Paradoxically, however, this meant that once again, those who had either advocated or prematurely accepted defeat never had to face the consequences of what such a defeat might mean. Protected by their enemy Bush and his victory (at least so far; nothing is permanent or written in stone in Iraq), they can now bask in the glow of their devotion to peace at any price, and yet not be saddled with the burden of dealing with defeat there.
Thus, President Obama can speak of “ending” the war in his recent speech to Marines at Camp Lejeune while studiously avoiding all mention of victory, the surge, or including a single word of praise for his predecessor. The closest he comes is to say “you got the job done,” after speaking at length of dangers, loneliness, and burdens, as well as “difficult days ahead.”
I’m not sure what message the Marines heard. But I think the message our enemies have heard—loud and clear—is that President Obama and the Democrats may mouth intimidating words about Afghanistan and Pakistan, but when push comes to shove, they’ll be shoving off.
If you ever had any doubt, it’s becoming more and more clear every day that Obama meant every single radical thing he ever said. Including that one about bankrupting the coal companies.
Obama said [in a January 2007 interview] that the environmental policies he proposes would cause builders of new coal plants to go bankrupt. And he didn’t sound the least bit sad about the prospect…
Obama stated that;
…under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”¦whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.
I added at the time I wrote my post on the subject, right before the 2008 election, that:
Rather than banning new coal plants de jure, [Obama] plans to drive them out of business de facto, because the environmental requirements of his policies would be so stringent that new plants would be unable to comply and the penalties for noncompliance would be catastrophic. In other words,, any new plants would have to pay penalties so Draconian that they would be bankrupted””and the listener is left to wonder whether even older plants might be required to retrofit in order to comply, and be forced out of business as well.
Obama’s plan is that market forces would dictate that, as new coal production would become impossible, people would be forced to quickly fill in for the lack of power by developing the wonderfully clean alternative sources of energy that he is so sure would be available if only the will were there. We have no way of knowing whether it would work out that way, of course. But in the meantime we could be sure that the economic costs would be very high, as Obama unapologetically states.
Well, you can’t say I—and Obama—didn’t warn you. Although one had to be paying close attention to hear it, and to understand what he actually meant—and still means.
Obama seems to think that green energy can be developed and made reasonable and efficient to use, if only the nasty old capitalists were given the right incentives to develop it. This argument was already suspect two years ago when he made it. But now, in a recession, his policies are a recipe for a deepening of the economic disaster, with no real evidence that such sources of energy are even scientifically possible at this juncture.
Note that Obama is not talking about developing the one alternative source that most definitely is available: nuclear power plants. Nor is he supporting tapping new domestic fossil fuel sources to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
The President has a worthy if somewhat utopian goal in mind: He is attempting to create a new industrial base that will produce solar panels, windmills, a smart electrical grid and other clean-energy sources and technologies, while simultaneously boosting the economy and reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Leadership in green technologies theoretically would give the U.S. something to sell to the rest of the world that cheap-labor countries like China and India can’t produce readily…Because solar, wind and other forms of clean energy are now much more expensive to generate than energy supplied by coal, gas and oil, Congress would have to pass legislation that in effect forces Americans to use more of it.
Why are they more expensive? Because they are inefficient and are not being produced and used on a large scale. Unfortunately, there are reasons why this is so—and these are mostly physical rather than political, although liberals have great difficulty acknowledging this extremely inconvenient truth.
It’s not just lack of goodwill that stops us from heating our homes with the sun and the wind and the rain, as Steven den Beste pointed out back in 2002 in this post. It’s science:
Small sources of energy are easy. Big sources of energy aren’t, and the small sources of energy can’t be scaled, and there aren’t enough of them so that even when added up they would be enough to matter… Anything which, when fully deployed, generates less than ten gigawatts average (1010 joules per second) is useless for our purposes in terms of actually making a meaningful contribution to the total amount of energy we consume. For scale purposes:
Hoover Dam = 1.5 gigawatts.
Grand Coulee Dam = 6.5 gigawatts
Small coal or nuclear plant = 300 megawatts
Large coal or nuclear plant = 1 gigawatt
Average US electrical power consumption = 400 gigawatts
Peak US electrical power consumption is probably above 1 terawatt
Den Beste went on to describe four large enough sources of energy that might be practical some day, but none of them are even close to being realizable yet (the science is nowhere near there), and they certainly don’t include anything like wind or solar power. The latter have their uses, no doubt. But to drive out coal by making it unaffordable, in the hopes that good alternatives will just spring into action to take its place, is an absurdity.
And very, very expensive. The last thing we need in the current financial climate is added expense.
But Obama has an answer for that, as well—and it’s his answer to almost everything right now: pass the cost on to the rich and give the poor a break.
Obama’s cap and trade scheme will impose a $700-$1400 additional tax on all families as energy producers (and users) pass-through their own higher costs to the public.
Obama plans to devote more taxpayer money to defray these costs for those making $75,000 per year or less.
So the added burden will be borne by those making over $75,000 a year—the bad “rich” guys, who will be footing the bill for almost everything in the Obama administration.
Note, by the way, that with cap and trade it’s not just those making more than $250,000—Obama’s old dividing line between the innocent poor and the guilty rich—who will be in trouble. But he is technically correct that those in the $75,000 to $250,000 bracket would not actually be paying a raised tax. Instead, they (and everyone else) would be paying higher utility bills as a result of the Obama penalties on coal plants. But they also would not be getting the federal monies that the under-75K crowd would be receiving to offset it.
Pretty clever, no? Let’s see: electric bills skyrocket as a result of Obama’s policies. Cheap and efficient wind and solar power cannot possibly fill the gap, as much as we all would wish it. Obama’s green supporters are ecstatic, however, and support him mightily. The rest of the public is unlikely—unless they are paying strict attention—to understand why their utility bills are rising. Obama will no doubt say it’s because of the nasty coal and electric companies trying to stiff the poor working American. This increases that enmity against greedy capitalists that so suits Obama’s electoral purposes.
And then, who comes to the rescue for those making under $75,000? Why, Obama and the Democrats, that’s who. As for the jobs lost in the process—well, who cares, as long as the government is ready with a helping hand?
[ADDENDUM: Read Hanson on Obama, “The Great Divider.” I can’t say I think the President will take his suggestions, though, since they run counter to his own purposes.]
It remains to be seen whether these folks will actually end up blocking some of the worst excesses of Obama’s spending proposals. But I hope so; we could certainly use a few profiles in courage right now.
Candidates for the title: these moderate Democrat Senators who are starting to realize that the Obama’s budget is way out of line. Do we have a new “gang of 14” on the Democrat side?:
Moderate and conservative Democrats in the Senate are starting to choke over the massive spending and tax increases in President Barack Obama’s budget plans and have begun plotting to increase their influence over the agenda of a president who is turning out to be much more liberal than they are.
A group of 14 Senate Democrats and one independent huddled behind closed doors on Tuesday, discussing how centrists in that chamber can assert more leverage on the major policy debates that will dominate this Congress.
Afterward, some in attendance made plain that they are getting jitters over the cost and expansive reach of Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget proposal.
Asked when he’d reach his breaking point, Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, said: “Right now.
I’ve been polling some of my liberal friends who voted for Obama, asking their opinion about what’s been happening lately in the financial sector and his effect on the economy. Every one of them has responded in much the same way, by saying quickly that nobody knows what lies ahead and nobody knows how to fix it.
They don’t seem ready to blame Obama for anything yet, and I don’t know whether they ever will. This “nobody has a clue” mantra may be the wave of the future for some time to come.
But they look and sound shaky and stunned, with a frightened tension in their eyes. They sure don’t sound happy about the bills that have been passed so far, or about the policies Obama has been recommending next, or the precipitous drop in the stock market.
.
In forging ahead with his liberal/radical economic spending agenda in the midst of a serious recession, President Obama seems to be blithely ignoring the fact that every time he speaks the stock market falls. His declaration of war on the rich hasn’t helped much, either, nor has his definition of “rich” as households or businesses earning 250 thousand dollars a year.
I can’t escape the conclusion that Obama doesn’t care if the stock market keeps on falling and people keep being spooked. In fact, it benefits him, up to a point. After all, Obama can blame market declines at the outset of his administration on his despised predecessor Bush. What’s more, the lower the market falls now, the more room it has to recover under his watch.
In addition (and perhaps most importantly), the lower the market falls the greater the panic it induces, and an increase of fear and desperation is exactly what Obama needs to sell change with “the fierce urgency of now.” As long as his supporters are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and blame others—and, if my friends are at all typical, they are still doing just that—he can ignore the falling market and concentrate on the social welfare part of the change we’ve been waiting for.
[ADDENDUM: If this is correct, maybe today will begin the big stock market climb we’ve all been hoping for. But I wouldn’t sit on a hot stove.]
It shouldn’t come as a big surprise that McDonald’s has been doing well lately. There’s no mystery as to why: it food is relatively cheap, and people are pinching pennies.
I’ve never been much of a McDonald’s fan myself. I used to go when my son was little, of course, to make him happy with a Happy Meal. But not very often (oh, the poor neglected child); I just don’t much care for the food.
But I found myself in a McDonald’s the other day and was stunned to learn that the clock has been rolled back, and they are pushing the dollar meal menu. A burger (albeit small) for a dollar! A cheeseburger, likewise. It’s all very tempting to a cheapskate like me. After all, you can barely buy a pack of gum these days for a dollar.
There’s something very satisfying about the whole state of affairs, the silver lining in the darkening cloud of the recession. These items are smaller than a Big Mac, to be sure, but they’re not all that small. And the dollar hamburger fields a modest and diet-friendly 250 calories, while the Big Mac checks in at 540.
How do I know that? McDonald’s has obliged us by providing nutritional information for all its products. Some of this stuff you may not want to know (for instance, if you’re a fan of the Double Quarter-Pounder with cheese, or the 21-oz Chocolate Triple Thick Shake, you may need to be sitting down when you take a look), so click on the link at your peril.
The war to divide Americans continues, with explicitly and purposely combative language from the no-longer-conciliatory Obama. The Obama who’s showing up now is the same guy who crowed “I won” when challenged by Congressional Republicans during a supposedly bipartisan closed-door meeting about the stimulus bill.
Obama has taken the gloves off—the kid ones, that is—and put on the boxing gloves. Now we know that when he said “change,” he really meant it:
…[Obama] will fight to change health care, energy and education in dramatic ways that will upset the status quo.
“The system we have now might work for the powerful and well-connected interests that have run Washington for far too long,” Obama said in his weekly radio and video address. “But I don’t. I work for the American people.”
The strain of populism that was always present in the Obama campaign is now coming to the fore. Flush with the victory of the nonpartisan stimulus bill, he is throwing down the gauntlet (more glove figures of sppech) and fighting for truth, justice, and the American way against the shadowy special interest groups that protect the wealthy and the status quo and hurt the common man/woman:
“I know these steps won’t sit well with the special interests and lobbyists who are invested in the old way of doing business, and I know they’re gearing up for a fight…My message to them is this: So am I.”
Forget the fact that Obama is rewarding powerful special interest groups and lobbyists as well—they just happen to be the ones he and his party define as the “good guys.” So if other interest groups and lobbyists are against his policies it must be because they are against change, you see, and everybody knows that change is good—especially if it’s the sort of change proposed by Obama.
There’s no room in Obama’s mind for the idea that many of those who oppose him might merely disagree about the best way to help the economy, or that some of their arguments might have merit, or that certain of their actions might benefit as all, although not in a direct welfare-state sort of way. He’d rather cast all of his opponents as the selfish enemy opposing the good, which is defined as his mantra of “change.”
And never mind that the change Obama is proposing is radical change. After all, he says he gave us fair warning, and if we voted for him we were giving him carte blanche to follow the most radical of all the many conflicting policies he outlined during his campaign (in the quote that follows, I’d omit the word “almost”):
Some analysts say Obama’s proposals are almost radical. But he said all of them were included in his campaign promises. “It is the change the American people voted for in November,” he said.
Obama must know, of course, that this is because almost everything was included in his campaign promises. That was part of his m.o.; to say many things at once, some of them contradictory. To seem centrist at one moment and radical at another. To change his mind. To deny what he’d said when he deemed it strategic to do so, and/or to “clarify” (read: reverse) his position.
And so I am virtually certain that most of what he is proposing now was indeed mentioned somewhere during his campaign. Back then, many of us bloggers on the right tried to highlight his more worrisome proposals and to mention his myriad radical associations. But Obama counted on the fact that a great many of the people who were about to vote for him weren’t paying attention to his more radical side, and would be lulled into a false sense of security by his centrist pose.
And if you retain doubt that it was a pose, then I fear you’re in deep denial. As Clive Crook (who is basically an Obama supporter) writes in this piece in Financial Times, Obama’s true nature has been revealed [emphasis mine]:
…I feel I owe Republicans an apology.
As you recall, in the debate over the fiscal stimulus, Republicans accused the president of presenting a measure they could not support, disguising this with an empty show of co-operation. Bipartisanship, they said, is more than inviting your opponents round for coffee and a chat. I did not buy it: I accused them, in effect, of brainless rejectionism and a refusal to compromise, and congratulated the president for trying to come to terms with the other side.
This budget says the Republicans had Mr Obama right all along. The draft contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal…
Take this budget at face value, and when Mr Obama talks about “a new era of responsibility” he does not mean: “We are all in this together.” He means: “The rich are responsible for this mess and it is payback time.”
According to Obama, if you’re against the radical restructuring that he’s proposing, then you’re just a rich bloodsucker trying to get richer at the expense of the working stiff. Of course, this is the case for some of his opponents. But certainly far from all of them; much of the opposition is principled.
Obama continues:
Insurance companies will dislike having “to bid competitively to continue offering Medicare coverage, but that’s how we’ll help preserve and protect Medicare and lower health care costs,” the president said. “I know that banks and big student lenders won’t like the idea that we’re ending their huge taxpayer subsidies, but that’s how we’ll save taxpayers nearly $50 billion and make college more affordable. I know that oil and gas companies won’t like us ending nearly $30 billion in tax breaks, but that’s how we’ll help fund a renewable energy economy.”
Passing the budget, even with a Democratic-controlled Congress, “won’t be easy,” Obama said. “Because it represents real and dramatic change, it also represents a threat to the status quo in Washington.”
But there are reasons to object to his proposals other than defending business as usual in Washington. There’s the huge deficit they will run up. There’s the tax burden that is almost bound to worsen the recession and discourage investment in new business—and which might not even raise much revenue, certainly nowhere near as much as would be needed. There’s a reduction in the quality of health care for the elderly. There’s a rise in gas prices because the taxes will be passed along to all of us.
I don’t usually quote Andrew Sullivan, but something he wrote on the subject recently caught my eye. It appears that even Obamaphile Sullivan is wrestling with discomfort over the radical nature of Obama’s policy proposals. For example, here’s Sullivan writing on February 25th:
[The]…question about Obama is whether the crises we are all confronting require or demand a seismic shift, to keep the American ship afloat. I have felt a deep ambivalence about this since one of my first posts absorbing what Obama meant.
I would love to know when that “first post” was written. When did Sullilvan first begin to “absorb what Obama meant?” During the campaign? Or during the lead up to the stimulus bill? Or even more recently than that? Did the fact that Sullivan fell wholly under the spell of the charismatic orator originally blind him to what the man was actually saying he would do? Did Sulllivan only hear what he wanted to hear, as one often does when in the first flush of infatuation? And is he starting to come to? If so, how long will it take, and how many others might do the same?
Here’s more from the same Sullivan piece:
Do I worry that government will over-reach? You bet I do. Is my instinct and inclination to do less than Obama plans? You bet it is.
Now read what Sullivan has to say two days later, on February 27. After an intro that lauds Obama’s tactical genius, he writes:
[A]fter presenting such a centrist, bi-partisan, moderate and personally trustworthy front, he gets to unveil a radical long-term agenda that really will soak the very rich and invest in the poor. Given the crisis, he has seized this moment for more radicalism than might have seemed possible only a couple of months ago.
Sullivan goes on to discuss whether Obama’s proposals will be successful or not; he’s still agnostic on that. But it is deeply troubling to me how Sullivan can describe the bait and switch tactic by which Obama won the election and yet ignore the fundamental indecency of such deceptiveness. And how can Obama claim the American people knew about his far liberal plans all the time, when they were purposely obscured and muffled by his centrist rhetoric? And is this not at variance with “personal trustworthiness?”
In the February 25th piece, Sulllivan quotes Ross Douthat on Obama’s speech to Congress the evening before. Once again, see how the evaluation is of Obama’s style and strategy rather than his substance, and how the duplicity of the man is considered clever rather than problematic:
Obama was fantastic…He laid out the most ambitious and expensive domestic agenda of any Democratic President since LBJ, and did it so smoothly that you’d think he was just selling an incremental center-left pragmatism…It was the speech of a man seeking to turn a moment of crisis into a domestic-policy revolution, and oozing confidence from every pore along the way. Now all he has to do is find a way to pay for it …
Oh, is that all?
It’s a repellent picture, whether Douthat realizes it or not: Obama as smooth salesman, deceiving the American people about his revolution, and all for their own good. And as for that confidence that “oozes from every pore,” it’s disturbing in its arrogance. For all of Obama’s failure to project optimism about the economy, he has tremendous confidence in one thing: his ability to ram his program through Congress before the American people even know what hit them.
One of the most chilling quotes from Obama that I’ve ever read is this one, reported by Fred Barnes recently:
When Barack Obama met with TV anchors at a White House lunch last week, he assured them he likes being president. “And it turns out I’m very good at it,” he added.
Let that one sink in for a moment. President for only a little over a month and he’s “very good at it.” The stock market falling every day (as I write this, it’s in the 6800s) and he’s “very good at it.”
Confidence is one thing. Untrammeled, unashamed hubris is another. The worrisome signs have been there from the start with Obama.
Remember this McCain campaign ad? It seems like a long time ago, but it bears repeating (note especially the brief exchange at :29 in which the interviewer asks Obama “Do you ever have any doubts?” and he responds with a firm and chilling “Never”):
The American people—along with Andrew Sullivan and Clive Crook—should be having some doubts about Obama right about now. Let’s hope it’s not too late.
