A 100-day run left of center
God made the world in seven days, while Barack Obama has needed the better part of 100 to make over America, thus proving the existence of a stunning albeit slender gap between a deity and a president whose restive liberal spirit yet hovers over the deep. God help us, he’s still not finished.
Obama has walked on water and clouds, the latter ominously dark, which may be the preferred hue for presidents ascending amid crisis bestowed upon them by their predecessors. So vile was the final taste of a Bush presidency – even some staunch Republicans can scarcely bear it – that Obama has captured in the mind of the electorate an air of infallibility, a thing he’s naturally inclined to assume.
Acting on this, Obama has gone about saying it and making it so, transforming this country’s free-market system at blurring speeds to which Americans have been blind. Relying on experience as a law professor, community organizer and politician, Obama now stands at the helm of the banking and automobile industries. Even banks not at risk of failure must answer to him under the Trouble Assets Relief Program. Car companies must produce lines of vehicles that Obama wants but buyers do not. Yet the president is not sated. He wants health care, too.
Still, for all of Obama’s perceived messianic qualities, his power remains corporeal, which requires its being backed by something material, principally money, lots of it. His stimulus bill will cost $787 billion. His budget would cost $3.6 trillion. To cover these and other spending initiatives, America will be required to borrow $9.3 trillion over the next two decades, swelling the national debt to $17.3 trillion, or 82 percent of the national economy, by 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office. George W. Bush’s spending habits were liberal. Obama’s are madness.
Yet the president glides on the celestial air he breathes. His approval rating in the latest Gallup poll is 63 percent, slightly behind Ronald Reagan, a Republican whose rating was 67 percent at the same stage in his presidency after taking over for failed Democrat Jimmy Carter. Even Bill Clinton, the most successful Democratic president since FDR, lagged behind Obama at the same point. Clinton’s approval rating was 55 percent.
Americans have raised tepid protest in the form of attempted tempests, such as the Tax Day tea parties. But many remain blissfully swept in the Obama myth. He is a man who exudes qualities that Americans treasure: coolness and confidence. Even what may be rightly construed as dangerous naiveté on world affairs, Obama’s perpetual attempts to appease enemies real and potential in Iran, North Korea, Syria and Cuba, assuage a ballooning American desire to be liked around the world, especially after those nasty Bush years.
But personality will not overcome the legacy Obama so quickly has sown. Bills will come due. Enemies provided the cover of faux diplomacy will come calling. Obama is a president with a screen legend’s stage presence; the sight of him is pure magic in some eyes. But no sleight of hand can mask the inherent dangers of his policies. If they are not his undoing, they might well be America’s.
Reader Reactions
Chris:
I very much fear that your once-objective journalistic outlook has been mortally skewed by your emergence as a leader of the Democrat Party. Naturally you must defend a new Democrat president from criticism, that’s what political parties and party loyalty is all about. You see the Obama agenda through glasses carefully ground to a prescription dictated by party leaders.
The articles cited by the WNV publisher are but a few of many reports by a number of legitimate news organizations over the past month or two. Certainly the Obama administration is pressuring banks to accept bailout monies – including our own banks here in the Valley. Certainly, if they can get these banks to accept the money, they will then dictate how it is to be spent and how the banks are to operate in many matters important to Democrat or far-left positions. Probably the Republicans would have done the same thing, except more Republicans seem to be sensitive to the inherent dangers to the free-market than are Democrats. That’s politics in Washington, politics spelled p-o-w-e-r.
And the car bit is silly. Detroit and overseas auto manufactures respond to markets, they don’t lead or dictate them. Despite all the energy conservation push for the past decade, people just didn’t want to give up gas guzzlers. When fuel prices soared, they began to look for efficiency. With prices now more reasonable, they look more for size, comfort and status. That’s the market. Heck, even Al Gore, one-time Democrat presidential candidate and energy efficiency prophet extraordinaire has a personal energy consumption footprint – according to CNN and the Post (not your most conservative media, mind you) many times that of an average citizen.
The danger in the totality of the Obama approach to the recession is the government invasion of the private sector. The nation has experienced bad recessions before, and emerged stronger. Certainly the government, particularly FDR, meddled in markets to prompt recovery and promote political ends. But the markets today are different. They are larger, more complex, and worldwide. Today they are just too complex for slow-responding, inexperienced government bureaucrats to crudely push around. To be sure, there was some real corruption of the financial oversight of the financial markets in recent years, corruption made worse by specific failures or inappropriate involvement by both Democrat and Republican politicians. That failure needed real attention structurally, but, from all I read, the Obama administration has done little to fix what is broken, besides a few words. We’ll have to wait and see if that is truly addressed in the years ahead.
But the rest of the various stimulus packages are simply huge giveaways for which generations to come will be paying. And many of these giveaways to the private sector, and to states, have been crafted by Democrat politicians and the Obama crowd with strings that will promote a host of political causes in the years to come. There are other programs that seem to simply shovel monies into private pockets and, as the past has proven beyond doubt, once certain citizens get a freebie, they will throw their vote at whoever promises to continue to give them that freebie, no matter how harmful it is to them, their fellow citizens or the nation.
The WNV editorial is correct in pointing out that payment will come due for all this largesse, and for federal meddling in the private sector. Unfortunately that bill will be very high in terms both of money and our free enterprise system.
I am a moderate conservative with little use for the far right or far left. And, while the reader base of the WNV, SNL and most other print media - liberal or conservative - is indeed shrinking, I would argue from personal experience that there are far, far more conservatives in the Valley than liberals, and many who have suddenly begun to call themselves Democrats are just angry over the failures of the previous, Republican administration. Indeed, the Republicans have not proven to be more conservative than Democrats over the past decade, although they are a bit less obvious. However, I don’t see that a classic conservative can find much satisfaction in the GOP. Come to think of it, I’m not sure a classic liberal would feel comfortable in the present Democrat party.
But that’s just what I think.
Check out these stories:
“Hyrid car sales go from 60 to 0 at breakneck speed” (Los Angeles Times): http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hybrid17-2009mar17,0,6682265.story
“Here, banks, take this money whether you need it or not” (Houston Chronicle): http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/steffy/6087315.html
“Even banks not at risk of failure must answer to him under the Trouble Assets Relief Program.“ Who forced those banks “not at risk of failure” to take TARP monies? Are you suggesting the government forced private enterprise to fill out those applications and cash those checks?
“Car companies must produce lines of vehicles that Obama wants but buyers do not.“ Once again, did President Obama and congressional Democrats fly to Detroit to tell them that they needed to take a mandated federal bailout? And by what notion are more fuel-efficient vehicles not in demand by buyers? Is it possible that the auto industry completely misread what the buyers wanted and produced new line after new line of low fuel-efficiency products and that’s why they needed bailed out? And that the bailout will help them reorganize and refocus on what the buyers do actually want?
Do not insult people like me in your declining reader base by suggesting that our steadfast support of Obama and congressional Democrats is the result of us being “blissfully swept” away. And be careful about the tempest in the teapot you’re creating with the imagery of “But no sleight of hand can mask the inherent dangers of his policies. If they are not his undoing, they might well be America’s.“ This nonsense feeds the hysterical fringe that this paper is finding out the hard way is just a small segment of our local newspaper-reading population.
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