Walls loom in spending haze

A wave of unrest, which began unfurling last fall, washed across the country Wednesday, to the discernible notice of observers in the White House, where a lockdown was ordered, and the noticeable chagrin of the president’s compadres in Congress and his acolytes elsewhere.

Tens of thousands of Americans turned out carrying signs and tossing tea bags – more than 500 people rallied in Staunton and Fishersville – to protest soaring government spending and debt.

Detecting the spatter of discord on the shining garments of Barack Obama, his defenders raced quickly to cleanse the stain of conscious objection principally by dismissing it as the product of right-wing lunacy. This discounts but fails to obfuscate the fact that Democrats as well as Republicans felt unease that eventually stirred to anger when the federal bailout train began rolling last year, all under a Republican administration. The original spending sins are George W. Bush’s, not Obama’s.

But where Dubya opened doors before ambling off to Texas, Obama strode through and opened floodgates. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that debt in the wake of Obama’s stimulus bill and proposed budget will reach $11 trillion by the end of his first term, almost double the debt he inherited and more than triple the debt in 2000.

In Washington, where politicians wear oblivion like an expensive suit, with pride they hope others won’t detect, the public’s simmering disdain for these activities has been meticulously filtered. Some reverent apostles here have latched onto the message. They are recognizable as those who joined opposition to the reassessment in Augusta County – a movement driven by worries about increased taxes – yet were mysteriously miffed that people dared assemble peaceably Wednesday.

Here’s a bit of clarity: The protests were not aimed solely at the spending initiatives of Obama and Democrats. Plenty of Republicans helped make the mess. Nor is federal spending alone the issue, for increased local taxes – like those feared as looming in Augusta – are a concern, too.

Some people wonder and we with them where the end might be for they know there must be one, a point when no more can be spent for there is no more to be spent, when the ink for the money presses goes dry, when the lenders in China and elsewhere have said no for the final time, when the country staggers no more but falls. These are not partisan questions but questions of time, space, dimension and matter: Somewhere out there is a line marking finitude to which government spenders are blind.

Blue-dog Democrats, who stand for fiscal conservatism and, in many respects, for the ideals that once were the herald of their party, know the limits as surely as any Republican does. And there are far too many Republicans who’ve strayed from their party’s ideological roots, as presidential nominee John McCain did in an act that doomed his hopes if ever he had any, advocating last fall’s $700-billion federal banking bailout, along with other so-called rescues to follow.

Obama is one among many elected officials from both parties who hoped the electorate would ignore the excesses. The opposite has happened. As Wednesday’s protesters demonstrated, people now are scrutinizing not only Washington but also the taxing and spending habits of state and local governments. This is the kind of activism that spawned a country. It ought to be neither ignored nor disdained, but heeded.