It good to know I’m not the only one drawing this conclusion these days….
What we’re seeing in Washington these days is beginning to look like Jimmy Carter II.
Carter, like Barack Obama, started out with the idea of stimulating the economy.
His plan was to give every taxpayer $50, then throw in a few billion for tax cuts and public works programs. Simple, right? Wrong: In Washington, this soon became very complicated. Within a month, the package grew from $20 billion to more than $31 billion — a significant amount in the 1970s.
Ah, those were the days. Elitist liberal miscreants like Obama pissed away mere billions instead of trillions.
Obama is losing momentum and spending political capital as fast as stimulus dollars. Will he change course?
In April of his first year in office, Carter finally threw up his hands and scrapped the whole idea. He had dithered for four months. He had nothing to show for the effort. By then he was fatally diminished, his authority substantially eroded.
With the Obama administration, a similar unraveling is well under way and gathering momentum. Voters are increasingly restive. The country is souring on Obama’s gargantuan policy ambitions. The sense is growing that he has grossly overplayed his hand.
Regrettably, I think Obama is more committed than Carter was to government engorgement of the private sector. Let’s not underestimate of the damage Obama, Reid, Pelosi and their posse are prepared to perpetrate on America.
Like Carter, Obama looks increasingly like a president out of step with the times. Like Carter, there is a large gap between what voters expected based on the measured and moderate tone of his campaign and what began unfolding after his inauguration. Obama ran as a centrist, but he is governing from the left.
Surprise! (not)
In an NPR poll, a plurality of Americans opposed Obama’s health care efforts. In a recent Rasmussen poll, those who strongly disapproved of the president’s performance outnumbered those who strongly supported him by 11 percentage points.
Immaterial. Obama is smarter than we are and knows what’s best for us. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Many legitimately fear that if not stopped, Obama and the Democratic Congress will take this country well beyond the point where the public sector starts to “squeeze the life” out of the economy.
Too late. I believe we’re calling it the Great Recession.
It’s not too late for Obama to make a major adjustment. Bill Clinton’s initial months were equally turbulent. He was savvy enough to make a mid-course correction — but it came only after the election of a Republican Congress. On his present course, Obama is making that eventuality increasingly likely.
Then again, Bill Clinton was a fiscal conservative, compared to Obama and Bush.
Progressives talk as if the country is turning against the President because we suddenly woke up this week to how much we hate Black people.
Nonsense, the country voted for a Black man BECAUSE he was Black. We didn’t vote for his policies – nobody knew what they were and didn’t much care. We wanted a Black President for purposes of symbolism, like wearing a colored ribbon or wristband. Doesn’t mean we’re willing to lay down our children’s lives for breast cancer research, only that we support the general idea in a vague, not-very-committed way.
Let’s admit it – the vast majority of the people who voted for Barak Obama were not looking for a savior, we wanted a Token Black to fill an Affirmative Action slot so we could feel good about ourselves being so post-racial and all. Let him sit in the big chair and fly around in the cool jet, sure, but that’s all we were prepared to do. We were looking for photo ops; we weren’t prepared to have him totally make over the country in the fashion of some third-world dictator.
That’s why there’s pushback to his policies. It’s not that he’s a Black man. It’s that he’s a going way beyond what we expected of him, down a path we never expected to explore. Nationalizing the largest industries in the country might be a grand idea, but let us get used to it a little at a time, okay?
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