{"id":4759,"date":"2009-05-11T06:45:27","date_gmt":"2009-05-11T11:45:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4759"},"modified":"2009-05-11T06:45:27","modified_gmt":"2009-05-11T11:45:27","slug":"hopeless-stasis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4759","title":{"rendered":"Hopeless Stasis"},"content":{"rendered":"

After running a campaign that harped on “vision”, Obama’s administration desperately lacks it:<\/a><\/p>\n

President Barack Obama is about as visionary as the guy who invented Dippin’ Dots, Ice Cream of the Future. Far from sketching out a truly forward-looking set of policies for the 21st century, as his supporters had hoped, Obama is instead serving up cryogenically tasteless and headache-inducing morsels from years gone by.On issue after issue, Obama has made it clear that instead of blasting past “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long,” (as he promised in his inaugural address), he’s moving full speed ahead toward policy prescriptions that already had less fizz than a case of Billy Beer back when Jimmy Carter was urging us all to wear sweaters and turn down our thermostats. Instead of thinking outside the box, Obama is nailing it shut from the inside.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My theory – and I’ll stand by it – is that much of Obama’s electorate is too young or too complacent about politics to know that “different from Bush” isn’t really “different” in the great scheme of things.<\/p>\n

Obama’s big schtick so far seems to be counting on populist Macguffins\u00a0 <\/a>both vague (“hope and change”) and specific (“green jobs”, “raising taxes on the wealthy”, “high speed trains”) for his actual policy substance:<\/p>\n

Consider the president’s recent “major” speech about transportation, yet another Castro-like exhortation in which Obama boldly rejected the failed policies of the past in favor of the failed policies of the future.<\/p>\n

“Our highways are clogged with traffic,” he noted, before unveiling his big fix: Shiny new trains that go almost twice as fast as cars. Forget that, as urban historian Joel Garreau has long documented, our country has been decentralizing its living and working patterns for decades now, migrating from virtually all urban centers (except maybe for booming Washington, D.C.) to relatively low-density suburbs. In a big, spread-out country where individualized service at the coffee stand, on cable TV, and in your computer is the new normal, our chief visionary officer is talking about a one-size-fits-all solution that will surely bomb even bigger than NBC’s Supertrain.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s an axiom of economics that “making someone pay more or less for a good or service than they would on their own causes grievous unexpected consequences”.\u00a0 I suspect that the same holds true for trying to chivvy, shame or coerce people into living where they ordinarily won’t would work about the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After running a campaign that harped on “vision”, Obama’s administration desperately lacks it: President Barack Obama is about as visionary as the guy who invented Dippin’ Dots, Ice Cream of the Future. Far from sketching out a truly forward-looking set of policies for the 21st century, as his supporters had hoped, Obama is instead serving […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-president-obama","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4759\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}