The Reality of 2011
We are now nearing the third year of the Obama administration. Were those worries of 2008 at all justified? Let us briefly review them in the same order:
In truth, Obama, for all his rhetorical skills and soft-spoken charisma, had little experience in the private sector outside of politics, academia, foundations, and subsidized organizing. Consequently, he did not seem to understand the nature of profit and loss, payrolls, how businesses worked and planned, or much of anything in the private sector.
Obama at times seemed to lack common sense, and perhaps even common knowledge. He appeared confused about everything from the number of U.S. states to the idea that air pressure and “tune-ups” might substitute for new oil exploration. He seemed assured when reading a teleprompted script, and yet lost much of his eloquence when it came to repartee and question and answer.
Were these concerns justified? Let's closely analyze Obama's progress since he has been president.
a) Economy? Obama’s EU-like economic plan is in shambles. Prior to Obama, Keynesians had argued that no one had given them a fair shot since the Depression. But borrowing nearly five trillion in less than three years, near zero interest rates, vastly expanding food stamps and unemployment benefits, absorbing private companies, and issuing vast new financial and environmental regulations turned an anticipated recovery into another near recession.
In any case, Obama’s economic architects of such Keynesian policies — Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, Summers — mysteriously did not last three years. We must now conclude Keynesian economics has been thoroughly discredited.
b) Common sense? 2008 campaign “slips” prefaced things like “corpse-man” and speaking Austrian — perhaps understandable, but not in the media climate of zero media tolerance for “nucular.” Presidents I suppose in the future will have to be taught by handlers not to bow to emperors and kings. Going to our ally Germany to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall was apparently less important than jetting to Copenhagen to lobby for a Chicago Olympics. The 2009 Cairo speech was one of the most factually incorrect speeches in recent presidential history, as almost every assertion was demonstrably false. Well before Solyndra, the secretary of energy quipped that gas prices should reach European levels, that California farms would some day blow away, and that Americans, in essence, could not be trusted to buy the right light bulbs. From “man-made disasters” to “overseas contingency operations” to “my people” and “cowards” to videos assuring that immigration laws will not be enforced, the Obama cabinet is about what one could have predicted back in 2008.
c) Political savvy?
Why federalize health care in the midst of a recession with 10% plus unemployment? Obama promised the public in November 2010 not to raise taxes in a recession; in 2011 he promised instead to raise them a lot. Solyndra seems far worse than Enron, but Fast and Furious perhaps as bad as Iran Contra — except that Americans died in the former (Fast and Furious) and not the latter. In 2010, potential Republican opponents and the Democratic base were worried that Obama would triangulate as Clinton had in 1995; in 2011, most observers are exasperated that he thinks more of what failed in 2010 is the remedy in 2011.
d) Hate or love of the elite?
The hints of the 2008 attraction and distrust of wealth only magnified by 2011. In the midst of “at some point” we have made enough money, of not the time for profits on Wall Street, of “millionaires and billionaires,” of “corporate jets,” of going after everyone from guitar factories to Boeing — in the midst of all that, where do all the all elite vacation spots and golf resorts fit in — along with massive donations from Goldman Sachs and BP? How strange that the more one demonizes the good life that unimaginable riches provide, the more one seems comfortable with the good life that unlimited government subsidizes?
The skeptics of 2008 proved prescient; those who demonized them should be embarrassed. And we should remember that candidates, of both parties, will govern mostly as they campaign. Slips are not indiscretions, but often will prove in hindsight windows of the soul.
Source:
Works and Days » Did 2008 Come True?
