Victor Davis Hanson: Our Obama Saga
I think our Obama’s collective story will some day be written something like this. The leftwing anointed vision of America got stalled with the failures of the Great Society, and the high tax, big government discontent of the 1970s and 1980s.
Abroad after Vietnam, the gospel that America was the problem sputtered out — with the fall of the Soviet Union, the rejoicing in Eastern Europe with the liberation from communism, the market reforms of China, and the general rise of a murderous radical Islam, coupled with the later 9/11 attacks.
In short, doctrinaire liberalism, now to be recast as progressivism, was in trouble. About all that could be hoped for in lieu of ideological governance were entrenched liberal congressional enclaves, which served traditional Democratic constituencies — and offered occasional opposition to conservative excess and corruption of the Abramoff sort.
Jimmy Carter was simply too inept, self-righteous, and inexperienced to retake Rome from the barbarians. A gifted Bill Clinton might have; but he was too savvy for subservience to an unpopular ideology, too enslaved instead to his multifarious appetites and too malleable and worried about Bill Clinton to be a principled avatar of hope and change.
So the media, academia, the unions, the foundations, and the elite on Wall Street kept waiting for the Great Stone Face to appear — the saintly deliverer who would at last have the requisite skill and pedigree to bring a benevolent liberal statism to the unwashed, who for so long in their ignorance and selfish, petty agendas had resisted what was good for them....
So Obama came in, quickly shed his thin centrist exoskeleton, and started in on the long promised bigger government agenda. In short order, we saw the absorption of some of the private sector, attempts at statist healthcare, and appointments that reflected an equality-of-result philosophy, mandated and enforced by a guardian class of Ivy-League technocrats, immune to the protocols they enforced on ignorant others, although, unlike Plato’s overseers, subject to no harsh regimen....
Obama knew little of Middle America and had little desire to learn. His idea of the nuances of the United States was gleaned from the university seminar and the federal payroll. Hyphenated racial-self-identity had always proved lucrative and was not to be abandoned. Postmodern indifference to the truth and facts ensured that much of what the President asserted, in reality, was not merely inaccurate but the exact opposite of what he claimed.
While Obama, the quick study, understood the role of deception, triangulation, and fudging in free-for-all politics, it was nevertheless difficult for him for long to disguise forty years of inculcation. So like a leaky faucet, the drops of an entrenched and rather scary philosophy now and then splashed upon us — Van Jones, Ron Bloom, and Anita Dunn echoed a prevailing ideological landscape.
I confess I am not entirely confident that this third great attempt in the last three decades to become Europe can be so easily stopped (and yet in just 12 months we saw the greatest decline in popularity of any first-year president in poll-recorded history).... The enormous borrowing for a time may spark an inflation-driven expansion timed to coincide with the November election. GDP growth will accelerate while worries about mega-deficits, stagflation, and persistent unemployment will, for a while, be put off to 2011. Much of the TARP money will be released in late summer, and it will create a temporary uplifting effect, analogous to the final binge of a soon to be maxed-out credit card. We also have not quite yet seen the bitter pushback: expect a renewed “Bush did it” offensive, the promiscuous playing of the racial card to stifle dissent, and stimulus money lavished on everyone from train aficionados to solar panel producers. Do not underestimate either the role of the SEIU or Acorn-like groups during registration and balloting in key close run congressional races. Americans have never given up on a president so early. To do so would mean to a majority of voters not merely that they were wrong, but terribly wrong. To admit that is difficult; to admit that so early is terribly difficult.... This election the stakes are not just the particular career of yet another politician, but the very way our United States will fare for a generation. Rarely has the Left so ambitiously and brazenly set out a statist agenda, to radically transform America by establishing such gargantuan deficits that a variety of tax increases to prevent bankruptcy will mean that the nation’s entrepreneurial class will pay between 60 and 65% of their incomes in taxes —“spreading the wealth” in pursuit of “redistributive change.” Since the economy experienced GDP growth over 5% in the last quarter, these record deficits are more than stimulus. They are unabashedly ideological in nature. My only puzzlement is whether Obama is primarily interested in the growing of government per se, so that new millions of loyal constituents can either administer or receive entitlements — or his primary interest is in piling up red-ink to such a degree that record new state income, federal income, payroll, capital gains, and property taxes will radically redistribute income: the entrepreneur will accept that he can keep scarcely 40% of his gross income, and can’t pass on his life’s work without 45-55% in inheritance taxes to a government to redistribute to more “deserving” others, and in despair accept his fate that he is just a cog in the wheel like everyone else. (E.g., So why do the extra work, when the government will take it while alive and after death?)