Victor Davis Hanson: An Honest Obama Campaign

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

Given what we know now, I think Obama’s summer-2008 campaign speeches should have sounded something like this:

The Economy: “Make no mistake about it — we must have critical new investment and government priming to free us from the Bush recession. Therefore, if America is willing to embrace such Keynesian spending, I will promise to keep our unemployment rate below 10 percent, while my team borrows no more than an additional $5 trillion for new shovel-ready stimulus. I envision our national debt rising to no more than $16 trillion over my tenure. I also promise to take over any corporation that explores bankruptcy as a way to default on what it owes its union members and pensioners, who will always have a higher claim than any creditors or Wall Street speculators. I have already talked of spreading the wealth; but as president I promise to extend food stamps to more Americans than at any time in history.”

Foreign Policy: “Hope and change will go abroad as well. America needs a new foreign policy of the sort that I would call ‘leading from behind’ — something my envisioned diplomatic team of Samantha Power and Susan Rice have already worked out. An Obama administration will seek a reset strategy based on apologizing for the Bush imperiousness and accepting America’s declining power and the inevitability of American unpopularity. But that does not mean that I will not, in my first four years of governance, escalate in Afghanistan, keep troops in the lost war in Iraq, and from time to time bomb more Middle Eastern oil-exporting Islamic nations. Some of you may be worried at my supposed inconsistency, but remember that my new interventions will not require congressional approval, because I think my air strikes will be limited in nature.”...