Obama & Co., Growing Up Fast Obama and his EU counterparts are learning that high-minded adolescence makes for bad governance. But it’s an expensive lesson.
Old laws predicated on human nature cannot so easily be discarded — even by utopians who think they have the power to cool the planet and stop the rising seas. Borrowed money really has to be paid back. Governments cannot operate without confidentiality. Nations perish if they cannot protect themselves from existential threats. Watching a therapeutic Barack Obama grow up and learn these tragic lessons is as enlightening as it is sometimes scary.
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When they are out of power, modern leftists advocate massive government spending and large deficits. They applaud when Republicans and conservatives sometimes prove as profligate as any big-government liberal. But when invested with the responsibility of governance, they come to understand that Keynesian “stimulus” must eventually cede to the same unhappy logic as the private household’s indebtedness.
Maxing out credit cards does not exempt one from having to pay off the balance. Low or nonexistent interest on debt does not mean the principal vanishes. We are reminded that debt is real with the ongoing meltdown of the European Union, as a bloated public sector from the Atlantic to the Aegean demands that someone, somewhere cover its debts.
Here in America the same fiscal rules have not disappeared. In California, Governor-elect Jerry Brown will have few choices in January 2011. Since he cannot raise taxes much in a state that already has the nation’s highest income and sales taxes, he can only find a way to cut expenditures. He must then either finesse such reductions with a sort of green philosophy of “small is better” or plead that his reactionary predecessor gave him, a compassionate liberal, no choice. Either way, the creditors and bondholders must be paid. Even Barack Obama, after spending $1.3 trillion more this year than the government took in, now seeks to save a few billion dollars by freezing federal wages.
In short, from Sacramento to Athens the world is reminded that obligations, despite in-vogue euphemisms like “stimulus” and “Keynesian,” really do have to be met. There is an iron law that transcends politics and limits the application of fiscal liberalism: Print more money and money becomes less valuable; default just once and all future credit is lost or intolerably expensive.
In a similar way, the WikiLeaks mess reminds us of the adolescence of crusading freelance leakers and their enablers. This time the disclosures are not morality tales about Vietnam or Guantanamo. They concern a tough Hillary Clinton urging her State Department subordinates to spy on United Nations personnel. Barack Obama is not seen calling for the planet to cool, but is shown as so desperate to keep his promise to shut down Guantanamo that he is reduced, in tawdry fashion, to horse-trading photo-ops with the leader of any small country willing to take a detainee or two off his hands. In other words, those who once sermonized about the morality of leaking the Pentagon Papers and details of U.S. policy in the war on terror are now seeing that a let-it-all-hang-out transparency can be nihilistic rather than liberating. Will Hollywood now follow Rendition, Redacted, and In the Valley of Elah with a hagiographic treatment of WikiLeaks?
Likewise, the notion that “civil liberties” were sacrificed in the effort to stop Islamist terrorism increasingly is shown to be a liberal talking point, not a serious criticism of responsible wartime government. Barack Obama conceded that argument when he flipped on every pre-presidential critique he had made of George W. Bush’s protocols. At one time or another, Obama, as law professor, state legislator, senator, and presidential candidate, had ridiculed the Patriot Act, wiretaps, renditions, military tribunals, the Iraq War, Predator strikes, and Guantanamo.
Always informative, another concise view on the consequences of elections. Thanks VDH! One thing I question is whether or not Barry has ever been a "law professor"". I have researched this and can only find evidence that he was never a professor of law at least at U of Chicago where the lame-stream claims he was. Any help on this?
The current disaster shows the stupidity of electing another empty suit to power.
The answer to the question about Barry's supposed 'professorship' is that he was a guest lecturer. Not a professor.
I agree that Obama's visions are adolescent. But I don't think he's "learning" that deficits must be paid, or that military realities are necessary to attain goals he now discovers he shares with conservatives.
Obama is a movement socialist. In the tradition of the Gamaliel Foundation, the Midwest Academy, Clowar/Piven, Saul Alinsky, Michael Harrington, Peter Dreier and the host of other hard-core socialist with whom Obama has consorted and worked his entire career, it is the pan to destroy what they perceive as a rotten-to-the-core American system. Unsustainable deficts are good in this formulation, because they wil collapse the system, making way for the proletariat to rise up and embrace socialism. Obama is only not embracing defeat abroad because he knows it would put an end to what is left of his political pwoer and chances for re-election. Otherwise, he would embrace military defeat with the same relish he hastens economic collapse.
He's not evil. He is massively deluded. But that delusion causes him to be deeply commited to wrecking ("fundamentally transforming") as much of American as we have known it as he can, as quickly as possible. He's not learning grown up lessons. He is simply adjusting to political realities to stay in power and finish what he has started.
I hope the voters are learning grown up lessons, though.
In a world when the government’s power (federal or in states like California) to redistribute wealth was weak—not so long ago—the number of voters wanting to elect socialists was few.
Now that the cast of collectivists have inherited the progressive usurpation of power to command and control business, energy, healthcare, and our wallets, whose only apparent master is the hegemony of unions—in the states where they rule—then their voters will not make them grow up, reverse their course and rectify their errors, but will push them further in deliberately rigging the political patronage system of picking winners and losers.
I am concerned with wether or not the actions being taken by Mr. Obama can be undone. Is there any way for us to cease the downward spiral from liberty to socialism? Can we as a nation recover to the glory of a republic, or will we simply fall apart? Will the federal government fail, and the states group together into smaller weaker countries? How long, truly, do we have to prepare before we must worry about a ground invasion by the more than one billion people who wish us to do nothing more than "submit?" This is my fear. Our country needs Medic-alert. We have fallen, and we cannot get back up.
He's a monument to fecklessness, and the pedestal he is on is being raised day by day.
Our young President, and the people he's surrounded himself with, cannot verifiably be attributed any learning from the past two years. All the moves mentioned could conceivably be seen as advanced political maneuvering, meant to maintain power.
There really has been no evidence he's separated himself from the ideologues, or the ideologies he's clung to in the face of contrary historical, empirical facts, throughout his known life.
A large part of "growing up" is learning to deal with the harder facts. I just don't see this in the "Administration", or the President. I hope I'm wrong.
Adolescence is an excellent analogy for the administration's ostentatious embrace of high-mindedness - it's just more of the classic resentment of the teenager towards his parents; he demands freedom from responsibility while at the same time insisting that mom and dad provide his infrastructure of food, shelter, health care, college education, and so on.
Taken on the national scale, then - as you've pointed out in the past - the parents become the ubiquitous "Them" and "They" who are to be blamed for practically every ill, e.g., the oceans have not receded and radical Islam still hates us? I can just hear Obama saying, "There are those who say that the oceans have not receded, and Radical Islam still hates us, but we must not give in to the voices of cynicism", etc. etc.
Shall the tiger change his stripes, or the leopard his spots? More chance of that than that Obama will abandon his leftist world view. To counter this depressing thought we have only the manifest awakening of the people at the core of the republic (i.e., outside of coastal California and downstate New York) to the inadequacies of this administration.
If the only operative factor in our future were the Executive Branch, utter desperation would be in order. However, as the new House of Representatives undertakes serious oversight, and takes away the purse strings, the administration will lose much of its ability to destroy our heritage and compromise our security.
I agree with other commenters that Obama is not learning grown up lessons. He is merely adjusting to realities. I think what drives him even more than his ideology is his narcissistic quest for power that he believes he deserves.
Also, it's a sad shame that the person elected president has such a shady past that we can't even say for sure if he was a professor, guest lecturer, or simply on retainer while he finished his book about himself.
"on retainer while he finished his book about himself."
While true, I feel strangely compelled to point out that the retainer had been given to him by a publisher for a book not about himself, but on another topic entirely. When he delivered his book, the publisher decided to go ahead and publish it, despite the fact that it was not what they had asked for.
No big revelation....Thomas Jefferson said the same thing about Alexander Hamiliton...hes' for the rich...national bank is bad...wants to circumvent the Constitution - what does Jefferson do after he becomes president? Exonerates Hamilton of wrong doing..then, circumvents the Constitution and makes the Louisiana Purchase.
How can BHO "grow up" if he has had no training, background or experience in Leadership?
He is already a "mature" liberal progressive and he is incapable of changing his "skin" or his "spots!"
Were it not for the Congressional Republicans he would have had us out Frenching the French by now.
We might also add the outrageousness of choosing the TSA peep show scanners or feel-your-private-parts frisk. Only people who have no moral dignity left would think this is acceptable to submit our women and children to this kind of sexualization of the public. In the future -- no, now -- everybody will be molested for 15 seconds. This is all courtesy of the crude adolescent values and logic that are the foundation of liberal thought embodied in the Democrats.
Watching Obama "learn the Presidency" is like watching a 20 year old son deal with a car, an apartment, a job and a sleazy girl friend. Or like being Martin Sheen and having to deal with Charlie Sheen as your son.
It's not pretty, and somebody is going to get hurt.
The Left stumbles about economically like the teenager who can't understand why he has no money in his checking account when he has checks left in his checkbook. It would be comical if it wasn't so costly.
Over the last 4 years, the Democrats have squandered more than 5 $trillion on boondoggle vote buying schemes and, more to the point, squandered the future for an entire generation of Americans. Simply removing them from political power doesn't seem near enough punishment. Still, with their institutionalization of election fraud and control of education, the media, entertainment, and most of the government, we'll be lucky to remove them from power at all.
You guys are sounding completely one-dimensional. Projecting the excesses of the last few decades onto President Obama with your displays of disrespect is exceedingly unbecoming as well as looking extremely desperate. What has happened to civility? Surely, past administrations have no culpability for any present US woes. Isn't that right?
It seems this "administration" is convinced that the American people are too engrossed in pop culture to notice what has happened before it is too late. Wrong.
It seems this "administration" is convinced that the American people are too engrossed in pop culture to notice what has happened before it is too late. Wrong.
