The Democrats seem to have given up on budgets. Hey, who can blame them? They’ve got a ballpark figure: Let’s raise $2 trillion in revenue every year, and then spend $4 trillion. That seems to work pretty well, so why get hung up on a lot of fine print? Harry Reid says the Senate has no plans to produce a budget, but in April the president did give a speech about “a new budget framework” that he said would save $4 trillion over the next twelve years.
That would be 2023, if you’re minded to take him seriously. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, did. Last week he asked Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, if he’d “estimated the budget impact of this framework.”
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“No, Mr. Chairman,” replied Director Elmendorf, deadpan. “We don’t estimate speeches. We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech.”
“We don’t estimate speeches”: There’s an epitaph to chisel on the tombstone of the republic. Unfortunately for those of us on the receiving end, giving speeches is what Obama does. Indeed, having no other accomplishments to his name (as Hillary Clinton pointed out), giving speeches is what got the president his job. You remember — the stuff about “hope” and “change.” Were the CBO in the business of “estimating speeches,” they’d have run the numbers and concluded that under the Obama plan, vague abstract nouns would be generating 87 percent of GDP by 2016.
For whatever reason, it didn’t work out quite like that. But that’s no reason not to give another speech. So there he was the other night expounding on Afghanistan. Unlike Douglas Elmendorf, the Taliban do estimate speeches, and they correctly concluded from the president’s 2009 speech that all they need to do is run out the clock and all or most of the country will be theirs once more. Last week’s update confirmed their estimate. “Winning” is not in Obama’s vocabulary. Oh, wait. That’s not true. In an earlier unestimated speech, he declared he was committed to “winning the future,” “winning the future” at some unspecified time in the future being a lot easier than winning the war. In fairness, it’s been two-thirds of a century since America has unambiguously won a war, but throughout that period most presidents were at least notionally committed to the possibility of victory. Obama seems to regard the very concept as something boorish and vulgar that would cause him embarrassment if it came up at dinner parties. So place your bets on how long it will be before Mullah Omar’s back in town. And then ask yourself if America will have anything to show for its decade in Afghanistan that it wouldn’t have had if it had just quit two weeks after toppling the Taliban in the fall of 2001 and left the mullahs, warlords, poppy barons, and pederasts to have at each other without the distraction of extravagant NATO reconstruction projects littering their beautiful land of charmingly unspoilt rubble.
That’s not how the president put it, of course. But then the delightful appeal of an Obama speech is the ever wider gulf between Speechworld and Reality. So in this instance he framed our retreat from the Hindu Kush as an excellent opportunity to stop wasting money overseas and start wasting even more in Washington. Or in his words:
“America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.”
Gee, thanks. If America were a Kandahar wedding, that would be the cue to fire your rifle in the air and grab the cutest nine-year-old boy. Naturally, not everyone sees eye to eye. Like Afghanistan, ours is a fractious land. But as Obama said:
“Our nation draws strength from our differences, and when our union is strong, no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach.”
Climb ev’ry mountain. Ford ev’ry stream.
Are you sure we can afford ev’ry stream? Yes, it’s far less rugged than it sounds. In compliance with EPA regulations, no real hills and dales were harmed in the making of this glib rhetorical imagery.
“At his best,” wrote the New York Times of Obama’s speech, “the president can be hugely persuasive.”
Obama is not, and was never intended to be the de facto President of the United States of Amercia.
Sure, most politicians are servants in one way or another of their donors and political patrons, but I am more convinved than I was in 2008 that Obama is a "sock puppet," some one has their hand up somewhere making his lips move.
To extend this notion further, that puppeteer WAS, in my opinion Ted Kennedy. A Boston/Chicago machine alliance. I think the astounding utter failure of the Obama presidency can be explained fully by the absence of Kennedy. Obama has been left to be, well, Obama. Big hat, no cattle, cranking out the equivilent of oral exams on left-wing orthodoxy -- all he really knows to do.
You have found your niche Mr. Steyn. Please never abandon the writing style you have recently developed. If things get tough, let us know, we'll find more money for you somehow.
Nothing better than fact-based snark! Cuts through the bulls**t like a knife. This Midwestern mom is among your biggest fans. You are a jewel in the crown of conservatism. Thank you for an excellent piece.
It's too bad that Speechworld is going to beat Realworld because the GOP refuses to exploit weakness.
The budget debate would be different if every Republican politician started every answer to every media question with "well as you know Katie, the Democrats haven't submitted a budget in 700 & some odd days, not even when they controlled Congress. . ." In Realworld, many Americans are not cognizant of this fact because the media will not report it - unless forced to.
Instead we hang Ryan (and Gov. Walker) out to dry. BRILLIANT!
I am reading The Forgotten Man about the depression.
It is uncanny how the same "solutions" we are trying today were used then and made the suffering last for a decade.
We learn nothing from history. We listen to the rhetoric the way we were soothed by Roosevelt's fireside chats while he was destroying all that was good in this country.
Does Obama know and is he willfully doing the destroying or does he have no clue and think this will work? I know which I think it is.
But the worst is that intelligent Americans still believe in him the way desolate Americans continued to believe in Roosevelt. That is seriously dangerous. The fact that Obama still has a 43% approval rating despite what he has caused and there are so many who continue to blame Bush, etc. is the danger.
As history repeats itself from FDR to Obama, so Steyn continues to repeat himself with another brilliant column.
When I was in Afghanistan, I had the opportunity to ask a General officer what we were doing to help the Afghans build up their infrastructure. He mentioned that they have a hydroelectric plant (one!) and that we were building lots of roads.
It struck me that the problem of nation-building is this: You have to simultaneously develop three things, and they all have to get as far as they possibly can. You have to have 1) Internal security, so you can prevent the destruction of 2) transportation and power generation infrastructure. But it's all irrelevant if you don't have 3) the tax base to pay for it, be it industry, trade, labor, or selling raw materials.
With Afghanistan, although we're spending tons of money building their infrastructure, the government doesn't have the tax base to maintain it, nor the ability to maintain internal security. We would have to maintain Coalition forces there until Afghanistan becomes a developed nation, if we wanted to keep them from reverting.
A lot of our (non-combat) efforts in Afghanistan have gone into trying to help the Afghans find something marketable about their country. Agricultural teams have tried to get the locals started growing Saffron, which is a high-dollar spice. We've have mineral deposit evaluations that speculate that there's lots of... SOMEthing in the soil that would be worth it to dig out. But without internal security, neither of those is worth trying.
I felt, when I was there (and I still feel) that we could "win" the war in Afghanistan, but it would require a multi-decadal commitment to maintaining security in the country. Given the fiscal situation at home, I'm no longer sure it's the best investment of defense funding and personnel.
Mr. Steyn, you continue to make me laugh, but in a serious way...
When half of the population is either ignorant or dependent, a good speech tips the balance in their favor. I'm tired of it and propose a new cap & trade solution. That is, cap the number of statists, and offer them in trade with other countries. We'll give two dependent deadbeats (guaranteed to vote for bigger government) and a power-hungry leftist for each productive citizen who wants to work and contribute in a free society.
There are two types of speakers. When the first finishes people say, "How well he spoke." This is the New York Times describing Barack Obama. When the second type finishes people say, "Let's march!" Somehow "Let me make this perfectly clear..." does not move me to put my boots on. Obama really only has one speech. The subject changes. The rhythm and cadence remain the same. Besides "Yes we can!" has there been another memorable line?
"Indeed, having no other accomplishments to his name (as Hillary Clinton pointed out), giving speeches is what got the president his job"
And just think an unfortunate majority voted for this man. That speaks volume about how far we have declined.
Mr. Steyn - The validity and truth that you put forth (in a very entertaining and humorous way) does little but harsh the buzz of the Obamaites who want to do the see no, hear no problems. It's all good just as long as our dear leader keeps reassuring them that there is nothing to see here.
Steyn is as great as Obama isn't (and that's REALLY great!).
That one can be an 'intelligent' American and continue to believe in Obama and his platform is debatable. That anyone who does so is intellectually lazy is the given.
Intelligent people aren't by definition intelligent about all things or are at all times intelligent - like a poison ivy remedy, it only helps if it's applied to the problem at hand.
The US populace of thinking Americans in 2011 breaks into two camps as cleanly as a saltine cracker - those who hope for the future because they believe there are still enough Americans capable of 'thinking for themselves, using requisite norms and standards to discern basic truths', and those who despair for the future because they believe that said Americans have dwindled to too small a number to carry the day and save this country from permanent decline. Nov 2012 is our Battle of Midway and our beach at Normandy, all rolled into one - God save us.
At his best (most effective),Obama can be hugely manipulative.
That's what got him into office -- shifty, manipulative, rhetoric about hopey-changey and "Vote for me, or you're a racist."
And now that he's in office, he means to put in force all his own personal biases and animosities -- trashing Great Britain and Israel and rewarding his cronies and pets with big bucks. He's a small, small, tiny person with a small, small idea of what it is to be President.
@freedom: "But the worst is that intelligent Americans still believe in him..."
I don't happen to think they're very intelligent - no matter how high their IQ or how many sheepskins or accolades are hanging on their walls. Otherwise, an excellent comment.
@Chad: I love it! It even shows that some of us conservatives are pro-immigration! As long as we're pro-emigration, too. ;)
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