‘The way I think about it,” Barack Obama told a TV station in Orlando, “is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft.”
He has a point. This is a great, great country that got so soft that 53 percent of electors voted for a ludicrously unqualified chief executive who would be regarded as a joke candidate in any serious nation. One should not begrudge a man who seizes his opportunity. But one should certainly hold in contempt those who allow him to seize it on the basis of such flaccid generalities as “hope” and “change”: That’s more than “a little” soft. “He’s probably the smartest guy ever to become president,” declared presidential historian Michael Beschloss the day after the 2008 election. But you don’t have to be that smart to put one over on all the smart guys. “I’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. I’m an Obama Sap,” admits David Brooks, the softest touch at the New York Times. Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek, now says of the president: “He wasn’t ready, it turns out, really.”
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If you’re a tenured columnist at the New York Times, you can just about afford the consequences of your sappiness. But out there among the hundreds of thousands of your readers who didn’t know you were a sap until you told them three years later, soft choices have hard consequences. If you’re one of Obama’s core constituencies, the ones who looked so photogenic at all the hopeychangey rallies, things are really hard: “Young Becoming ‘Lost Generation’ Amid Recession” (CBS News). Tough luck, rubes. You got a bumper sticker; he got to make things worse.
But don’t worry, it’s not much better at the other end of the spectrum: “Obama’s Wall Street Donors Look Elsewhere” (UPI). Gee, aren’t you the fellows who, when you buy a company, do something called “due diligence”? But you sunk everything into stock in Obamania Inc. on the basis of his “perfectly creased pant leg” or whatever David Brooks was drooling about that day? You handed a multi-trillion-dollar economy to a community organizer and you’re surprised that it led to more taxes, more bureaucracy, more regulation, more barnacles on an already rusting hulk?
Hard statism is usually murmured in soft, soothing, beguiling terms: Regulation is about cleaner air, healthier restaurants, safer children’s toys. Sounds so nice. But federal regulation alone sucks up 10 percent of GDP. That’s to say, Americans take the equivalent of the Canadian economy and toss it down the toilet just in complying with federal paperwork. Obama and the great toxic alphabet soup of federal regulation — EPA, OSHA, SEC, DHSS — want to take that 10 percent and crank it up to 12, 14, 15 percent.
Who could have foreseen that? The most dismal thing about that David Brooks column conceding that “yes, I’m a sap . . . remember, I’m a sap . . . as you know, I’m a sap” was the headline his New York Times editors chose to append to it: “Obama Rejects Obamaism.”
In other words, even in a column remorselessly cataloguing how one of its smartest smart guys had been repeatedly suckered by Obama on jobs, on Medicare, on deficits, on tax reform, etc., the New York Times chose to insist that there is still something called “Obamaism” — prudent, centrist, responsible — that for some perverse reason the man for whom this political philosophy is named insists on betraying, 24/7, week in, month out, spring, summer, autumn, tax season. You can set your clock by Obama’s rejection of “Obamaism.”
That’s because there’s no such thing. There never was. “Obamaism” was the Emperor’s new centrism: To a fool such as your average talk-radio host, His Majesty appears to be a man of minimal accomplishments other than self-promotion marinated in a radical faculty-lounge view of the world and the role of government. But, to a wise man such as your average presidential historian or New York Times columnist, he is the smartest guy ever to become president.
Mr.Obama is the "snooze-button" for self-absorbed millions in this country; why get to work now. I don't feel like being responsible and besides, someone else will take care of the "busy work" that is really beneath my dignity. Gosh, they are lucky to have me...zzzzZz
I don't listen to what our president says any longer. (In fact I quit listening to him some time ago).
I have four grandchildren that make more sense than he does.
However; he is right that America has gone soft. We have become (if you will allow "we" to represent the majority) an entitlement SEEKING nation.
Is there a sane way to end this malady? Short of an all consuming national emergency, (no not a depression) like WWII where our actual physical survival was on the table, I'm not certain there is a crisis that will get through to the parasitic clingers that refuse to accept the notion that the host is about bled dry.
Just look at the performance of our political leaders during this last (and I believe continuing) recession. We had to fight tooth and nail to prevent economic martial law. Do you think Obama would have stopped at the car companies and banks had he had a free hand?
We need to be hard again. Deliver the bad news, toss the free loaders off the national teet (their numbers both as individuals and corporate entities are legion) loosen the noose on business and defy the national crybabies (mainstream media) to write anything they want.
While I agree that we need to reduce the people's dependence on government, I believe something else is even more important: Many of our fellow citizens--including economic professors at respected universities--believe that the government can "create jobs." We need a paradign shift in our culture where such nonsense is recognized for what it is and where the majority understands that government is, by nature, parasitic, that our problems cannot be solved by more taxes and "shovel ready programs," and that the biggest impediment to growth and recovery is our own government. As the Gipper once said, "government isn't the solution; government is the problem."
"IN THE PRESENT CRISIS, government is not the solution, government is the problem."
Reagan never said, and likely never believed, that government is NEVER the solution.
I mean seriously. Where would we be without the National Weather Service, DARPA (whose research into computer networks led to the Internet), the Centers for Disease Control, the Interstate Highway System, or the National Airspace System (air traffic control)? Those are all government programs.
BTW, both my own home state of MA and other states like CA, benefited enormously from Reagan's military buildup. Tens of thousands of jobs were created, at Raytheon, Hughes Aircraft, Rockwell, Bath Iron Works, etc.
I remember. As an engineer, I had more job offers from some of these companies than I knew what to do with.
Carl W, if your grandchildren "make more sense than he does," that means someone had the wisdom to keep them out of the public "education" cesspool. A tip of my hat to whoever had the smarts to make that decision!
If parts of America are soft it is because our ever increasing "euro-social-nanny state" policies. These policies are like a cancer attacking various parts of our socio-economic body. Under the Obama Administration the “social justice” cancer is metastasizing.
Statist, crony capitalism has never been worse. I own a small business and see so many other firms who organize their strategies around a government play. Some of it is legit, such offering services to government. But the cancerous form of it though is where firms organize their business models around government programs or tax benefits. That distorts and misallocates resources. Why did GE pay no income taxes last year? It was because they devoted resources to business lines favored by government and not necessarily the market.
I guess this is rational in some way. But at the same time it is highly corrosive to our economic foundation – even if the government programs have “merit”.
As Carl so aptly notes, we can solve our economic (and I dare say social) problems by restraining governmental intervention (spending and regulation) and embrace freedom. Our economic engine is not dead yet. Let’s “loosen the noose”.
Just think, if Ann Durham had taken up with a foreign exchange student from any place other than Africa, our current POTUS would probably be teaching political science or sociology at some forgotten community college.
Without a cool name and a tan skin tone, he's just another guy reading the Nation, listening to "All Things Considered" and pontificating about externalities.
Ah! MikeB chiming in with what passes for a cogent argument from the left. And what kind of idiot names a baby girl "Stanley"?
Answer: a communist idiot.
I think he was being charitable.
Aren't we sensitive. Does it matter, or change the reality because he got her "little" name wrong? Hey let's attack something "little" and meaningless so we can ignore the real issue, Obama's competence. Speaking of little things, have you seen junior's grades yet?
Gee, Denroy, you think Lawdawg's comment was directed toward Obama's competence as opposed to, um, his race?
Lawdawg's got that third-rate-school chip on his shoulder. If Lawdawg had half the pegigree Obama has, Lawdawg would know that affirmative action simply can't get you elected president of HLR or appointed to an adjunct gig at a national law school. As between Obama and Lawdawg, one of them has the chops.
Well he did a get a pass because of his race - although in reality the press is in the tank for any democratic candidate anyway. The funny part is I pretty much predicted what he would do, based upon where he came from.
But I guess I'm just not as smart as Matthews, Brooks and history profs. Which means I will continue to ignore most of what they say except as a check on what is probably wrong.
I don't know whether he is smart or not. He may be super smart - see all the damage he has done in line with his desires. I just never realized pant's creases were a very accurate indicator.
MikeyB believes in predestination. If you go to the “right” school you are automatically intelligent and worthy. If you went to a third rate college, you are stuck forever and nothing you say or do has any value.
MikelyB, I suspect, went to an Ivy League college and so he deems himself qualified to pass judgment on the intelligence of the posters here. Yet, he is himself an intellectual lightweight. His posts basically consist of snarky comments and straw man arguments. Discussing the intellectual content of MikeyB’s posts is sort of like discussing the club scene at the Vatican or the hunting scene in San Francisco, it simply doesn’t exist.
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