“Junkie and pusher”

posted at 9:02 am on May 2, 2009 by Pundette
[ Obama ]   

Obama is open about his desire to “remake America.” But he’s less than forthright about what he wants to make it into, and even less so on how he will accomplish his grand changes. Yet outside of conservative circles he attracts little questioning or criticism. Mark Steyn believes that Obama’s magic lies in his ability to look moderate and act radical, but not so much through his vaunted oratory, which is “frankly a bit of a snoozeroo”:

That uptilted chin combined with the left-right teleprompter neck swivel you can set your watch by makes him look like an emaciated Mussolini umpiring an endless rally of high lobs on Centre Court at Wimbledon.

It may be, rather, the pose of thoughtfulness, that has gotten Obama where he is:

The thoughtful look suckered many of my more impressionable conservative comrades last fall, when David Brooks and Christopher Buckley were cranking out gushing paeans to Obama’s “first-class temperament” – temperament being to the Obamacons what Nick Jonas’ hair is to a Tiger Beat reporter.

Steyn lures us in with the humor but his readers know the painful truth is coming. Obama’s goal is to make us want to be taken care of:

In its boundless ambition, the Left understands that the character of a people can be transformed: British, Canadian and European elections are now about which party can deliver “better services,” as if the nation is a hotel, and the government could use some spritelier bellhops. Socialized health care in particular changes the nature of the relationship between citizen and state into something closer to junkie and pusher.

How well this meshes with Michael Grunwald’s TIME article of April 2. Though he enthusiastically embraces his new master, Grunwald reveals more than one might expect from a supporter. It’s quite damning:

President Obama is still relying on behavioral science. But now his Administration is using it to try to transform the country. Because when you know what makes people tick, it’s a lot easier to help them change. [emphasis added]

Obama and his “behavioral dream team” are focusing on “creating social norms” by taking advantage of the our “inertia”:

The Administration hopes to harness our inertia with its automatic pension plan, a major step toward universal savings accounts, and by dramatically simplifying applications for federal tuition aid. Its push to computerize health-care records — another big-ticket stimulus item — could make generic drugs and cost-effective procedures our default treatments. And seniors who don’t select health-care or drug plans could be automatically enrolled in low-cost options. “It would be nice if we all behaved like supercomputers, but that’s not how we are,” Orszag says.

You see, we have so many bad habits, and we’re so weak, we can’t break them without “help”:

In fact, Obama is betting his presidency on our ability to change our behavior. His top priorities — the economy, health care and energy — all depend on it. We need to spend more money now to avert a short-term depression, then save more money later to secure our long-term economic future. We need to consume less energy in order to reduce our oil imports and carbon emissions as well as our household expenses. We need to quit smoking, lay off the Twinkies and avoid other risky behaviors that both damage our personal health and boost the costs of care that are ravaging the nation’s fiscal health. Basically, we need to make better choices — about mortgages and credit cards, insurance and retirement plans — so we won’t need bailouts down the road.

The problem, as anyone with a sweet tooth, an alcoholic relative or a maxed-out Visa card knows, is that old habits die hard. Temptation is strong. We are weak. We’ve got plenty of gurus, talk-show hosts and celebrity spokespeople badgering us to save energy, lose weight and live within our means, but we’re still addicted to oil, junk food and debt. It’s fair to ask whether we’re even capable of changing.

Eating a Twinkie is a risky behavior. Think about that for a minute.

Much can be accomplished by creating policies that take advantage of the human inclination to follow, conform, and take the easy way. It’s the beauty of the default option:

This is why default options pack such power. Most of us will save for retirement, run our computers in energy-efficient mode and be organ donors if we have to take action to say no — but not if we have to take action to say yes. Almost nobody signed up for a German utility’s clean-energy plan until it became the default, and then 94% stuck with it. We’re also much likelier to go to the doctor for preventive care like flu shots if the appointment is made for us. In a speech last year, Orszag even suggested charging us for doctor’s appointments unless we take action to cancel, though he conceded that might sound “a little crazy at first blush or even second blush.”

Right. Completely crazy, until it happens. But I digress.

The default option not only appeals to our laziness; its existence implies that it is the better choice. And down the road, when so few opt out of it, the “option” part goes poof, and the “better choice” turns into the only choice, i.e., a requirement.

Thus, with nudges and passive acceptance, social norms are created, and the character of a people is changed.

Another minor case in point on achieving the appearance of moderation: Charles Krauthammer notes that Obama is entirely candid when he tells us that he doesn’t want to run a car company. We may debate this, but when Obama states it, it sounds entirely plausible, which is what matters. And while he’s pacifying the sheep with his apparent lack of desire to run GM, he’s planning a coup on his big three: health, education, and energy. And in effect, says CK, he portrays himself as a “small government guy” when in reality he’s all about big government.

It may be an obvious sham to conservatives, but it’s playing well enough at present to allow him to keep rolling along until something goes terribly wrong, or the US becomes, writes Steyn, “just another sclerotic Euro-style social democracy, and even your more excitable jihadi won’t be able to jump up and down chanting ‘Death to the Great Satan!’ with a straight face.”

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