Obama Has Delivered on His Promise

posted at 12:02 pm on August 13, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Fiscal Stimulus ]   

Norman Podhoretz has an illuminating piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. The article asks a question that is on just about every commentator’s lips—“What happened to Obama?”—and then answers it: “Absolutely nothing.”

Podhoretz reprises answers from both the left (Obama veered left when he should have veered further left) and right (Obama is out to sabotage the nation) before delivering his own post mortem, which is that is precisely as advertised in 2008. Podhoretz concludes, somewhat caustically:

[Obama] is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president, and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind.

I agree for the most with Podhoretz’s assessment. In fact, I gave utterance to a similar viewpoint in January of 2010, when I wrote that Obama’s having been forged in the Chicago political machine made it not just difficult but impossible for him to tack right, even when political expedience dictated that course. It is worth recalling Obama’s own words back then, when the first warning signs that the nation was on the verge of economic failure were manifest. The president told his audience at a town hall in Elyria, Ohio:

Now, here’s the message I want you to take away—and we’re going to have a lot of time for questions, but I want to make this absolutely clear. I did not run for President to turn away from these challenges. I didn’t run to kick these challenges down the road. I ran for President to confront them—once and for all.

In the next breath he explained that one of his foremost challenges was “to deal with the problem of runaway health insurance costs that are breaking family budgets and breaking business budgets and breaking our national budgets.”

The next four months in Congress were squandered on a bitter and partisan debate over making the liberal dream of socialized medicine a reality instead of focsued on repairing a broken economy. During this period, the president made occasional cameos to give Americans the illusion that he, and not Congressional leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, was spearheading the charge.

We all know how this battle played out—and what followed. By January of 2011, the imperiled housing market slumped into a full-fledged depression. More recently, America’s AAA debt security rating was downgraded mainly because of this administration’s sharing its predecessor’s appetite for profligate spending.

Yet, the president’s rigidity as a dyed-in-the-wool radical makes it impossible for him to budge. Even as the left grows weary of his speechifying (Podhoretz quotes Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen as saying he cannot “recall a soaring passage from a speech” by Obama), the president heedlessly continues to deliver grandiloquent weekly addresses. This morning’sbegins:

On Thursday, I visited a new, high-tech factory in Michigan where workers are helping America lead the way in a growing clean energy industry.

Sounds swell until you read the fine print. From Weasel Zippers:

Obama’s stimulus granted $300 million to that firm, which created 150 jobs at a cost of $2 million per job. [Emphasis added]

Richard Cohen calls Obama “the very personification of cognitive dissonance.” I say his words and deeds are no more and no less than any clear-thinking rational being expected when he was handed the keys to the country. I say he has made good on his promise to “fundamentally transform” the nation. Just don’t expect it will be that easy to change back.

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• The question about Obama is not “Will he” but “Can he” tack right?

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