When The Man With No Name looks at you dead on, as he did Super Bowl Sunday, and says it’s halftime in America and the country will come roaring back, you know the man speaking those words wasn’t talking about his embrace of the vision in Barack Obama’s 2013 budget.
In terms of the nation’s animating ethos, these two American icons could not be further apart. Clint Eastwood was talking about an America heading back up—”roaring” forward in the unpredictable, astonishing way it has since at least the days of the Wild West. The Obama budget is about an America whose path will be guided by the government far into the future. He is announcing that in his second term, the days of the private Wild West in America will come to a close. …
The Obama budget is about national attitude. Before this presidency, the national attitude was indeed caught in the snarling, disgusted, refuse-to-lose tone of Clint Eastwood’s voice in that commercial. The new national attitude on offer is caught in the Obama voice: resentful, moody, looking for someone else to blame and then punish.
An American wealth tax will make us wimpy and whiny. That won’t be halftime. It will be the final whistle.
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