For months before the election, conservatives, including myself, sounded alarms. I had termed him the "Pied Piper of Failed Liberalism" and warned about the empty rhetoric: "Pay attention to what he does, not what he says."
To be sure, Obama has done his best to soft sell his real agenda: He has assured Americans he can expand the government footprint and resolve longstanding issues in energy, health care, the environment and education, all while giving 95% of working American households a tax cut and marginally raise them on higher-earning Americans. He could promise to resolve all the serious problems facing the country and bridge the partisan divide in Washington while burnishing a paper-thin resume of executive experience and legislative accomplishments.
We conservatives watched in dismay as normally intelligent voters bought into vacuous "hope" and "change we need", while handing, without check and balances, both the Presidency and the Congress to the Democratic Party after an economic tsunami: the same Democratic Party which for decades in control of Congress never balanced the budget, launched a New Deal program that prolonged the Depression, and promoted a Great Society suite of social spending programs which have done little but perpetuate a dependency on government assistance, substandard public schools, and collapsing family structures in inner cities. The same party which pressured lenders into giving loans to low-income workers without a conventional down payment and allowed government-subsidized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to dominate the home mortgage market, increasing risk to the American taxpayer. The same party which has added bureaucratic rules and regulations to the cost of doing business in America, retained some of the highest business tax brackets among the major economic powers, and has stonewalled domestic energy exploration and production offshore and in ANWR, leaving oil companies with no commercially viable alternative than to seek imports, produced by foreign workers. The same party with ties to labor unions, which aid and abet failing American auto companies and fight trade treaties tooth-and-nail, hurting American exporters (and related American jobs); teacher unions, which fight perceived threats to government monopolies in failing public schools; environmental groups, which seek to unilaterally impose higher energy costs on American consumers and industries; and trial lawyers, whom are indirectly responsible for about 30% in defensive medicine costs, passed along to policyholders.
And yet American voters, whom have rarely seen Democrats take the lead on business and investment tax reform since the JFK/LBJ era in the 1960's, expect Obama to resolve issues in energy, health care, and education, beyond throwing good taxpayer money at wasteful budget-busting subsidies, easier passed than paid for, at the problems?
David Brooks, in his recent New York Times editorial entitled "A Moderate Manifesto", writes the following:
The U.S. has traditionally had a relatively limited central government. But federal spending as a share of G.D.P. is zooming from its modern norm of 20 percent to an unacknowledged level somewhere far beyond.Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”
Drs. Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, in a recent Wall Street Journal article debunking Obama's cost-saving claims regarding electronic medical records, wrote the following:
We both voted for President Obama, in part because of his pragmatic approach to problems, belief in empirical data, and openness to changing his mind when those data contradict his initial approach his initial approach to a problem. We need [him not to] rely on elegant exercises in wishful thinking.
Oh, but we do know Obama can change his mind--like when the self-styled ethics reformer renounced his vow to abide by federal financing for the general election campaign (when he discovered he could attract more campaign money than McCain and could use that fact to his political advantage) or when he vowed during the Presidential debates to fight earmarks, but just signed the omnibus budget bill with almost 9000 of them (because he wanted the politicians pushing the earmarks on his side in upcoming votes).
Megan McArdle of The Atlantic writes:
Having defended Obama's candidacy largely on his economic team, I'm having serious buyer's remorse. Geithner, who is rapidly starting to look like the weakest link, is rattling around by himself in Treasury. Meanwhile, the administration is clearly prioritized a stimulus package...over fixing the banking system. But he also promised to be non-partisan and accountable, and the size and composition stimulus package looks like just one more attempt to ram through his ideological agenda without much scrutiny, with the heaviest focus on programs that will be especially hard to cut...He has now raced passed Bush in the Delusional Budget Math olympics.
No wonder Douglas Schoen and Scott Rasmussen state:
Mr. Obama's appoval rating is dropping and is below where George W. Bush was in an analogous period in 2001...Rasmussen Report...shows a third strongly disapproving of the president's performance...Mr. Obama has lost virtually all of his Republican support and a good part of his independent support, and the trend is decidedly negative.Unfortunately, elections of incompetent Presidents have consequences. There are no "lemon laws" to save us from fast-talking Presidential candidates selling glossy exteriors, but lousy job engines that quit just after you vote him off the lot.
