Mark Tapscott
Obama's strategy requires the perpetual crisis his economic policy produces
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
March 12, 2009
Lost in the hue and cry over Rush Limbaugh’s hope that President Barack Obama “fails” is this key fact – it’s the Chief Executive, not the mighty mouth of Talk Radio, who sees an opportunity in the nation’s suffering to change America.
Whatever one thinks of Limbaugh, he’s not the one trying to use rising unemployment, a plummeting stock market, the alleged impending collapse of the financial system and a host of other fears about the future to advance his policy agenda.
White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel gave the game away back in November with his observation that:
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. This is an opportunity…And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before."
Emanuel even helpfully specified the issues where the opportunity would be most helpful to the new administration – “health care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area - things that we had postponed for too long that were long-term are now immediate and must be dealt with.”
Initially, Emanuel’s disturbing words were dismissable as just his own, but the president himself and most recently Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have since repeated variations on the theme. So it is clearly the Obama strategy to use the current economic crisis as justification for his radical agenda.
Call it policy-making by perpetual crisis.
This is a not a new phenomena in the political world, of course. One need look no further than North Korea’s “Dear Leader,” with his constant invocation of the illusory threat of U.S. military invasion to keep his suffering people in their chains.
Kim Jong il is not unique, only the most bald-faced about using real or manufactured threats to justify his dictatorial policies. Other examples from history quickly come to mind, including communist titans like Stalin and Mao continually warning of “imperialist aggressors” from the capitalist West.
What is different now is that we’ve never before seen an American president so explicitly invoke this strategy of using a domestic crisis to achieve long-term domestic policy goals. Consider the economic stimulus package and how it was sold.
Back in February, Obama said this of his then-$800 billion-plus proposal: "It is the right size, it is the right scope. Broadly speaking it has the right priorities to create jobs that will jump-start our economy and transform it for the 21st century."
Since then, not much in the way of optimism has been heard. More often, we've been reminded that failure to pass the bill would lead to a “catastrophe” that could stretch into a decade or more of economic misery.
Critics predicted Obama’s proposal would fail to get the economy growing again because it consisted mainly of pork barrel spending unlikely to stimulate anything but Washington's ever-hungry special interests, and, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), wouldn’t even take affect until months after the current recession was history.
So, Congress passed the only slightly reduced $787 billion version of the stimulus package, but the bad economic news continued and even worsened. We might then have expected to hear a continuing litany of cautionary requests to give the package time to work and assurances that a job-creation bonanza, not economic catastrophe, is what is right around the corner .
Instead, what we hear now are White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and other administration officials effortlessly gliding into promotional mode for a second stimulus package after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic House leadership are reported to be conferring with White House economic advisors on the idea.
“House Democrats are looking at yet another economic stimulus bill beyond the $787 billion one just enacted as investors and consumers continue to show little faith in the economy,” The Hill’s Jared Allen reported earlier this week.
So, when debate begins on Stimulus II, remember that, according to Obama, the only "long-term solution" for the economic crisis is his package of proposals to put bureaucrats in charge of health care, make Americans use less and pay much more for energy, and drastically increase the federal funding and direction that has pretty much ruined American public education.
Now you know why one thing is certain here: If Obama gets his policies, his prediction of long-term economic crisis will be self-fulfilling.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on dcexaminer.com.
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