Suppose they gave a financial debt crisis, and no president came? That’s just about what has happened, not just in the immediate crisis of the debt ceiling rising, but of the big one that caused it; the one that exploded in April 2010, when the sudden implosion of Greece informed all the First World that it was vastly overextended on its welfare-state spending and was about to run into a wall.
In Britain, France, Spain and other countries, leaders took measures to curtail their expenditures, sometimes to backdrops of riots. In the United States, President Obama, having tripled the national debt in just two years in office, and with Medicare shortly to run out of money, did nothing except dream up ways to spend even more.
Having come into office using a crisis as an excuse to exact an expansion of government, having used (and used up) his political capital on a crisis in health care that didn’t exist, he was blind to a real one when it plopped itself on his doorstep, until threatened by default only recently. And his eyes haven’t opened quite yet.
Obama’s problem, and ours, is that he’s a soi-disant creature of destiny, handed a destiny he will not accept. He is a government-grower in an era of mandated shrinkage, a welfare state-expander when that state as it is has become unsustainable, a piner after the European model when Europe itself has been calling it quits.
Fred Hiatt noted recently in the Washington Post that, when conditions change, Obama doesn’t change with them, but continues on his own preset course.
When the Green Revolution broke out in Iran, for example, he blew a chance at regime change, as he was set on “engagement” with its fanatical rulers.
After the crash of September 2008, “he did not allow the crisis to reshape [his] priorities. … Instead, he repackaged them,” pushing health care and varied expansions of government as cures for the slump.
In 2011, after Greece and the voter revolt in the 2010 midterms, he ignored the need to scale the welfare state back to sustainable levels, and carried on just as before.
No plan emerged, ever, to rein in the debt. At the State of the Union, he produced “empty platitudes,” according to Newsweek’s Robert Samuelson. He submitted a budget so extravagant the Democrat-led Senate dismissed it unanimously.
He gave an address billed as a response to an elaborate budget proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, and spent his time there insulting the congressman, whom he had invited to join him at the address.
He squelched bipartisan efforts to reach a solution: “As Congress considered naming a bipartisan fiscal commission with statutory teeth, Obama was AWOL,” the Post’s Hiatt has noted.
“When the toothless commission that he subsequently appointed unexpectedly coalesced around a fiscal plan that managed to attract support ranging from Dick Durbin on the left to Tom Coburn … Obama refused to lend it a hand.”
This ensured that the Republican House would use the debt ceiling in a desperate effort to get his attention. And that it would unfold as it did.
In case you call this “dereliction of duty,” you might be pleased to be told that you’re wrong. “Can we just enjoy Obama for a moment?” asks Stephen Marche.
“Twenty years from now, we’re going to look back on this time as a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding on the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph. … Can we just take a month or two to contemplate him the way we might contemplate a painting by Vermeer?”
It is, he says, “the summer of Obama.” And who can deny that it is?
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
