Among the most amazing aspects of the 2012 presidential campaign is the severe amnesia spreading like the Black Plague through the liberal ranks of the mainstream media. The great gasbags of this brand of thinking – The New York Times and The Washington Post – seemed to lose all connection with political reality over the New Years weekend. Political health experts are baffled about the origins of this affliction, but anecdotal evidence suggests it strikes journalists whose intoxication with statist solutions prompts them to protect readers from inconvenient facts about President Obama and other incumbent Democrats. (There is a variation of the syndrome that breaks out among some conservative think tanks when Republicans run the government)
Take, for example, the Post’s story on Sunday by David Nakamura in which unnamed senior Obama campaign aides made clear that, “as he enters his reelection campaign year, Obama intends to ‘double down’ on his outside strategy, pressing the message that he is fighting for the middle class against a Congress beholden to special interests.” The Obama aides apparently went on and on in that vein without challenge from the Post reporter. Nakamura evidently forgot to ask the Obama aides why their boss never publicly challenged Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democratic Senate majority to stop smothering the two dozen job-creation bills sent over by the Republican House, even as the nation’s unemployment and underemployment rates remained in the red zone.
Obama and his campaign strategists extol Harry Truman’s fabled 1948 re-election campaign strategy of running against “a do-nothing Congress” as often as they wish, but there are two fundamental flaws with this strategy. First, Truman faced Republican majorities in the Senate and House. But it’s been the Democratic Senate, not the Republican House that has blocked passage of bills that provided common- sense ways to get the economy growing again. And let’s not forget that the House Republicans approved a 2012 federal budget last May, while Senate Democrats haven’t approved a full-year budget since 2009. It would be more honest of Obama to run against “block everything” Senate Democrats instead of accusing House GOPers of preventing him from enacting his agenda.
Second, Obama’s agenda has already been largely enacted, and it has been colossal bust. He promised that the $787 billion economic stimulus program approved by the Democratic Congress in 2009 would keep unemployment below eight percent, but it has been above that mark every month but one during his tenure. And Obamacare, the president’s signature legislative “achievement,” is now widely recognized as preventing job creation by creating excessive uncertainty about future government health care regulations.
Well, the editors of the New York Times have a solution to that problem. With no remembrance of things past, the Times thundered that “the way to revive sustainable growth is with more government aid to help create jobs, support demand and prevent foreclosures.” That’s exactly what Congress did when it approved Obama’s economic stimulus program. Apparently the amnesia strikes journalists who still haven’t figured out that more government is the problem, not the solution.
