It has been seven years since the election of our first black president. Seven years since a supposed post-partisan (even post-racial) era was to begin.
But expectations were too high, especially among those who were certain the country’s major problems were racially based. The pundits got it wrong. “Hope” and “change” turned out to be mere campaign slogans. America’s racial divide has deepened. And a previously slobbering media has (unhappily) reported on a sharply divided (and coarsened) America.
Such naïve expectations had no connection to reality in the first place. State Senator Obama and United States Senator Obama was indeed articulate, charismatic, and charming — but also hyper-partisan and ultra-liberal. Nobody can reasonably say they’re surprised that the same mindset and philosophical approach followed him to the White House.
Yet, the promised “transformation” of America’s economy and culture proceeds apace — with too little attention paid to its progress.
As America staggers toward the end of Obama’s second term, this observer offers the following report.
Tax & Spend
One of the weakest recoveries in the post-war period (labor participation remains historically low), a “shovel-less”, oversold stimulus, massive tax hikes, and explosive spending define the Obama economic record.
The result is a federal debt soaring toward $20 trillion, $9 trillion of which will have been added during Obama’s tenure. Remember when Senator Obama labeled George Bush’s $4 trillion debt “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic”? Well, apparently, neither does he.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans are willing to address the budget mess. One party abhors any action to reign in government spending; the other talks a good game but almost always fails to deliver. The public expresses little outrage. Few Americans imagine a budget reckoning. But that day will come sooner rather than later thanks to the mad spending spree of Barack Obama and his acolytes.
Housing
Recent progressive rhetoric brings to mind the market-bending arguments that led to the great recession of 2008-12. To wit, everyone should own a home, regardless of credit rating, income, or debt burden. And to the extent that some lending institutions fail to board the easy credit bandwagon, they get personally demonized as “red-liners” and “racists”.
The Obama administration’s more recent attempt to revisit subprime credit should be closely monitored, and resisted. Despite representations to the contrary, the laws of supply and demand are not subject to change — even in Washington, D.C.
Which brings us to the recent story of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s attempt to leverage New York banks into a more “socially conscious” (read: easy money) lending regime. Fortunately, a federal judge remembered in early August to read the law and held this latest local outrage from the dangerous Mr. de Blasio unconstitutional.
Another beauty from Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development concerns proposed rules to preempt local zoning, where the Washington social engineers see insufficient amounts of racial integration. Yes, you read that correctly. The federal government has calculated the “correct” racial and economic mix for your neighborhood. And to think entire generations of us were raised to believe “fair housing” meant that every American got to live where he or she wants to live regardless of what you look like or where you came from — if you can afford it.
Higher Education
America’s college campuses have always been a home field for the left. It’s a rule of life that socialism, progressivism and liberalism tend to flourish in an environment where tenure reigns and where intellectual adventurism is supposed to blossom without the burden(s) of waking early, going to work, and paying the bills.
But today’s college scene is a bridge too far. Seems not a day goes by without a media report of some college professor gone off the progressive deep end. Indeed, we are becoming desensitized to stories of “speech codes”, “bias-free guides”, “safe zones”, and “trigger warnings”. And it’s all to do with an aggrieved, fearful left now turned against free speech. (A Rutgers University “Bias Prevention and Education Committee” told students “there’s no such thing as free speech.”) The historic demands for freedom that characterized the great American Civil Rights Movement are now a relic of the 1960s.
Such was a traditional notion of higher education until a new brand of militant progressivism began to take root. This virulent movement has little in common with that bygone and more intellectually curious era. Today’s movement is more akin to a rhetorical Gulag, wherein speech codes rule and an “offense-less” culture is the goal. This is the non-engagement left, where one runs to a “safe zone” in order to escape those with whom you disagree. And please check your sense of humor (and history) at the door.
Worse, a new wave of student-brats is more than willing to take over a dean/president’s office to make its point. After all, the movement is infused with the Clinton/Obama/Alinsky doctrine of “nefarious means justify progressive ends” – interpreted here as the willing degradation and embarrassment of those of insufficient sensitivity. Do you wonder how these coddled children will react when there is no sympathetic college counselor around to hold their hand? So do I.
That the movement has enjoyed great success is beyond question. Cultural attitudes toward wealth inequality, American exceptionalism, women in combat, gay marriage, immigration enforcement, gender identity, and religious freedom have undergone a profound leftward shift.
Simply put, “the marketplace of ideas” has disappeared. You don’t need to look further than your local college or university to understand the why. You don’t need to look further than your family dinner table to find a place where the trend can be stopped.
Income Inequality
Some people have more money and make more money than others. This inequality is a byproduct of many factors, including talent, intellect, work ethic, birth circumstances, and market capitalism.
But economic fundamentals are ignored in the era of income inequality hysterics. Witness the recent labor-organized protests over a higher federal minimum wage. Progressives from coast to coast adopted the mantra. In response, dozens of states and municipalities raised their local minimum wage. Yet, progressive theory cannot transform marginal labor into skilled labor. And so the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reported on what fast food chain CEOs have long promised: higher mandated wages mean fewer jobs and more automation. Alas, there is no union representing the newly unemployed.
The anti-income inequality movement continues to gain traction. And nowhere is the ascendant concept more pronounced than in the rhetoric of Barack Obama, he of “spread the wealth” and “you didn’t build that” fame. Guess a record 100 million Americans now receiving some form of government assistance is not enough.
Such rhetorical attacks on old-fashioned American capitalism would have constituted political death for most Democrats in the age from Reagan to Bush. But no longer. “Occupy Wall Street” may have failed because it forgot to shower and be socially presentable, but the smooth, articulate community organizer practiced essentially the same philosophy and won two presidential elections. Today, committed class warriors such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren preach identity politics and draw large crowds. And the Democratic National Committee openly supports “Black Lives Matter”, which should tell you all you need to know about where one of America’s two major political parties and a substantial part of the electorate reside these days.
Health care
It is not surprising that the one-size-fits-all, federally imposed reform known as “Obamacare” has significantly damaged healthcare delivery in America. Indeed, the national media regularly reports critical stories and exposés that depict the law as oversold and underperforming. What else is there to conclude in the wake of insurance premium sticker shock, higher deductibles, reduced consumer choice, co-op failures, sign-up shortfalls, medical device industry layoffs, and the rapid demise of independent medical practices?
The illuminating testimony of Professor Jonathan Gruber affirmed what many of us suspected: that the architects of Obamacare took great pains to increase the bill’s complexity and hide its true costs. Nevertheless, the legislation’s deep flaws are now painfully obvious to those unfortunate folks who bought the president’s promises of “you can keep your doctor” and “a per family savings of $2,500”!
Years of debate have now yielded what should be a commonly accepted conclusion: anti-choice, anti-market government programs invariably underperform. The experience of American consumers with the latest such experiment should make it easier to explain how market-based alternatives generate better results. Such a task will fall to the next Republican-held White House.
Global Warming
College professors who challenge the concept of manmade global warming put their careers at risk. Recall the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee who initiated an “investigation” of climate scientists and professors, and expressed contrarian views by sending letters of inquiry to their respective university presidents. Likewise, politicians who question the (often subjective) science become the targets of hostile media types. When inappropriate data manipulation by climate scientists is exposed, the story dies. And the president of the United States is fond of ostracizing those who challenge the science or one of his regulatory remedies.
A share of the blame belongs to conservatives who have allowed themselves to be labeled “climate change deniers”, when the science reflects constant temperature change on earth. A more accurate policy statement could have referenced the earth’s constantly changing temperature while noting that temperature modeling is subjective and often subject to error.
Suffice to say that climate politics is a perfect vehicle for the anti-growth, limited-horizon policies of the left. After all, slower growth necessarily follows unilateral disarmament on fossil fuels.
American Exceptionalism
“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
–Barack Obama to Edward Luce, Financial Times 4/4/09
This not-so-subtle dig at American exceptionalism falls directly in line with Barack Obama’s anti-imperial mindset. His worldview presupposes an America wherein the limits of its military might translate to a “leading from behind” approach to the world’s hotspots. For Barack Obama, exiting stage left means avoiding wars of attrition — the central promise of his first campaign.
Yet the same approach allows for the persistence of all flavors of dictator — strongmen to fill the vacuums left by a retreating superpower. The familiar cliché applies: Power does abhor a vacuum. But such results are perfectly acceptable in light of the president’s favorite paradigm: Either the U.S. pulls back or there will be war. Such is the familiar narrative of an anti-war activist. Observers of U.S. policy on Ukraine, Syria, and Iran will recognize this trademark Obama talking point.
Race & Ethnicity
Some disaffected conservative Republicans cast a vote for Barack Obama in 2008, despite his down-the-line progressive voting record during his time as a legislator. These individuals were simply done with the Bush-era GOP. Candidate Obama benefitted from this temporary insanity. He also benefitted after the election from a renewed sense of national pride. A serious color barrier had been broken. A better racial future was in sight. What more positive statement could be made about America’s evolving culture?
Fast forward to America circa 2015, when a New York Times poll found 57 percent of respondents believed race relations are “generally bad”, as opposed to 37 percent who responded “generally good”. Five years ago, the same question in the same poll found 61 percent good, 33 percent bad. But the Obama era has been “opportunity missed”. Every issue is not about race – yet practitioners of the art try to make it so. The bottom line: the Obama/Holder era has shifted race relations in the wrong direction. Today, major Democratic candidates for president apologize for stating that “all lives matter”.
Regulation
Remember when the American left’s dominant fear was an imperial presidency? Yet today the silence is deafening as an army of appointed bureaucrats and an imperial executive repeatedly bypass the people’s elected representatives.
The National Labor Relations Board has morphed into a wholly owned subsidiary of the AFL-CIO. This critical regulator has in turn imprinted organized labor’s agenda on the private sector, a remarkable turn of events given labor’s ever-declining share of the American workforce. Outside the workplace, Obama’s unilateral directive to grant legal status to four million illegal immigrants was unprecedented. So was the “guidance” to allow non-Obamacare insurance plans to be offered in the private insurance marketplace for an additional two years. Only the federal courts have stopped Obama’s unilateral rewriting of religious freedom protections granted by law. And the EPA’s attempts at expanding the reach of the Clean Air Act are seemingly endless. Lawless? No — the courts have regularly narrowed or defeated such end runs. An imperial mindset? Yes.
National Security
A politically correct “unserious-ness” is an appropriate description of Obama’s national security doctrine.
Recall the failure to bomb ISIS-held strategic oil fields that finance the terror army for fear of environmental impact; an immigration policy under which federal agencies fail to examine social media postings of potentially dangerous immigrants; an administration-wide refusal to use the phrase “Islamic terrorists”; a flippant presidential dismissal of ISIS as the “JV squad” while intelligence reports reflected otherwise; posting crooner James Taylor to represent the United States at a Paris unity rally of world leaders; famously playing 18 holes after acknowledging the torture and burning of a captured Jordanian fighter pilot; Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s claim that her first post-San Bernardino priority was discouraging backlash against Muslims; promising and then ignoring a consequential response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of weapons of mass destruction in Syria; Secretary of State John Kerry’s promise of “an unbelievably small, limited kind of effort” once Assad’s WMD line was crossed; the dismissal of the Ft. Hood terror killings as “workplace violence”; contending that Syrian refugees are comprehensively vetted while the president’s own national security agencies say otherwise; the persistent application of moral equivalence rhetoric in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; an aggressive rhetorical campaign to weaken (and ultimately defeat) a sitting Israeli prime minister; and a spectacularly weak response to Russian aggression in Ukraine.
ON THE OTHER HAND
Alas, the hoped-for transformation is incomplete. Despite a full court press, Obama’s progressive onslaught has failed to move the country further left in a number of important respects. The resistance is real, and not confined to angry Republicans. A prolonged malaise — fear that the American dream is in decline — is the foundation. A broken immigration system, the demise of skilled blue-collar jobs, and the reality of radical Islam provide context. Herewith, a sampling of issues that have proven resistant to Obama-era overtures.
School Choice
The administration has repeatedly sought to defund “opportunity scholarships” in the District of Columbia. Eric Holder’s Justice Department sued the State of Louisiana for providing private vouchers to poor, black students. And who can forget New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s attempt to increase the rent paid by the city’s public charter schools?
But the forces of entrenchment are losing this one. In California, of all places, parents now get to “fire” underperforming schools. Successful public charter schools are multiplying, as are residential charters. And private vouchers are back in vogue.
There is serious movement here. It is the result of too much dysfunction, too many lost kids, too many limited futures. And it is led in part by African Americans from America’s inner cities.
School Curriculum
Some of you may recall last year’s proposed College Board guidelines for the AP U.S. history test. (The College Board is the corporation that publishes advanced placement courses and exams.) It was progressive revisionism in all its anti-American glory, including the usual charges of imperialism, nativism, sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, and other ‘isms’.
But the proposed changes were met with significant opposition in red-state legislatures. Some called for the replacement of the Board’s guidelines. All of this has now led to a revised work product playing to positive reviews on the right and cries of anguish from the left. Even the Founding Fathers are now pictured in a positive light in educational materials. This is progress.
Gun Control
The man who promised he only needs a telephone and a pen to degrade a couple of hundred years of constitutional constraints has found it impossible to pass a federal gun control bill.
The preemptor in chief has been quite vocal in his frustration. After all, what modern politician is more adept at using periodic mass shootings to push for yet additional federal control over gun rights?
But even a majority Democratic Congress rejected the president’s entreaties. It seems there are a few remaining Democrats representing “flyover districts” where gun control is not seen as a tonic for what ails us, but more like a prescription for defeat in the next general election.
Even the recent and well-publicized executive action on guns represents a minimalist approach, as only a small percentage of individuals who sell firearms on the private market will be affected. Public reaction has been oh-so-predictable: Liberals feel better, conservatives are angry, and gun sales have gone through the roof. We have seen this movie before.
The most deadly domestic terror attack since 9/11 and other periodic terror episodes do not help the president’s cause. A public that supports the Second Amendment most certainly does not believe this is an appropriate time to disarm.
Immigration
This one may be a bit of a stretch. Democrats have advanced two-tier drivers licenses, in-state college tuition, sanctuary cities, and all types of welfare benefits on behalf of illegal aliens for years. For this, they have been handsomely rewarded at the polls — especially in blue states.
But that was prior to the mass child migration of 2014, high profile crimes committed by sanctuary city-protected offenders — and Donald Trump.
Put aside Trump’s gratuitous insults and hyperbole for a moment, and even the inconsistencies and ad hominem attacks on his opponents. His central premise is impossible to dismiss: no sovereignty equals no country.
Mitt Romney’s self-deportation plan may have cost him an election. Now Trump has doubled down. No one can predict the ultimate outcome. One thing is for sure: Many voters have grown mighty frustrated with porous borders, a broken immigration system, and the unwillingness of politicians from both parties to fix it.
Agency fees
A foundation of the public sector’s union-organizing strength (held constitutional in 1977) is likely to be overturned by the Supreme Court. Such is the media judgment after hostile questioning by the court’s sometimes conservative majority. The stakes are indeed high: Unions that lose the ability to collect fees from non-union members see membership rolls and money plummet, which is a huge blow to organized labor and their Democratic Party beneficiaries.
Water in the desert
Just when the utter absurdity of contemporary political correctness is about to wear you down completely, along comes a story to remind us all is not lost …yet.
First, two caveats: One, my Baltimore roots do not make me a fan of any team from Pittsburgh; and two,I understand where some parents may view the return of athletic trophies as a bit over the line.
Nevertheless, positive reaction to Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison’s decision to return “participation” trophies “awarded” to his sons is encouraging. A majority of Americans still like to compete and want to win. These folks understand that God invented scoreboards for a reason. Those contrarian parents of a certain progressive mindset might also recall that try as they might to let everyone “feel good” about participation, kids really do keep score. Just ask them.
Robert Ehrlich was a House member from Maryland from 1994 to 2002. He was governor of Maryland from 2002 to 2006.
