Barack Obama is already preparing a razzmatazz celebration when he wins the presidential election, and what I can’t help recalling is the made-up story of George Armstrong Custer riding down the hill with his men at the Little Big Horn and shouting, “Come on boys, we’ve got ’em now.”
Obama may indeed triumph, but then come the arrows, the actualities of governance. It’s not going to be easy with policies such as a timetable-retreat from Iraq and what that could mean — a strengthening of al Qaeda and Iran and a setback in the terrorist fight that could lead to other 9/11-type attacks on our shores, only this time, perhaps, more devastating.
The candidate has insisted he does want to secure Afghanistan, perhaps not grasping that this could be as tough a fight as Iraq and become his war the way Vietnam went from being Lyndon Johnson’s to Richard Nixon’s war. What is this opponent of the successful Iraq surge and anything like it elsewhere going to do when his pacifist buddies turn on him, asking what kind of an exit strategy he has in mind this time around?
To engender helpful election-year fear, Obama badmouthed the economy when it was humming and has repeatedly associated the present financial mess with the Great Depression. Such negativity, along with his proposals for excessive regulation, government giveaways and other deficit-enlarging excesses of all kinds could help edge us in that direction. Will people then suppose it’s not his fault, or will they note how he collaborated in making things worse?
In the campaign, Obama made it sound as if he would shower the middle class with goodies the likes of which no one has ever seen.
He didn’t bother to point out, though, that his proposal to hike capital gains taxes will devalue stocks that have now already plummeted disastrously, costing middle Americans a couple of trillion dollars in retirement savings. If an elected Obama refused to back off, he would send stock prices down lower, and make recovery that much more difficult.
At that point, the American people might become more than a little upset, just as they will be upset when they learn how the corporate tax hikes Obama has been advocating will cost jobs and cause prices to go up, or how his free trade interventions will hurt the export business and make visits to retail outlets more expensive, or how his redistribution of wealth will shrink the economy, as such socialist adventures always do.
Not long into an Obama administration, he would have to do something about the $40 trillion liability incurred by Social Security and Medicare, and the truth would emerge that his tax-hiking Social Security solution was a short-term fizzle, and that there is no way in the world this country can afford the new health and education entitlements he has pledged to bring about.
You might hope Congress would be a moderating influence, but the opposite will be true — victorious Democrats will be ready to go with all kinds of ideas, from squashing free speech with a new Fairness Doctrine, to keeping government in charge of banks forever, to insisting on the kind of welfare state now sinking vast parts of Europe.
By the time Congress and Obama are done, the military could also be done, hope for keeping Iran nuke-free could be done, pragmatic energy rescue could be done and hope for sane, Constitution-abiding courts could be done.
So Obama is right: Have his party — this Custer cheer I’ve written about in other connections — before the real world chases his ideas to sorry defeat.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at [email protected].
