On May 28, 1588, Philip II of Spain launched a massive Armada, aimed at changing England forever. More than 130 ships loaded with supplies and 30,000 warriors left for a rendezvous with the army of Duke of Parma and his army of tens of thousands of more veterans who would barge under the Armada’s protective screen across the English Channel.
Philip II threw everything he had at Elizabeth –and as Arthur Herman’s “To Rule the Waves” makes clear, the Spanish monarch had to. Sir Francs Drake had bled Philip’s empire with a pair of bold strokes and the momentum (and the money needed to maintain the momentum) was bleeding away.
So he risked it all, sending everything at England at once. England was saved by a number of factors including Drake’s seamanship, superior gun- and ship-design and, of course, the weather.
Philip went for the big win, the single crushing campaign to change history. He gambled and lost.
President Obama’s legislative armada, launched in waves at Congress all spring and early summer, is having enormous difficulties these days. His big demand for supplies for his vision –the Stimulus– is seen by increasing millions to have been a waste of massive amounts of money, a unique opportunity that could have helped revive job generation that instead went into pork on a historic scale, even as unemployment continues to rise.
Tax cuts could have generated jobs, but the president chose generating political IOUs, and rising unemployment is his burden to bear as a result.
Then came the launch of his twin legislative super-initiatives –far-reaching and often radical proposals on health care and the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax energy bill in both the House and Senate. No order of priority was assigned and no restraint placed on the ideological extremists in Congress.
Obama demanded some sort of symbolic win, and as a result the House passed Waxman-Markey, barely, a vast American-economy-destroying carbon tax that seems DOA in the Senate.
The House has now turned towards a big push on health care, and its vision for your medical treatment going forward is every bit as radical as its vision for your energy bills. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) can fairly be said to be screaming “There is no money!” and did so as recently as Friday, but the Obama/Pelosi/Reid brain-trust is sailing on. Turning back means certain political defeat, though it would surely be in the best interests of all Americans to get something this central to all of our lives right.
Montana’s Democrat Sen. Max Baucus continues to keep his version of a Senate health care rewrite under wraps for he knows any version of the so-called “government option/public plan” will sink his ship, given the enormous costs such a private-sector destroying plan entails.
The so-called House “blue dogs” are in revolt against the mountain of money required to fund the Obama healthcare bureaucracy, and even some corners of the MSM have begun to push back against the staggering hubris that is trying to push through fundamental changes to the American way of medicine with little if any public debate over the actual specifics of the bill.
Now an ominous spike in swine flu deaths in England are worrying public health officials that H1N1 is going to be back with a big bite, and sooner than anyone thought. What a backdrop for a debate in which the president will be demanding that Americans trust him on health care to deliver the same sort of results that the Stimulus did.
If pageantry and big plans meant anything, Philip II and not Elizabeth would be memorialized in Westminster Abbey. But bad things happen to overly ambitious, poorly thought out rush jobs. It is far too early to say that Obama’s legislative ambitions have foundered, but they certainly aren’t on the course he plotted.
Examiner columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
