Well, that didn’t take long.
Less than a month ago, Barack Obama was sworn-in as chief executive amid historic promises of “change we can believe in.” But there won’t be a second Obama term if he doesn’t admit that, no matter how adroitly he wraps himself in Reaganesque rhetoric, Leviathan is no better suited for 2009 than it was in 1933 for FDR.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the New Deal’s Big Government spending failed to end the Great Depression. That is clear to anybody who reads Paul Johnson’s masterful chapter on the New Deal in “Modern Times.”
Or Amity Schlaes’ superb “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.” Or the utterly convincing data-driven study by UCLA professors Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian that concluded the New Deal lengthened the Great Depression by at least seven years.
FDR at least had nearly a decade for his Sisyphean labors. Obama won’t get a chance to end the current recession because, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the recovery will have long since started before most of the gargantuan $1 trillion stimulus bill’s spending crosses the Potomac.
But that’s not the main reason Obama’s prospects for gaining a second term in 2012 are already fading faster than a Maine RINO can forget what being a Republican means. Obama is making himself the symbol of what’s wrong with Washington rather than being the agent of change in Washington.
Democratic pols like Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York think voters don’t care about pork in the stimulus bill, but lots of now-former Republican members of Congress know better.
Earmarks are indeed, in Sen. Tom Coburn’s evocative term, “the gateway drug to federal spending addiction” and the basic ingredient of the culture of corruption in Washington that has driven the approval rating of Congress into the single digits.
Growing public awareness of the deeply porkified content of the stimulus package is the chief driver behind the plunge in a mere two weeks from modestly strong initial approval to only a third of those surveyed continuing to support passage.
That awareness is also why Rasmussen Reports this week found a virtual dead heat between the two parties in the generic congressional voting survey, with 40 percent saying they plan to vote Democrat in their congressional balloting and 39 percent going Republican.
“This marks the lowest level of support for the Democrats in tracking history and is the closest the two parties have been on the generic ballot,” Rasmussen said of a survey that points to the party most likely to gain a majority in the next election. This may be the best single piece of electoral news the GOP has received in three years.
By ceding to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the crafting of the economic stimulus package – the biggest single spending bill in U.S. history – and then vigorously defending them in the most partisan manner, Obama has recast himself from icon into just another Washington politico.
It is doubtful Obama will ever say anything more damaging to his credibility than his claim “there are no earmarks” in the stimulus bill. That one no doubt caused howls of disbelieving laughter from one end of Congress to the other. Even a few of Obama’s devotees in the Mainstream Media winced at those words.
Only the most deeply naïve don’t know that both the Senate’s $838 billion bill and the House’s $827 billion measure are swollen with pork barrel spending. That’s before the conference report is completed. Even as this column is being written, the Reid and Peolosi brigades are no doubt carpet-bombing the conference report with air-dropped earmarks.
We know this because staffers for Reid, Pelosi and the Democratic conferees met during the night Tuesday to draft the final report, so it can be voted on by the Senate and House Thursday, then sent to Obama for his signature late Thursday or Friday.
We’ll know before fall arrives that the stimulus package has failed and we will be hearing demands for another one. Then, while Obama’s place as America’s first black president is assured, the odds are great that the next line in his legacy will read “the last New Deal liberal in the White House.”
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on dcexaminer.com.
UPDATE: There is a big IF up there, folks
Evidently, my saying Obama is headed for a one-term presidency IF he doesn’t change course isn’t sufficiently clear for some people. I’m not saying Obama has now been doomed by his actions since Jan. 20, 2009 to defeat in November 2012 regardless of what he does between now and then. What I am very definitely saying is that he is presently embarked on a losing strategy that must be changed if he hopes to win a second term.
UPDATE II: Kristol’s blistering critique of Obama’s first month
The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol looks at the Obama who will shortly sign the signature legislation of his first term and wonders where the president has been since inauguration day. Kristol writes one of the most severe critiques of a new president I’ve seen anywhere among journalists of the Right.
Noting the presence of an $8 billion funding provision for that 311 mph Mag-Lev bullet train linking Disneyland and Las Vegas dreamed of lo these many years by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Kristol observes:
“That’s the kind of policymaking the new Obama administration has embraced in its signature legislative proposal: a congressional process as unseemly as ever; an emergency bill that barely addresses the emergency; a “stimulus” bill short on stimulus (is that magnetic-levitation rail line ‘shovel-ready’?).
“What accounts for this debacle? You could start with a lack of presidential leadership. Who would have thought the missing player in the first month of the administration would be Barack Obama? He let his signature economic legislation, the stimulus, be shaped by congressional Democrats. He let internal disputes over the difficult question of how to save the banking system result in a disastrous non-announcement of a non-plan by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner last week.
“Before that, he let Geithner become Treasury secretary after cheating on his income taxes, and waived his own ethics rules to appoint a lobbyist as deputy secretary of defense–undercutting his promises to clean up Washington. He allowed Rahm Emanuel to politicize the Census Bureau, losing as a result his commerce secretary-designee, Judd Gregg, an ornament of his professed hope for bipartisanship.
“In foreign policy, Obama has exerted no more control. He allowed both Super-Special Pooh-bah Richard Holbrooke and National Security Adviser Jim Jones to give interviews to the New York Times and the Washington Post, respectively, touting their own importance and presenting the president as a distant player in the formulation of foreign policy. Meanwhile, turf wars in the State Department and the National Security Council are even more bitterly fought than usual. The tale of Holbrooke shouting at Undersecretary of State Bill Burns that he’ll keep Burns waiting as long as he wants, since he (allegedly) outranks Burns, makes the Rumsfeld-Powell drama look tame.”
Kristol doesn’t say it directly but I will – Obama’s first month has been the least effective launches of a presidential administration since Jimmy Carter and his Georgia Mafia managed to alienate the Democratic leadership in Congress and the liberal activists in the federal civil service within days of his own inauguration.
And if Obama does not make radical changes quickly, his transformation from agent of change in Washington to Public Defender Number One of recidivist tax cheats, high-priced influence peddlers, and congressional pork barrelling is a losing strategy. Unless the GOP re-nominates John McCain or Bob Dole.
Simillarly, Jennifer Rubin notes on the Commentary blog:
“During the campaign, everyone cooed about his temperament and watched in awe as he played rope-a-dope with John McCain. But come to think of it he never told us then what he thought of key, urgent matters (e.g. the invasion of Georgia, the AIG rescue) until long after everyone else had put their cards on the table. Zen-like passivity worked when he did not have responsibility for governing.
“So we remain baffled about whether he has allowed himself to be run over by events and his own party, or whether this is precisely what he wants — an ultra-liberal, hyper-partisan administration. If the former, we have a serious management issue. If the latter, there are plenty of voters who were deceived.”
Either way, most voters will come to view Obama’s election as a healthy historical milestone for the country, but his administration will be dismissed as a disapointment and a failure.
