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Stuart Taylor has always been a fair minded liberal which is why his work has graced these pages many times. He starts us off today with his concerns about the “left turn” of the new administration.
Having praised President Obama’s job performance in two recent columns, it is with regret that I now worry that he may be deepening what looks more and more like a depression and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free.
Other Obama-admiring centrists have expressed similar concerns. Like them, I would like to be proved wrong. After all, if this president fails, who will revive our economy? And when? And what kind of America will our children inherit?
But with the nation already plunging deep into probably necessary debt to rescue the crippled financial system and stimulate the economy, Obama’s proposals for many hundreds of billions in additional spending on universal health care, universal postsecondary education, a massive overhaul of the energy economy, and other liberal programs seem grandiose and unaffordable.
With little in the way of offsetting savings likely to materialize, the Obama agenda would probably generate trillion-dollar deficits with no end in sight, or send middle-class taxes soaring to record levels, or both. …
Pickerhead was delighted with Stuart Taylor’s column. Mark Steyn not so much. Seems he might have confused David Brooks’ thoughts for Taylor’s
… As for Stuart Taylor, he still doesn’t quite get it:
The house is burning down. It’s no time to be watering the grass.
If only. The house is burning down. And Obama’s soaking the neighboring buildings in Exxon-Mobil’s finest. Fortunately for Mr Taylor’s fit of the wobbles, the alternative to the Obama Fire Department is a GOP “dominated by such hard-right conservatives as Rush Limbaugh”. Twenty-five million people listened to Rush last week. Millions of them have listened to him for 20 years. That makes them “hard-right” extremists.
Whereas being one of a few thousand who listened to Jeremiah Wright every week for 20 years makes you a mainstream moderate.
Which leads us to Mark’s weekly column in the Orange County Register. Since Mark is a Brit educated Canadian immigrant to the U. S., he is particularly well situated to comment on last week’s gift gaffe.
The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown thought long and hard about what gift to bring on his visit to the White House last week. Barack Obama is the first African American president, so the prime minister gave him an ornamental desk-pen holder hewn from the timbers of one of the Royal Navy’s anti-slaving ships of the 19th century, HMS Gannet. Even more appropriate, in 1909 the Gannet was renamed HMS President.
The president’s guest also presented him with the framed commission for HMS Resolute, the lost British ship retrieved from the Arctic and returned by America to London, and whose timbers were used for a thank-you gift Queen Victoria sent to Rutherford Hayes: the handsome desk that now sits in the Oval Office.
And, just to round things out, as a little stocking stuffer, Gordon Brown gave President Obama a first edition of Sir Martin Gilbert’s seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill.
In return, America’s head of state gave the prime minister 25 DVDs of “classic American movies.”
Evidently, the White House gift shop was all out of “MY GOVERNMENT DELEGATION WENT TO WASHINGTON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT” T-shirts. Still, the “classic American movies” set is a pretty good substitute, and it can set you back as much as $38.99 at Wal-Mart: Lot of classics in there, I’m sure – “Casablanca,” “Citizen Kane,” “The Sound Of Music” – though this sort of collection always slip in a couple of “Dude, Where’s My Car? 3″ and “Police Academy 12″ just to make up the numbers. I’ll be interested to know if Mr. Brown has anything to play the films on back home, since U.S.-format DVDs don’t work in United Kingdom DVD players. …
Ed Morrissey deconstructs the proposed excuse for the gag gift for Gordon Brown.
After insulting Gordon Brown during the British prime minister’s visit this week by ignoring protocol and cheaping out on the traditional gift exchange, the UK media has erupted in outrage. The Obama White House has now started to recognize the firestorm the new President created with our closest ally, and wants to assure the Brits that he meant no disrespect. Instead, Obama apparently wants to assure them that he’s simply in over his head and floundering …
Continuing on the gift gaffe riff, Morrissey covers Hillary’s hilarious gift to the Russian foreign minister.
… Some will say, Come on, it’s just a light moment, but let’s think about what Hillary was doing here. She was making fun of the previous administration’s diplomacy with her “reset” button, a rather nasty piece of work. I’ll bet the Bush administration and Condi Rice would have gotten the translation correct before making that joke — and I’d bet even more money they wouldn’t have thought to make fun of Hillary’s husband in that fashion in the first place.
Can we get a reset button?
And the London Times is looking askance at all this.
… What has begun to trouble some even within his own party is that Mr Obama’s pledge to spend the US out of recession, while slashing the budget deficit to $533 billion within four years, already looks recklessly optimistic. Few dispute, even among Republicans, the need for healthcare reform or to wean America off foreign oil. It is the scale of debt that Mr Obama is willing to incur to achieve these goals that is causing such heartburn.
And it is not just Americans who desperately need him to prevail. As Gordon Brown said in Washington this week, while pledging faith in the President’s plans, everyone is watching the US economy. The entire developed world is banking on Mr Obama to succeed.
But much of his promise to rein in the deficit rested on a projection that the recession will cease and the US economy grow next year, but nobody can clearly see an end to this slump. The central question – how to stop the banking sector from collapse – is still a work in progress. They prefer huge injections of cash to stop the banks dying – but stop short of nationalisation – while they try to work out how to rid them of at least $2 trillion of toxic assets. There is still a significant chance that the scale of debt involved could devour Mr Obama’s presidency.
The markets are so unnerved about Mr Obama’s ability to rescue the financial sector, and by the numerous bailouts that have had little effect, that wealth is being destroyed on Wall Street at a rate not seen since the 1930s. The President said on Tuesday that he does not worry about “the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market”, but investors have made it clear that his economic prescriptions have so far failed to reassure them.
Mr Obama also says that much of his programme will be paid for by reducing the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet he has just ordered 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan for a war that his Defence Secretary says will be a long and difficult slog, and he is still groping for a strategy in Pakistan.
“We are always better off on the high wire,” David Plouffe, Mr Obama’s campaign manager, said last year. Now Mr Obama is President, watching from below has become both enthralling and terrifying.
James Taranto discovers that even Paul Krugman has Obama reservations.
We never thought we’d say this, but former Enron adviser Paul Krugman has a pretty good column in today’s New York Times. It’s a tough criticism of the Obama administration but, unlike Krugman’s hundreds of anti-Bush columns, it is not a rant. Krugman is concerned that President Obama is not treating the crisis in America’s financial institutions with sufficient urgency:
Among people I talk to there’s a growing sense of frustration, even panic, over Mr. Obama’s failure to match his words with deeds. The reality is that when it comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy is stuck in a holding pattern. . . ….
Charles Krauthammer continues commentary on the money spent in DC.
… The logic of Obama’s address to Congress went like this:
“Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,” he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and education — importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.
The “day of reckoning” has arrived. And because “it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,” Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.
Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people. …
Jennifer Rubin says he’s just not into governing.
… What does he like to do? Summits. These are in essence campaign events — faux town-halls where nary a discouraging word is heard and no real work is done. And he loves those campaign rallies around the country.
So if the report is accurate that others are crafting his political strategy (just like the Pelosi-Reid machine is drafting his legislation), it should should come as no surprise. George W. Bush was lambasted for poor management skills and excessive delegation. But that was nothing — Obama has delegated the entire task of governing. He will keep the campaigning for himself.
Scrappleface says Obama’s gift to the Queen next month will not be a queen sized bed.
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