Lowry: Our Reactionary President
Rich Lowry writes at the National Review:
President Obama is stirring up the forces of reaction. Or at least he wants to. He is their inspiration and their leader, the nation’s most eloquent and powerful advocate of a government of the past.The man from “hope and change” wants, to the extent he can, to perpetuate the bankrupt and bankrupting structures of 20th-century government. His political genius turns out to be throwing a patina of daring over what is only an amped-up version of the status quo. Both his supporters and his critics hype him as something new under the sun, when nearly everything he does represents the brackish backwash of 1970s liberalism.
When the Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, proposes changes to put his state’s relationship with public-employee unions on a footing more appropriate to our straitened times, Obama instinctively sides with the unions, defending privileges dating from the mid and late 20th century. The president’s former campaign arm, Organizing for America, supports the anti-Walker protesters, who deploy hoary tactics — the chanting, the drums, the sit-ins — that could have been pulled from a 1970s time capsule.
In a noisome bit of body snatching, the Madison protesters associate themselves with the demonstrators in Egypt. If we must use Egypt analogies, this one has it backward. Tapping into new technologies empowering individuals, the anti-Mubarak protesters overthrew a sclerotic political system that no longer fit the times. In their aims, the anti-Walker throngs are more like Egypt’s counterdemonstrators who rode in on camels to try to save a decrepit, 30-year-old political dispensation.
Obama’s transformative agenda has largely consisted of accelerating already-present trends. We had already tried a stimulus and deficit spending — Obama gave us more of both. We already had subsidies to green energy — Obama created more. We already were spending more than ever on education — Obama added more. We already had massive government health-care programs crowding out the private sector and tipping the federal government toward bankruptcy — Obama added yet another one.
At a time when even some Democrats say spending has to be cut, when his own administration says that the debt is unsustainable, Obama’s budget stays resolutely anchored in the status quo. His own deficit commission proposed far-reaching reforms of the budget, the tax system, and entitlement programs. Obama took up none of them: too much change.
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