Growing up with a father who is an irritable traveler
notoriously obsessed with avoiding traffic, I developed a habit of
always preparing myself for the worst whenever embarking on a
journey.
If I’m waiting for my airplane to take off from a busy airport,
I’ll brace for a two-hour delay on the tarmac. If I’m hopping on a
5 p.m. bus from Washington, D.C. to New York, I’ll tell my friends
to expect me by midnight, though it’s only a four-hour ride without
traffic.
Preparing for the worst case scenario, I find, makes it a lot
easier to deal with adverse outcomes, and often makes me pleasantly
surprised when things don’t go as bad as feared.
This personality quirk has become such a part of my nature, that
in recent weeks I have found myself contemplating the prospect of
an Obama administration, and wondering: What’s the worst that could
happen?
AMERICA HAS ENDURED liberal presidents before. Jimmy Carter’s
single term in office was an unmitigated disaster, but it brought
us eight years of Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton’s early stumbles
ignited the Gingrich Revolution. Though Clinton’s presidency
contained personal political triumphs, he never advanced the
liberal agenda in any permanent way, and welfare reform is one of
his few domestic accomplishments.
On the other hand, there is Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New
Deal created the welfare state as we know it, and more
significantly, changed the psychology of Americans so that they
would look to government to solve their problems ever after, a
legacy that Lyndon Johnson built on with his Great Society
programs.
If he’s elected president, there are certain items on the
liberal wish list that we can expect Barack Obama to fulfill,
especially given the likely expanded majorities he will enjoy in
Congress.
The Bush tax cuts will be allowed to expire, resulting in the
largest tax increase in the nation’s history. Democratic
legislation that cleared the House in the Bush years only to be
blocked by a Senate filibuster or Bush veto, will get passed and
quickly signed into law by Obama. Chief among these will be an
expansion of the government-run children’s health care program
S-CHIP and “card-check” legislation, which will deny workers access
to a secret ballot when voting on unionization, thus allowing big
labor to expand its membership through intimidation. Obama also can
be expected to appoint liberal judges to any court vacancies that
arise during his administration.
All of these developments would be bad, but none of them would
do permanent, irreversible, harm in the same way that the New Deal
and the Great Society did. Reagan and the current President Bush
brought tax rates back down, and each curbed abusive practices by
big labor. Should Republicans return to power with a conservative
message at some point in the future, they would be able to undue
much of Obama’s legacy if it is limited to the items mentioned
above.
Even on judges, while the importance of the issue cannot be
overstated, it’s worth noting that the oldest Supreme Court justice
is the 88-year-old John Paul Stevens. Replacing him with a younger
liberal judge would be a setback for conservatives and a missed
opportunity, but it won’t change the current ideological makeup of
the Court. And Republican presidents, despite notorious mistakes,
have offset liberal gains in the judiciary with the appointments of
Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito, as well as hundreds of
lower court judges.
But even the mighty Reagan couldn’t make a dent in the mammoth
government programs of Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, and
in President Bush’s case, he only made the problem worse by
creating an additional entitlement for prescription drugs.
THAT IS WHY, on the domestic front, the worst possible thing that
could happen for conservatives during an Obama administration,
would be for him to create a government-run health-care system.
While Obama has supported a single-payer, or socialized system, in
the past, in his current campaign he has adopted a more incremental
approach.
His plan would create a new government-run, Medicare-like
option, while imposing onerous regulations on insurers requiring
them to cover everybody who applies for insurance, regardless of
risk factors or preexisting conditions, at rates the government
deems affordable. While it is technically true that as currently
conceived it is not socialized medicine, Obama’s plan would
inevitably lead to a socialized system by expanding the role of
government in health care while simultaneously destroying the
private market.
Both in terms of the sheer cost, as well as the psychological
impact of putting the state in control of our life and death
decisions, this would represent the final defeat for advocates of
limited government, because if history is a guide, such reforms
will never be undone.
National security is even a bigger wild card. Obama has based
much of his campaign on reversing the Bush administration’s
policies, but those same policies have coincided with a nearly
seven-year period
devoid of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. The most damaging thing
Obama could do would be to return
America to a time when terrorism was seen as a manageable threat
that can be handled by law enforcement, rather than a war of global
scope that must be countered with aggressive, proactive action.
Withdrawing from Iraq prematurely based on arbitrary timetables
could reverse the undeniable gains made by the “surge” strategy.
And should Obama keep true to his promise of engaging in
face-to-face talks with the Iranian leadership, and unwittingly
allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, that would be a permanent
and irreversible development. Even if Iran doesn’t launch a nuclear
attack or provide materials to its favored terrorist groups, the
leverage gained by the regime, as well as the arms race it could
set off in the Middle East, are consequences that any future
American president would have to deal with, whether or not Obama is
a one-termer.
But in a larger sense, the idea of having a neophyte such as
Obama in charge of the country has disastrous potential should any
international crises emerge that aren’t known to us now, as
Carter’s handling of the Iranian Hostage situation tragically
demonstrated.
AT THIS POINT, it’s difficult to asses both what Obama would be
able to accomplish were he elected president, and how much he would
be willing to sacrifice his liberal principles for personal
political gain.
In a 2003 questionnaire Obama filled out as a Senate
candidate seeking the support of a liberal group in Illinois, Obama
promised, “In the US Senate, I will be a champion for the
progressive agenda…” He kept true to that promise, and racked up
the most liberal voting
record of any U.S. Senator, according to National
Journal rankings.
During the Democratic primary, he took some heat from the left
for admiring words he had for Reagan, but his actual point was that
he hoped to be the type of president who advanced an agenda. “I
think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that
Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” he
said.
The two Democratic presidents who did the most to advance the
liberal domestic agenda — FDR and LBJ — had a lot going for them
that Obama did not.
Although Democrats are expected to increase their majorities in
Congress this November, Obama won’t enjoy the type of
supermajorities that Roosevelt and Johnson had to work with.
Furthermore, his Democratic predecessors both had far more
experience. Roosevelt was a seasoned politician who had served as
governor of New York, which at the time was still the largest state
in the nation; and Johnson had been a powerful Senate Majority
Leader, capable of cajoling lawmakers to vote his way better than
perhaps any politician in American history.
Obama, by contrast, was just two years into his first Senate
term when he announced he would run for president. To date, he has
been the lead sponsor of 123 bills, but just two of them actually
passed: one “to promote relief, security, and democracy in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo” and “a resolution designating
July 13, 2006, as ‘National Summer Learning Day.’”
ANOTHER GOOD SIGN is that in the early stages of the general
election, Obama has reversed his progressive stances on public
financing, trade, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and
gun control, among others. He has added nuance to his bold vow to
meet unconditionally with the leaders of Iran and other rogue
regimes, and has even said he may “refine” his proposal to set a
firm 16-month timetable to withdraw combat troops from Iraq, even
though that pledge has been the cornerstone of his candidacy.
Nobody knows how Obama would actually behave were he elected,
since he has such a thin public record on which to evaluate him,
but the positive news for conservatives is that Obama is looking
more Clintonian by the day. In other words, he is coming across as
a leader who will ultimately abandon his liberal policy goals if
they are an obstacle to his political ambitions.
Despite all of the problems faced by the current incarnation of
the Republican Party, America is still a right of center nation,
which explains Obama’s need to abandon many of his liberal
positions. Although it’s something I would rather not find out,
what this means is that Obama’s ability to govern as a liberal if
elected president would largely be a function of how well
conservatives can mobilize opposition to him, thus exploiting his
inexperience and inclination to do the politically expedient thing.
This won’t prevent all bad things from happening under an Obama
presidency, but it may spare the nation from the worst-case
scenario.
