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Capitol Ideas

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Showing how remote from reality the administration is, the attorney general made his strange comment about America being “a nation of cowards” for not discussing race more often. Maybe I should send Eric Holder my TAS column about the black abortion rate. (Would he care to add to the discussion?

I would welcome it.) Doesn’t he realize that for years many of us deliberately held our tongues on several such issues out of sheer politeness? Meanwhile, markets have reacted negatively to Obama’s inauspicious start. He gives every indication of aiming to implement a progressive agenda at a time when the country can least afford it. It ought to worry his supporters but it won’t, because they believe reality is not really applicable to people with good intentions, like themselves.

Almost certainly, Obama is taking Al Gore and the enviros on faith when he proposes to redesign U.S. energy policy to fend off “climate change.” (The phrase “global warming” has been largely dropped because the globe has not warmed at all over the last decade.) Obama surely doesn’t realize what’s at stake here. Eventually, I hope, he will learn that climate change is a policy game dreamed up by bored semester intellectuals and an idle upper class. Energy will become much more expensive and the workers will be hurt. The inventors of climate change won’t mind that at all, but it won’t help Obama.

HERE'S HOW I SEE THIS PLAYING OUT. The stimulus won’t work and the economy may well decline further. Eventually, market signals will penetrate the Oval Office. Trillions of injected dollars are more likely to reignite inflation than revive the economy. Obama will say that his policies haven’t had enough time to work. But he won’t want to sink his own presidency, and that is one of the few rays of hope that I can see. Reality will take hold in the end. Liberals are political creatures who have the luxury of living much of the time in a world of their own dreams. They are cushioned and abetted by friends, colleagues, the media—the Zeitgeist. If things go wrong, it wasn’t their fault. Conservatives, on the other hand, are harried with daily reminders that their “cherished” free market system has so far failed to create one or another supposed ideal (equality, say).

Sometimes I wonder: how much longer will progressivism last? The current renewal of faith in huge government spending programs already has a déjà vu feel to it. FDR has been dusted off as a household god, the New Deal placed on a pedestal. But if Obama’s recession lasts half as long as FDR’s slump, he will be a one-term president.

The hot air of enthusiasm that has borne him aloft will cool, as Fred Smith predicted. I suspect that the wave of populist adulation for Obama is a symptom of our semi-pagan times. Secular liberalism is the faith of the godless, and at the moment Obama resembles nothing so much as an idol who is carried about in triumph for a season or two before, with little warning, that god, too, fails.