WASHINGTON — What strikes me about politics over the last
couple of years is how obvious it all has been. In 2008, as the
junior senator from Illinois campaigned across the country
demonstrating his gifts as a motivational speaker and community
organizer, all one had to do was review his recent life to know
that he was about to bring down on the country — ever so
incompetently — the most left-wing government in American
history. And so he has — with the utmost incompetence. Think of
the paucity of swine flu vaccine, in large part the consequence
of his government’s meddling with production.
As I say, it was all so obvious. No president in modern
times has come to power with less political experience and less
managerial experience. On the other hand, no president has come
to power with a clearer record of political extremism. Senator
Barack Obama had the most left-wing voting record in the Senate,
brief as his record was. Back in Illinois he had a record of
associations with extremists that would have sunk any other
presidential candidate. Think of his friendship with Bill Ayers,
a co-founder of the Weather Underground that actually bombed
public buildings in the 1960s. Think of Obama’s attendance week
after week at religious services where the Rev. Jeremiah Wright
thundered forth with diatribes lilting with such lines as “God
damn America.” The radical direction of the Obama presidency was
foreordained.
As for this week’s electoral setbacks for Obama, they too
were obviously in the cards. The economy is wobbling out of a
recession that it should have been emerging from months ago. Yet
how could it, with business utterly bemused by the Democrats’
plans for the future? Small businesses, the source of most job
expansion, are not hiring, and they are unlikely to when faced
with the staggering debt that the Democrats have built up, the
entrepreneurs’ awareness of the entitlement crisis facing the
country, and their apprehensions over how they are going to fund
health insurance for their present employees once the Democrats
have saddled them with the trillion-dollar healthcare
monstrosity. Right now the economic future facing the country is
stagnation or perhaps 1970s stagflation.
With that in mind, was it not obvious that the Democrats
would be routed this election year? The loss of the governorship
in Virginia was not supposed to happen, according to liberals a
year ago. The Prophet Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe,
spoke of Virginia as part of a “permanent Democratic majority.”
In New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine with his vast fortune, elite
Democratic connections, and a huge Democratic margin in the
voting roll was seen as an easy win. But then the economy did
what one would expect a weak economy to do when faced with
unprecedented peacetime spending and onerous new taxation. It
sputtered. Next came another obvious development: the electorate
put the economy at the top of its list of concerns.
Solidly Democratic New Jersey and “purple” Virginia voted
for Republicans. In New Jersey 89% of the citizenry were
primarily worried about the economy. In Virginia the figure was
85%. Reportedly the President did not stay up to watch the
returns. I can understand why. He has not a clue as to how to
solve his underlying economic problems other than resort to
motivational speaking and community organizing. That will not get
the economy growing again — and his dark murmurings about Wall
Street will only hurt his fundraising. Something like 60% of Wall
Street’s political donations regularly go to the
Democrats.
The enormous debt that the Democrats have burdened this
economy with will not disappear over the next several years. Of
late, it is nice to hear that the President is worried about that
debt, but he has not a clue as to how to reduce it. His only
answer is to tax the rich. Yet as the Wall Street
Journal pointed out this week, “if Congress had
confiscated 100% of the taxable income of people earning over
$500,000 in the boom year of 2006, it would only raise $1.3
trillion.” And in the years that followed, these rich people
would be claiming less income and the federal debt would resume
its growth. The answer to our financial problem is to cut federal
spending and to cut federal taxes. That is how we got the economy
going in the 1980s and it grew for a generation. The answer is
growth, but when the President hears that word he thinks of
government growth. That too is obvious.
