President Obama gave a speech Monday, which isn’t particularly
newsworthy in itself, as part of the president’s job is to be
Speechgiver-in-Chief. But this speech was different, at least for
me, simply because I listened to part of it.
Not listening to presidential speeches is a habit I
developed during the Clinton administration in an effort to
preserve my sanity. It was my wife who suggested this non-listening
policy after she watched me seething with fury and muttering curses
throughout Bill Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union
address.
Presidential historians will recall that as Clinton’s
“era of
big government is over” speech. For me, it was the “lying
two-faced bastard” speech. To list and refute every falsehood in
that speech would require more words than I’m willing to expend on
the effort. It would be easier to say, as Mary McCarthy said of
Lillian Hellman, that every word is a lie, including “and” and
“the.”
Just one example: “I challenge this Congress,” Clinton
proclaimed on Jan. 23, 1996, “to send me a bipartisan welfare
reform bill that will really move people from welfare to work and
do the right thing by our children. I will sign it immediately.”
Clinton vetoed welfare-reform twice and did not sign it until
August, when Congress sent it to him for the third time, and the
only reason Clinton signed it was to keep it from being used
against him as an issue in his fall re-election
campaign.
And, of course, after declaring the end of big government,
Clinton’s speech then went on to call for, inter alia,
raising the minimum wage, increasing funding for education, and
imposing various mandates on health insurance companies. The 1996
speech established a pattern for all subsequent Clinton State of
the Union speeches — he would begin with rhetorical salutes to
fiscal restraint, bipartisanship and moderation, then finish with a
grocery-list of new programs and liberal policies he wanted
Congress to enact, regardless of whatever taxpayer expense they
would require or regulatory burdens they would impose.
Actually listening to Clinton’s speeches was an
infuriating experience that, alas, became an occupational hazard
after November 1997, when I joined the staff of the Washington
Times. It became part of my job to edit the transcripts of
Clinton’s major speeches for publication, and colleagues got used
to hearing me grumble and curse throughout those ordeals. And, in
some ways, the problem became even worse after George W. Bush
became president.
Bush had a way of proposing transparently un-conservative
policies while insisting that these were, in fact, logical
expressions of America’s founding ideals. The No Child Left Behind
Act — crafted with the pre-approval of that eminent Burkean, Ted
Kennedy — was the first of many such Bush-era sellouts of
conservative principle. Republicans nowadays scoff at Obama’s
“green” rhetoric, but it was Bush who said the following in his
2007 State of the Union address:
For too long, our nation has been dependent on foreign
oil.… It’s in our vital interest to diversify America’s energy
supply, and the way forward is through technology. We must continue
changing the way America generates electric power by even greater
use of clean-coal technology; solar and wind energy; and clean,
safe nuclear power. We need to press on with battery research for
plug-in and hybrid vehicles and expand the use of clean-diesel
vehicles and biodiesel fuel.… At the same time, we need to reform
and modernize fuel economy standards for cars the way we did for
light trucks and conserve up to 8.5 billion more gallons of
gasoline by 2017.… [New] technologies will help us become better
stewards of the environment, and they will help us to confront the
serious challenge of global climate change.
The only real difference between Bush and Obama on this
score is that, in 2007, there was no recession to provide a
Keynesian rationale for billions of dollars in deficit-funded
stimulus spending on “green” technology. But if Bush was right in
2007 about the urgent need “to confront the serious challenge of
global climate change,” why had it been so important to defeat Al
Gore in 2000? What’s the point of voting Republican, if the
Republican you’re electing gets into office and demands
implementation of the Democrats’ policy agenda?
That painful shoe is now firmly on the other foot, and it
is Democrats who are questioning their partisan loyalty after
President Obama’s speech Monday, announcing a two-year freeze
on federal civilian employees. For several months,
Republicans had been advocating a federal pay freeze — and
being denounced by Democrats for doing so. The freeze was certain
to be one of the first legislative proposals pushed by John
Boehner’s new GOP majority as soon as they took office in January,
and so Obama cleverly decided to push the outgoing Democrat
majority to enact it as a lame-duck measure, thus depriving
Republicans of credit for it.
Furthermore, since the federal pay freeze is popular with
voters — as White House pollsters surely told the president —
Obama now positions himself to claim that he took the first step
toward a new era of bipartisan cooperation, and to cast Republicans
as irresponsible obstructionists for not reciprocating in some way
by supporting any of his agenda items. That this is utterly phony
can be demonstrated by imagining what would have happened had
Boehner and the House GOP been allowed to bring forward the
pay-freeze legislation early next year: Once passed by the House,
the bill would have forced Senate Democrats facing re-election in
2012 to either vote “yes” (to avoid being on the unpopular side of
the issue) or vote “no” (to placate their liberal base). Assuming
that several Democrats would be forced to support the pay-freeze,
Obama then would be presented with a nominally bipartisan bill. If
he vetoed it, he’d be accused of ignoring the will of the American
people, but if he signed it, he’d be portrayed as a weakling who
knuckled under to Republicans.
All of this Obama avoids by calling on the lame-duck
Congress to enact the pay-freeze. Many of the Democrats who vote
“yes” on this bill will be those who have already been defeated in
the mid-terms, so they’ll suffer no political consequence for
voting in favor of the same legislation they denounced and opposed
just a few months earlier. And as to other Democrats with an eye on
2012 re-election for whom a “yes” vote may be politically
convenient, they can explain it to their liberal supporters by
saying that they were, after all, only doing what the Democratic
president asked.
So the pay-freeze gesture clearly a product of a cynical
political calculation, and some of his liberal supporters were
honest enough to say so. (“Obama
Flunks Economics with Pointless Federal Wage Freeze” was the
headline on one liberal blog.) The speech in which Obama announced
this policy shift was, if possible, even more cynical than the
political calculations behind it.
He talked about a Tuesday meeting with Republican leaders
and his hope — what is it with this guy and “hope”? — that the
meeting would “mark a first step towards a new and
productive working relationship.” Twenty-two months into his
presidency, Obama has suddenly developed a desire for a “working
relationship” with Republicans. These are the same Republicans that
the president spent the entire fall campaign season describing as
idle Slurpee-sippers
unwilling to help get the nation’s economy out of the ditch into
which they had driven it.
Now evidently willing to forgive and forget the
recklessness of these Republican drivers, Obama spoke Monday of “a
shared responsibility,” of acting in a “cooperative and serious
way” to meet the “fundamental challenges” confronting the nation.
Among those challenges is ensuring that “we’re not dragged down by
long-term debt,” the president said: “This is a challenge that both
parties have a responsibility to address — to get federal spending
under control and bring down the deficits that have been growing
for most of the last decade.”
The nerve of this guy, huh? Obama occupied himself from
Inauguration Day onward with promoting a Keynesian program of
deficit-funded
“stimulus” spending — adding up to more than a trillion
dollars in new debt — and now he declares that “both parties have
a responsibility… to get federal spending under control.” Does
anyone recall Obama ever lecturing Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats about
that responsibility?
Obama also claimed Monday that he was now “interested in
hearing ideas from my Republican colleagues… about how we continue
to grow the economy and how we put people back to work” — as if,
for the past two years, Republicans had sat in utter silence as to
their ideas for promoting economic growth. The president spoke of
“tough decisions” and “a bipartisan conversation” as he approached
his peroration, which included a rather surprising interpretation
of the recent election:
We can’t afford to fall back onto the same old ideologies
or the same stale sound bites. We’re going to have to budge on some
deeply held positions and compromise for the good of the
country. We’re going to have to set aside the politics of the
moment to make progress for the long term. And as I’ve often said,
we’re going to have to think not just about the next election, but
about the next generation, because if there’s anything the American
people said this month, it’s that they want their leaders to have
one single focus: making sure their work is rewarded so that the
American Dream remains within their reach. It would be unwise to
assume they prefer one way of thinking over another. That wasn’t
the lesson that I took when I entered into office, and it’s not the
lesson today.
While Obama warned against “think[ing] about the next
election,” it is evidently the most recent election he wishes to
ignore. So he insists that the voters who went to the polls on Nov.
2 and delivered a devastating negative referendum on the Democratic
policy agenda cannot be assumed to have made a meaningful choice
between the two parties. Even when the GOP
picked up 63 House seats — the biggest Republican gain since
1938 — Obama wishes us to believe that the electorate did not
thereby demonstrate a preference for “one way of thinking over
another.” Such is the counterfactual world presented to Americans
by their president.
Given my professed habit of not listening to presidential
speeches, readers may wonder why I listened to this one. Well, I
just happened to be working in my basement office when Obama came
on the television and, because my kids have lost the remote control
to the TV in my office, it would have been a hassle to interrupt my
work to get up and change the channel. I tried to concentrate on my
work and ignore what the president was saying, but enough of it
seeped into my consciousness to inspire exasperated
curses.
So I decided to turn lemons into lemonade and wrote this
column which, in keeping with the spirit of the holiday season, I
will conclude with a hint to my wife: A new remote control makes an
excellent stocking stuffer.
