President Barack Obama has yet to adopt a slogan for his 2012
reelection bid, but he does seem to be warming up to a theme, or at
least a formula: Spending equals greatness.
That’s not to say the president does not realize spending
restraint is necessary to avoid a fiscal crisis. Rather — at least
based on a reemerging theme — Obama seems to think American
greatness is directly tied to government spending.
Most recently, on April 28 in New York, Obama told his
base at a fundraising event of the Democratic National Committee,
“I’m not going to reduce our deficit by sacrificing
the things that always made up great as a people.”
Those would be what? He continued, “I’m not going to
sacrifice investments in education. I’m not going to make
scholarships harder to get and more expensive for young people. I’m
not going to sacrifice the safety of our highways or our airports.
I’m not going to sacrifice clean air and clean water. I’m not going
to sacrifice clean energy at a time when we need to free ourselves
from dependence on foreign oil, and folks are getting killed at the
pump.”
“Investments” are another name for spending. But the
federal government did not “always” spend money on those things
that have “always made America great.”
“There’s more than one way to mortgage America’s future,”
Obama continued at the New York event. “We mortgage that future if
we don’t get a handle on our deficit and debt, but we also mortgage
it if we’re not investing in those things that will assure the
promise of the American Dream for the next generation.”
Thus, the American Dream cannot be accomplished without
government spending?
This was an extension of what Obama said when he delivered
his alternative fiscal plan to Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposal, talking
specifically about Social Security, unemployment insurance,
Medicare and Medicaid.
“We are a better country because of these commitments,”
Obama told a crowd on April 13 at George Washington University.
“I’ll go further — we would not be a great country without those
commitments.”
An audacious statement considering two of those programs
— Medicare and Medicaid — did not exist before 1965. Social
Security and unemployment insurance were products of the New Deal.
So what of the United States from 1776 to 1935? It was OK, but then
really became great after the Great Society?
To be clear, in the GWU speech, and the several others at
DNC events, he acknowledged American individualism and
entrepreneurship as a factor in America’s greatness.
“The America we know is great not because of our
skyscrapers or the size of our GDP,” Obama told a DNC gathering on
April 21 in San Francisco. “It’s because we’ve been able to keep
two ideas together at the same time. The first idea is that we are
all individuals endowed with certain inalienable rights and
liberties; that we are self-reliant; we are entrepreneurs. We don’t
expect others to do for us what we can do for ourselves, and we
don’t really like people telling us what to do. But the second
idea, just as important is that we’re all in this together; that we
look out for one another; that I am my brother’s keeper; that I am
my sister’s keeper.”
That is a fair and even moral point that most Americans
should agree with, aside from the debate on what role the federal
government has in achieving being our brother’s keeper. But the
president has effectively said America would not be
great without New Deal or Great Society programs that are less than
a century old. Such thinking sounds almost like a conservative
parody of liberalism.
The next day in Culver City, Calif., Obama pushed the
message that America could not be prosperous without government
spending.
“But let me tell you something. I will not reduce our
deficit by sacrificing the things that have always made America
great, the things that have made Americans prosper,” the president
said, before talking again of “investments” in education,
scientific research, green energy and highway safety.
As with any president, Obama can and should push his own
budget priorities, but the pattern of revealing statements about
the centrality of government spending to all that is right and good
should paint a compelling contrast for budget fight and the 2012
contest.
National security has understandably stolen away most of
the recent headlines, and Obama is taking a well-deserved victory
lap on that front in the midst of a rightfully euphoric
country.
But the troublesome fiscal mess will take center stage
again soon, and Obama is perhaps understating things when he says
it’s about two competing visions for America. He frames the Ryan
view as “a shrunken image of America that says we can’t afford to
do those things anymore; that America just doesn’t do big things
anymore.”
Sure, government can do big things like win World Wars I
and II, land on the moon and kill Osama bin Laden. But based on
recent assertions, Obama has completely forgot that the marketing
of the automobile, inventing television, inventing the airplane and
the discovery and later marketing of electrical power — all done
outside of government — are not only big things, but have led to
much prosperity and yes, even greatness.
