“It would be good if Obama could be a dictator for a few years,”
said the director Woody Allen in 2010, as he dismissed Tea Party
Republicans as obstructionists. The left holds this view even more
fervently today. Speaking to the National Council of La Raza
earlier this week, President Obama allowed himself a musing on
dictatorship’s appeal that met with great approval from the
audience.
“Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and
change the laws on my own. And believe me, right now, dealing with
Congress… the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I
promise you. Not just on immigration reform. But that’s not how —
that’s not how our system works,” he said, to which members of the
La Raza audience responded with a chant of “Yes, you can!” and a
cry of “Change it.”
So, liberals dream about dictatorial powers for Obama. Yet
this week they profess a deep regard for the virtues of
“bipartisanship” and see themselves as unimpeachable arbiters of a
“balanced” approach to the debt crisis. Nothing bothers them more
than the “intransigence” of Tea Party Republicans, who perversely
refuse to step aside and let Obama act like a debt-oblivious Third
World dictator.
For his part, Obama laments the lack of civility and
concord between members of the legislative and executive branch. He
has even ordered Congressional leaders to appear before him at the
White House in order to hear his thoughts on this
subject.
It tears him up that “compromise” has become a “dirty
word” in Washington, as he put it in his Prime Time speech on
Monday. Apparently, what would make this decaying city great again
is if its politicians abandoned principle more frequently than they
already do.
Presidents usually extol America for its commitment to
principle, but Obama this week has taken to touting its lack of
any.
“America, after all, has always been a grand
experiment in compromise. As a democracy made up of every
race and religion, where every belief and point view is welcomed,
we have put to the test time and again the proposition at the heart
of our founding: that out of many, we are one,” he said in
Monday’s speech. “We’ve engaged in fierce and passionate
debates about the issues of the day, but from slavery to war, from
civil liberties to questions of economic justice, we have tried to
live by the words that Jefferson once wrote: ‘Every man
cannot have his way in all things — without this mutual
disposition, we are disjointed individuals, but not a
society.’”
Obama declared that compromisers are the great Americans
“we remember” but the doggedly “ideological” we forget. At a
different time and before a different audience, he would say the
opposite (one can’t imagine the above paragraph appearing in a
speech before the NAACP), but in his final demagogic push to lift
the debt ceiling he feels the need to fake up some admiration
for philosophical flexibility. And so thoughts on compromise
from a slave owner are suddenly worthy of his citation, as are the
words of Ronald Reagan, who has gone from a “rigid ideologue” in
the left’s estimation to a venerable source of wit and
wisdom.
Conveniently forgotten for the moment is Reagan’s calls
for whole departments of the federal government to be abolished. Or
that Jimmy Carter, anticipating the politics of today, accused
Reagan of insufficient enthusiasm for Medicare, prompting Reagan’s
“there you go again” line.
What does Obama mean by compromise? He means that Tea
Party Republicans take equal responsibility for a crisis they
didn’t create and swallow a non-solution they didn’t negotiate. It
is telling that he considers spending cuts a wrenching “compromise”
on his part, as if accepting a tiny dent in debt accumulation
entitles him to special accolades. By in effect saying that
balanced budgets go against his principles, he exposes the
essential emptiness of those principles from which he claims to be
so heroically departing for the good of a deal.
Why, some of his supporters say, do we even have a debt
ceiling? Elizabeth Drew of the New York Review of
Books faults Obama for merely considering spending
cuts. Now is the time for more government spending, she insists.
The left longs for the day when an enlightened liberal
president can run up debt and issue new taxes by fiat. In the
meantime, Obama betrays the put-upon air of a deposed dictator
reduced to haggling with Tea Partiers he views as stubborn and
expendable peasants.
