Asked by
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if he regretted his promotion of
the bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra, Barack Obama said, “No, I
don’t.” This cavalier answer provides yet another snapshot of the
arrogance and ideological fixation that drives his presidency.
Clinging to an idea in defiance of reality defines the
ideologue, a definition to which Obama conforms perfectly. No
failure ever gives him pause. He can squander over a half billion
dollars of taxpayer money and then use the occasion to brag about
what he considers glorious forays into innovative
risk-taking.
Most hack pols are reluctant to admit errors, but hack
pols who also fancy themselves deep ideologues on the “right side
of history” take open pride in them. Obama falls into this latter
category. In his mind, the supposed purity of “green jobs” not only
absolves him of any complicity in the Solyndra scandal but confers
upon him a permanent halo. He has seen the future and it
works.
To the extent that he acknowledged the Solyndra failure,
he cast it as a minor misstep on the ascending road of progress. He
claimed that the green jobs loan guarantee program is humming along
nicely — “if you look at the overall portfolio of loan guarantees
that have been provided, overall, it is doing well” — even as
media outlets report that the program has yielded an anemic number
of jobs and a growing list of busts.
In his past boosterism for green jobs, Obama has described
them as an indisputable boon to the economy and environment and a
safe bet on the future. But in the Stephanopoulos interview, he
blithely acknowledged the risk of investing in them: “And what we
always understood was that not every single business is going to
succeed in clean energy.” Always understood? Did he inform the
taxpayer of this?
A gross dereliction of duty dressed up as brave
risk-taking has become the administration’s audacious new stance on
Solyndra: at first, White House officials professed innocent
ignorance of its risk to the taxpayer; now they acknowledge
awareness of its wobbliness and dismiss such foreseen failures as
the price of progress. “This program was established by Congress to
support innovative, cutting-edge projects that by their nature
carry a degree of risk,” Energy Department spokesman Damien LaVera
said to the Washington Post.
“Hindsight is always 20/20,” said Obama to Stephanopoulos,
even as his remarks indicated that he would gladly make the same
mistake again. He offered no apology to taxpayers while promising
more grand gambles with their money in the future: “… the fact of
the matter is that if we don’t get behind clean energy, if we don’t
get behind advanced battery manufacturing, if we’re not the ones
who are creating the cars of the future, then we’re not going to be
able to make stuff here in the United States of America. And one of
the most important things that I want to do over the next several
years is restore a sense that America can manufacture, but we don’t
just purchase stuff from someplace else, but we’re also exporting
to other countries.”
According to this ludicrous attempt at uplift, Obama is
making America more competitive in the global marketplace one
bankruptcy at a time. The idea that green jobs would ever prove
beneficial to the economy was the first deception involved here, as
foreshadowed by Obama’s appointment of Van Jones, a de facto
Marxist, as his “green jobs czar.” Marxists have never been known
for their job creation.
Nevertheless, Van Jones thrilled White House officials
with his “green collar economy” drivel. The Valerie Jarretts
listened with rapt attention as he urged environmentalists to move
beyond just hyperactive conservation and regulation and explore new
avenues of “investment” at taxpayer expense.
Solyndra has smudged the administration’s green collar and
raised the prospect of a new crime category, green collar crime,
while throwing light on a loan guarantee program that looks like
something hatched in a socialist dystopia of Van Jones’s imagining.
It has come out that former administration official Lawrence
Summers, commenting on Solyndra’s shakiness, warned that government
is a “crappy” venture capitalist, but such reservations were never
going to register with Obama no matter how loudly expressed, as he
was simply not interested in the normal workings of capitalism and
was fixated upon green jobs at all costs.
Like a good socialist ideologue, he is impervious to
reality and treats any setback as a reason to expand rather than
end the cause. Last week, his Department of Energy shoveled out the
door more money for green jobs. What will happen with those
billions is anybody’s guess. But if the gallows humor contained in
the leaked OMB memos about Solyndra are any indication of the
fitness of future projects, taxpayers shouldn’t hold their breath.
The Washington Post
quotes an analyst saying to a colleague: “What’s terrifying is
that after looking at some of the [loan guarantee projects] that
came next, this one [Solyndra] started to look
better.”
