Out of power, Democrats celebrate America’s system of checks and
balances. In power, they bemoan it. Woody Allen’s comment from a
few years back that Obama should enjoy dictatorial autonomy and
that the “Republican Party should get out of his way and stop
trying to hurt him” more or less summarizes the Democrats’ position
in the fiscal cliff debate.
Barack Obama is our “lord and savior,” says actor Jamie Foxx.
His wife is “superwoman,” according to actor Samuel Jackson. And so
the left expects Republicans to bow down to them. They find it
troubling that the party in charge of the chamber most responsive
to the people would deign to speak for them, and that individual
citizens, such as that “nobody” Grover Norquist, as pundit Chris
Matthews calls him, get to influence the debate.
For all of its recent prattle about the glories of democracy,
the left would prefer to see democracy suspended and Obama granted
Morsi-like emergency powers. Almost nothing has changed in four
years. All of Obama’s failures have been conveniently forgotten. He
remains, according to the left, a uniquely transcendent figure who
shouldn’t have to bother with dissent. Even the ludicrous Lincoln
comparisons are recycled from four years ago. “Somehow Lincoln has
worked himself into Obama’s heart and mind, and it’s a good thing
to have Lincoln as your mentor,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin in 2008.
Encouraging this talk, Obama said that Lincoln made “my story
possible.”
The left’s Lincoln nostalgia has nothing to do with democracy
but its wish for a progressive dictatorship under Obama. “So I
threw the Lincoln analogy at a close aide to the President last
week, and he said, ‘You know, with this Republican — with the way
politics of Washington are today, there’d still be slavery,’”
recounted reporter Chuck Todd recently. In previous impasses, the
White House called Republicans hostage-takers. Now it is likening
them to slaveholders. Maybe Chuck Todd picked up his morsel from
Joe Biden, who said the Republicans would put Americans “back in
chains.”
This isn’t the first time the White House has injected race into
an economic debate. In his first term, Obama would use race to try
and break Republican resistance to his budgets, saying once,
apropos of nothing, “This country was founded on compromise. I
couldn’t go through the front door in this country’s founding. And
if we were really thinking about ideal positions, we wouldn’t have
a union.”
The only species of servitude relevant to the fiscal cliff is
the economic kind. Americans are looking at many years of
involuntary labor as the debt mounts. Obama has no intention of
erasing it. All his posturing is just an exercise in symbolic
socialism: he wants a tax hike on the rich that wouldn’t end up
making the slightest dent in the debt. He is egging members of the
middle class into joining him in this pointless politics of envy,
but it will only backfire on them. The Democrats will raise taxes
on the middle class once they get the chance. Though the Democrats
now act like they authored Bush’s middle-class tax cuts, they
didn’t support them at the time.
Federal taxation could turn into “continual plunder,” warned the
Founding Fathers. Even Alexander Hamilton, who downplayed such
warnings in The Federalist Papers, would probably agree
with that characterization were he alive today. Hamilton tried to
reassure early colonists, who had seen their taxes used for the
“vainglorious” pursuits of King George III, that federal taxation
would never become a “hideous monster.” But it has, and its claws
will only grow sharper as China demands payment on the debt.
And as the economy sags, there will be less money for the
government to take. Obama’s tax hike is sure to hurt the economy,
despite his aides’ breezy predictions that it won’t affect
behavior. “The increases in the top two income tax brackets would
put a drag on consumption,” Michael Brown, an economist at Wells
Fargo Securities, has told the press. But Obama, said Brown,
thinks the other parts of his proposal would offset that drag on
consumption. That is why he has stuffed it with $200 billion in
“stimulus,” including a $50 billion infrastructure bank to fund
transportation projects.
So we are back to shovel-ready jobs as his envisioned economic
catalyst. More taxes and more spending — that is Obama’s
“compromise” position. It is no wonder Mitch McConnell laughed.
Obama’s olive branches look more like thorn bushes, which is what
Republicans should expect from a community organizer who learned
his economics and negotiating tactics from Saul Alinsky.
