Looking at falling poll numbers and decreasingly popular policies, Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie pronounce the Obama Presidency the second Carter Administration:
So far, he seems to be skipping the chapter on Bill Clinton and his generally free-market economic policies and instead flipping back to the themes and comportment of Jimmy Carter. Like the 39th president, Obama has inherited an awful economy, dizzying budget deficits and a geopolitical situation as promising as Kim Jong Il’s health. Like Carter, Obama is smart, moralistic and enamored of alternative energy schemes that were nonstarters back when America’s best-known peanut farmer was installing solar panels at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Like Carter, Obama faces as much effective opposition from his own party’s left wing as he does from an ardent but diminished GOP.
And perhaps most important, as with Carter, his specific policies are genuinely unpopular. The auto bailout — which, incidentally, is illegal, springing as it has from a fund specifically earmarked for financial institutions — has been reviled from the get-go, with opposition consistently polling north of 60 percent. Majorities have said no to bank bailouts and to cap and trade if it would make electricity significantly more expensive.
I think they’re a bit ahead of themselves. President Obama is definitely a slicker article than Mr. Carter was and there’s still a bit of time to focus his attentions rather than diluting them. My own advice would be to ignore Rahm Emanuel and to emulate the hedgehog rather than the fox. All of his attentions should be focused on getting the financial system back in order and ensuring that it doesn’t repeat the mistakes of the last decade. That is manifestly not the case now as Goldman-Sachs announces large profits and new financial offerings that sound remarkably like the old financial offerings that got the financial sector into such trouble.
However, Welch and Gillespie are right, we don’t have an outside threat right now although experience suggests that may change faster than we can imagine. Right now IMO the greatest threat to the United States is structural unemployment in the 10% range. That won’t be averted via Waxman-Markey, further bailouts of the automobile sector, or the healthcare reform bills that have gotten through committee in the House and Senate.
If he must do one more thing, it should be getting our fiscal house in order which means a healthcare reform bill that lowers the federal government’s healthcare spending.
If he doesn’t accomplish those things someone else may be in the White House in 2013, complaining about the mess that’s been left on his or her plate by the previous administration.
Like true libertarians, Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie, offer no solutions other than that government programs are destructive and those that do not think they way we do are dyspeptic dystopians and paranoiacs, with a nice little mix of American Exceptionalism and Shining City on the Hill. To wit:
Not the brightest bulbs in the ethers, if at a time when even the high school dunce sitting in a corner knows that part of our economic problems stem from high energy costs. I do believe that President Carter pointed to this problem, and attempted to introduce the American public on the value of conservation of energy and alternative energy sources.
On this we can agree:
That will only be achieved when the Center Right joins in the effort of controlling Medicare spending, rather than handing tax dollars to Insurance companies via the Medicare Advantage program.
By the way, the most recent OECD study points to ways that government can decrease health care cost, if you have not read it, perhaps now is the time.
http://www.olis.oecd.org/olis/2009doc.nsf/linkto/eco-wkp%282009%296
I’ve read it, thank you.
There’s a competing plan, Wyden-Bennett, that does achieve the objectives. In my view centrist Democrats and Republicans should get behind it. I’ve already posted to that effect.