And now, not even two months into the presidency of the man who promised an end to partisan bickering and a seismic shift in the way policy gets done in Washington, we find that it's really true. The president is a hard-left Liberal.
Not that I'm surprised, of course. I voted for the other guy...because voting for a hard-left Liberal is against my principles. I just remembered! Rush has said a thing or two about principles recently. I largely agree, though I wouldn't count on policy choices flowing more or less naturally from principles--it's hard work bringing principle to bear on policy, and it's easy to get sidetracked.
But that's beside the point. The point I'm making is that Rush got Obama right during the campaign. Heck, I got him right too, but I don't have a nationally syndicated radio talkshow! He was accused of cynicism and blind partisanship, along with all the rest of us because he (and we) didn't believe Obama's centrist talk. Those who had the audacity to open their minds and hope that he was really a different kind of politician included prominent conservative intellectuals who should have known better.
Christopher Buckley was delighted that our next President would be a talented writer (like him), and David Brooks crowed that what Obama said about pulling together to solve the country's problems was essentially what he'd been hoping for years.
But reality has a way of clubbing even the most hopeful over the head. Buckley indicates surprise and consternation at the spending proclivities of Obama, presented in the budget. Brooks is astonished and disappointed that Obama seems intent on pitting the different classes of Americans against each other. Centrists all over the place are beginning to squirm ever so slightly, though. It seems they really don't want to see a hard-left Liberal agenda go into the national policy machine.
The Reverend Jeremiah Wright (you remember him, right? He wishes God's damnation upon the country of his citizenship and believes, among other things, that America created the AIDS virus to kill Africans) is even expressing disappointment. "He's like any other president. He's a politician and he's got to do what politicians do."
That's funny. I thought we were cynics for refusing to hope that he was so much more than a politician. I'm not laughing; being right is not much of a triumph at this point, and "I told you so," just doesn't have its usual savor, somehow.
There's another story in here, and we'd do well to reflect on it a bit. Intellectuals are human, and they have all of the same afflictions of the rest of us mere mortals. They sometimes believe things that aren't true, they sometimes honestly want things that are bad--but they also have real talents. The point is that smart people can be blinded by ideology as well as anybody else. Being smart tends to make admitting error difficult, though, as a reading of Buckley or Brooks shows very clearly. Both stop well short of announcing "I was wrong!" because, I suspect, neither really believes that he is (yet). Here is Buckley:
He tells us that all this [the $3.6 trillion budget] is going to work because the economy is going to be growing by 3.2 percent a year from now. Do you believe that? Would you take out a loan based on that? And in the three years following, he predicts that our economy will grow by 4 percent a year.
This is nothing if not audacious hope. If he’s right, then looking back, March 2009 will be the dawn of the Age of Stimulation, or whatever elegant phrase Niall Ferguson comes up with. If he turns out to be wrong, then it will look very different, the entrance ramp to the Road to Serfdom, perhaps, and he will reap the whirlwind that follows, along with the rest of us.
Brooks is a little more up-front about it, admitting that Obama is not who he thought he was. But still, there's this:
Moderates now find themselves betwixt and between. On the left, there is a president who appears to be, as Crook says, “a conviction politician, a bold progressive liberal.” On the right, there are the Rush Limbaugh brigades. The only thing more scary than Obama’s experiment is the thought that it might fail and the political power will swing over to a Republican Party that is currently unfit to wield it.
Brooks adds a "fair" representation of the Administration's response to his scathing centrists's critique yesterday, and finishes in this way:
...the White House made a case that was sophisticated and fact-based. These people know how to lead a discussion and set a tone of friendly cooperation. I’m more optimistic that if Senate moderates can get their act together and come up with their own proactive plan, they can help shape a budget that allays their anxieties while meeting the president’s goals.
Pardon me if I'm not impressed by the gyrations Brooks is going through. Sometimes it's better to have a full-blown confession instead of create an ever-expanding system to account for all the little things that don't match up. It didn't work for Ptolemy's model of the Solar System, and it won't work now.
Is it too much to ask that the smart guys apply Occam's famous "Razor"? Or just some plain old principles?
UPDATE: You can add a bunch of energy executives to the list of disappointed and/or disillusioned folks. It seems Cap-and-Trade is going to hurt, after all.
Email Me
