Noteworthy:
"....Obama seems to believe that saying one thing, while doing another, somehow makes it so. His first budget was titled 'A New Era of Fiscal Responsibility,' even as his own projections showed a decade's worth of historically high deficits. He vowed no new taxes on 95 percent of Americans, then jacked up cigarette taxes and indicated a willingness to consider new health-care taxes as part of his reform package. He said he didn't want to take over General Motors on the day that he took over General Motors.Such is the extent of Obama's magical realism that he can promise to post all bills on the Internet five days before signing them, serially break that promise and then, when announcing that he wouldn't even try anymore, have a spokesman present the move as yet another example of 'providing the American people more transparency in government.'
What the new president has not quite grasped is that the American people understand both irony and cognitive dissonance. Instead, Obama has mistaken his personal popularity for a national predilection toward emergency-driven central planning. He doesn't get that Americans prefer the slower process of building political consensus based on reality, and at least a semblance of rational deliberation rather than one sky-is-falling legislative session after another."
And, as already established, that "personal popularity" is an illusion.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Related: Obama's Summer of Discontent.
Key point:
"In sorting through all of this, it would be silly and wishful thinking on the part of Republicans to pretend that Obama is in free-fall. But it would be equally silly and demonstrative of wishful thinking on the part of Democrats to ignore the warning signs. Barack Obama is no longer sailing on a summer sea. A public that was strongly supportive of Obama has, in six months, become increasingly wary of and resistant to his policies. He is governing in a manner that is different, and more liberal, than they were led to expect. Obama's soothing words are beginning to fall a bit flat, as is his effort to blame everything on his predecessor. That worked for a season, but that season has come to an end. And Obama is increasingly beginning to sound (and spin) like a conventional politician.
Worst of all, in my estimation, Obama is prescribing exactly the wrong antidote for our ailing economy. I may be mistaken; if so, and if Obamaism is sound economics, he could turn out to be a political Colossus. But if I, along with others far more knowledgeable about economics than I am, are right, then the ripples we are seeing will soon become large breakers, ones that may well begin to wash away recent Democratic gains and, in the process, do enormous, and perhaps irreparable, damage to modern liberalism."
Wehner is being charitable here.
Obama is in over his head, and the public is starting to figure it out.
#
Hopefully America will figure it out before it's too late. The damage he has already done is bad enough, but if this health care bill or the cap and trade bill get through, we could be in big trouble.
ReplyDeleteWe could probably unwind the cap and trade when folks see how bad it really is. But getting us out from under government paid health care could be simply too big a political risk for anyone to make. See social security.