Obama course, obstacles all too familiar
In a bit of political irony, the administration of President Obama is turning out to be the mirror image of the White House of President George W. Bush.
Democrats accused Bush of taking his eye off the ball, the war of necessity in Afghanistan, for a war of choice in Iraq. Now Republicans charge Obama took his eye off the ball, the domestic war of necessity to fix the economy, to focus on a war of choice, overhaul of health care. Poll after poll shows voters placing a higher priority on the economy, unemployment and the deficit than on health care. Republicans getting elected governor in Virginia and New Jersey last week proved that. But Obama and Democrats plow ahead with their health-care obsession.
Obama had his mission accomplished moment in February when the White House declared it had prevented unemployment from rising more than 8 percent by getting Congress to pass the $787 billion stimulus bill. After joblessness breached 9 percent, the White House said it had "misread" the economy and so had everyone else. That recalled the Bush administration saying the CIA and all the intelligence agencies of Western nations got it wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
A week ago, the Obama administration claimed the stimulus "created or saved" 640,000 jobs. Just days later the Labor Department reported unemployment hitting a quarter-century high of 10.2 percent with the economy shedding 3.8 million jobs since Obama was sworn in. News reports found the jobs-saved claim overstated. Salary raises were even found to count as jobs saved. Most of the posts allegedly rescued turned out to be government jobs. A prominent economist had the audacity to note the concept of a saved job didn't show up in economic textbooks. All this permits speculation the administration was playing with fuzzy numbers as critics once accused the Bush White House of cooking the books on Iraq.
The parallels go on. My liberal friends explained their Bush hatred by saying he shredded the Constitution with the run-up to the Iraq war, harsh interrogation techniques and the Patriot Act. Conservative anger at Obama reflects the same kind of fear that the White House is undermining traditional American values, abandoning the bedrock principles of our economy and radically reordering the relationship between government and citizen.
Exhibit A, of course, is health-care reform. The Democrat fixation on a government option is the first step in a process to herd all Americans into government-run health system and crowd out the private insurance industry.
Also alarming is the massive government intervention in the economy, and the trillions in red ink it brings. True, this began in the waning days of the Bush administration amid the panicky collapse of Wall Street. Still, rather than break up the financial giants that required rescue, administration policy helped make firms too big to fail even bigger. Obama ignored the advice of former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, a key campaign adviser, to prohibit the trading practices that got the banks into trouble in the first place.
Could it be that this White House likes the idea of too big to fail because it guarantees government meddling in business?
Further threatening our free market system and our liberties are the government bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler (for the second time) and the drive to banish the secret ballot from the workplace so unions can can organize without worrying about the niceties of democracy.
Obama, like Bush, perturbs enemies at the paranoid extremes of American politics. Obama has the "birthers" who deny his citizenship and Bush had the "truthers" who saw a White House conspiracy in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Let's not forget that Bush came to Washington promising to be a uniter, not a divider, while Obama pledged to cleanse our politics of bitter partisanship and cynicism.
Their politics may be polar opposites, but Obama trods some of the same paths as Bush. The result is the same -- polarized politics.
Comment at suntimes.com.