I’ve been a relentless critic of Obama’s policies of redistributionism, class warfare, and cronyism, so I didn’t feel I had anything new to say after Obama gave what’s being called his “Teddy Roosevelt speech” in Kansas earlier this week.
But David Harsanyi has an insightful column at Reason that is worth sharing. Here’s my favorite passage.
Obama’s mimicking Teddy Roosevelt’s end-of-career hard left turn tells us a lot about the president’s worldview. In his speech in Osawatomie, Kan., Obama dropped almost all pretenses and made the progressive case against an American free market system, which he called “a simple theory…one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government….And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work.” Obama, after all, is such a towering economic mind that in Osawatomie, he once again blamed ATMs (and the Internets) for job losses. This is a man we can trust. “Less productivity! More jobs!”
The only part that of the excerpt that might not be accurate is the jab about Obama’s “towering economic mind.”
It’s not that I object to insults and name calling, especially if the target is someone who routinely demonizes his opponents and questions their motives.
But I do think there’s another interpretation. Instead of assuming Obama is clueless, might it not be more reasonable to think he simply doesn’t care?
Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine you are President and you want to curry favor with special interest groups and buy support from various voting blocs. Wouldn’t that explain a lot of Obama’s policies?
In other words, maybe Obama’s making government bigger in response to the same short-term political pressures that motivated the Bush Administration to make government bigger.
This doesn’t excuse the bad policy, to be sure. It just means politicians do the wrong thing because they are often guided by something other than what’s best for America.
By the way, this is also why I disagree with those who think Obama is trying to deliberately destroy the nation. Why make such a radical assumption? Do you also think Bush was trying to wreck America? Do you think Greek politicians have been trying to cripple their nation? Or French politicians, Spanish politicians, and Japanese politicians?
As a general rule, I think politicians are contemptible, self-serving, corrupt, and hypocritical. But that doesn’t mean they’re stupid and/or deliberately destructive.
[…] Obama (Tweedledee) […]
Without any reservation I can undendeniably say that Obama is deliberately destructive over all else. Somewhere above I read that “he has ‘doubled’ Bush’s spending… DOUBLED! More like exponentially increased. Lets not forget Ms. Pelosi in this. The national deficit was something to the tune of $275bil when she took over as speaker of the house in year 7 of President Bush’s term and jumped by $100bil by the end of his presidency. She’s a big spender obviously, coupled with Obama absolutely frivolous. The national deficit breached the trillion mark within weeks of Obama’s inauguration, making spending AT LEAST 4x that of Bush 43’s in the very beginning. We all know that Obama has done nothing but put this country in enormous debt in an attempt to completely collapse the American economy so that marxist/socialist/communists like Acorn, SAIA, George Soros, Van Jones, etc. can take over and COMPLETELY run the last of the patriots/non-progressives into the ground. Deliberately destructive/indifferent/clueless all fit this moron’s profile, like it or not.
I will respectfully disagree with your conclusion, but enjoyed your article. I believe the reality is that Obama is all three. He is patently clueless about the nuts and bolts of capitalism. Plus, he surrounded himself with similar minded progressives to feed his marxist/socialistic based economic belief system. He is supremely indifferent to any suggestions and arguments against his intransigent positions on anything and everything economic. Lastly, you don’t think he is deliberately destructive. Au contraire – he is so deliberately destructive that he is evil. Don’t you all remember he TOLD us many times what his plan was for the country – he told us he was going to “transform” the country. He told us this long before his election. He never defined that transformation because he and his handlers knew the voters would NEVER elect him if he explained what “transformation” meant. He telegraphed his intentions – you could say that his actions were premeditated in his desire to destroy the country so he could start the rebuild in his marxist/socialistic dream world. If he is not stopped in 2012, the damage done could take a decade or more to correct. A very big “IF,” in my opinion.
Obama is thought to be deliberately destructive because he pal’d around with a lot of people in his life that have advocated for and attempted with actions to bring about the destruction of America and free economics in general.
Obama being elected was a result of our failed school system.
Because all you had to do was read his own words.
Now the school of hard knocks is reeducating the masses and they will not be fooled again.
Especially blacks I hope, for they have been screwed the worse by this imposter.
Even more clueless are the damn fools that voted this idiot as president!
For those who have read Obama’s books, his actions are no surprise. Obama remains a dedicated Black Nationalist and as such the dictates of his ideology command him to use all measures, “By any means necessary”, to destroy the United States. Obama was well versed in the processes defined by his Nationalist predecessors; those processes admit the ‘colonialist’ cannot be defeated in a direct confrontation. Thus evolves the necessity of destroying the colonialist’s means of empowerment. According to nationalists, bankrupting the government assures the collapse of the infrastructure that props-up colonialists. Obama’s dedication to Wall Street is an illusion, as is his dismissal of the consequences of expanding government dependencies. The bottom line to all of his efforts is the economic collapse of the United States and, if possible, the entirety of Western Culture. The ideologue presented in Obama’s books remains very active behind the facade he is presenting to the world. When the time comes, his mask will come off and his loyalties to the ‘movement’ will be revealed. Radicals like Obama fully understand the necessity of, “deceive to achieve” or “Drop the radical pose to achieve the radical ends.” I suspect this coming summer, when discontent is expressed with violence, Obama will parlay the situation to finalize the collapse of this nation; we will then have no doubt as to where his loyalties are – Until then, it is entertaining to watch befuddled Americans try to explain Obama’s behavior.
He is simply smart. He has figured out that finally after four centuries entropy has overtaken aberrant American individualism and thus American lemmings are finally ready to buy HopNChange to their destruction into worldwide economic averagedom — and to Obama’s personal success.
It’s clear Obama is deliberately destructive. He hypocritically criticizes Bush and his polices of so-called low tax cuts, yet he is doing everything Bush is doing regarding everything else. He doubled Bush’s spending, he renewed the Patriot Act. Obama has hardly changed a thing regarding foreign policy. He still views the war on terror as a threat and is spending more on defense then Bush did. The policies of both Bush and Obama are hardly any different.
On, the other hand, Obama’s an academic and surrounded himself with a lot of textbook academics. I have to believe the now departed council of economic wizards he surrounded himself with genuinely got it wrong. Economic formulae, for example may be able to predict some kind of multiplier from government spending, but fail to predict the chilling effect those inputs have when applied in a real-world environment of deepening deficits and deficit spending. Economic psychology doesn’t fit so well into these sorts of formulations. It so happens that those formulations also suited his political purposes which included a lot of spending on union pork, green initiatives and the rest. The one caveat – which is pretty much the norm with all politicians – is that the investment, so called has to return a poltical dividend. But then, isn’t this why we never get real solutions from politicians? It’s always a deal with the devil these skunks are playing. And Obama plays the game a heck of a lot better than any of us imgined.
Obama’s base of support is clueless. The left, is generally, very idealistic and fail to realize the negative consequences that accrue from their ‘positive’ initiatives. Obama has shown himself to be intensely beholden to his political base(s) among greens, unions, socialists, communists, economic liberals, and all of the other leftist cranks that are out there. Failure to placate that base is doom for this guy.
Even if you’re right and he simply doesn’t care, he is doing so much damage that should be obvious to any human being that his actions have risen to the criminal level of depraved indifference.
Presbo may have no specific agenda, but his financier Soros has a definite agenda and has spent money heavily in trying to take this country is a direction of economic collapse. He has already done the same thing to 5 other countries, last time picking up a cool billion dollars in a day out of the equity value of the British pound, equity value taken right out of the pockets of British citizens. It is not realistic or reasonable. It is just fantasy to decide that he has suddinly had a change of haeart and is no longer interested in profiting from collapsing a country and has decided suddenly to get religion and to spend pour all this money into America to push a lib/prog aganda “for our own good”.
If Presbo has no specific aganda, Soros definitely has one and it is not one that will help us, and Presbo is not getting in the way of its execution.
Calculated to destroy the republic and the freedom and liberty therein, and then to set up at the least a socialist, centrally planned, basically comunist oriented “democracy” which will be in fact an oligarchy where the already established lib/prog politicians run things under the auspices of representing folks and not having hardly any accountablity to the people that they purport to represent. That’s deliberatley destructive, evenb if you call it fundamentally transforming. And what about the majority of the country that does not WANT the country fundamentally transformed? Who are along for the ride and decrying the loss?
And who are getting folks pushed in their face who are big government status quo alternatives as the only other choice. No press time for Gary Johnson. Ron Paul either gets derision or is completely ignored by what currently passes for news reporting. We are getting force fed a repeat of the 2008 election where we either allow Presbo another shot or else get the current version of McCain as the only choice. Hobson’s choice.
Why limit Obama to just one of those? He is definately clueless, but that does not rule out neither indiifferent nor deliberately destructive. If he wasn’t clueless, he would be better at deliberately destructive.
Definitely calculated. No one could do all of this by accident.