by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n We are told there are lots of reasons why borrowing $5 trillion in less than three years and federalizing healthcare have not yet restored prosperity.<\/p>\n The residents of George Orwell\u2019s Oceania daily screamed at the infamous visage of arch-enemy of the people Emmanuel Goldstein. In the same way, almost every week for the last 140, Americans have been reminded just how nefarious and lasting was the work of George W. Bush. Now ensconced somewhere in Texas, Bush, in insidious ways, somehow still blocks our collective recovery.<\/p>\n Wall Street likewise continues to conspire to thwart Americans. \u201cFat-cat bankers,\u201d \u201cmillionaires and billionaires,\u201d people who fly in \u201ccorporate jets,\u201d and those who \u201cdon\u2019t pay their fair share\u201d and who junket to Las Vegas or jet to the Super Bowl \u201con the taxpayers\u2019 dime\u201d have all ignored the president\u2019s warnings. Did they not hear that \u201cnow is not the time for profit\u201d and \u201cI do think at a certain point you\u2019ve made enough money\u201d?<\/p>\n There are other guilty parties. The president also reminded us that there are fewer bank-teller jobs because of ATMs. And he added that online ticketing has meant that there is likewise far less employment for travel agents. Such accelerated automation after January 2009 apparently helps explain why unemployment is still over 9 percent.<\/p>\n And if technologically induced instability were not enough, there is the culpable Republican-controlled House. Until November 2010, a considerable Democratic majority in the House and a super-majority in the Senate were supposedly allowing the president to make headway. But then, for still poorly understood reasons, the people foolishly voted in a Republican majority in the House. The new Congress that was seated in January stopped the Obama success of the prior 24 months in its tracks. Since then, for the last nine months, the president has had to \u201cfight Congress\u201d in a way he had apparently not had to in his first two years of triumph. \u201cThey need to do their job,\u201d the president remarked of the mysterious congressional ennui that started in January of this year.<\/p>\n The president also noticed that sometimes even the gods conspire to derail the expected recovery. In August, in a series of speeches, Mr. Obama outlined the perfect storm that had hit us \u2014 a veritable quadrafecta of unexpected bad news. First there was the Arab Spring, which created global uncertainty. Then oil prices spiked and sidetracked the nascent recovery. To top that off, the Japanese tsunami did its share to halt the president\u2019s plans for economic restoration. Nor, he reminded us, should we forget the financial uncertainty in Europe.<\/p>\n Former top Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee best summed up the weird alignment of the stars: \u201cEarthquakes, tsunamis, revolutions in the Middle East, financial crisis, and now we even have earthquakes outside of Washington, DC.\u201d Other administration spokesmen noted the deleterious role of Hurricane Irene, which interrupted the president\u2019s vacation and paralyzed the East Coast. Earlier they had noted the damage done by BP and the seemingly unending oil spill. In other words, if Republicans in Congress and ATMs were not enough, we also had Arabs, Japanese, Europeans, and the angry earth shaker and tidal-wave maker, Poseidon, all in league against this administration.<\/p>\n But Bush, Republicans, foreigners, high tech, and divine retribution do not alone explain the continued economic stagnation. Most recently, a reflective President Obama told us he now thinks our problems are even more existential. We, the American people, he concluded, are also the problem: \u201cThe way I think about it is, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft, and we didn\u2019t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades.\u201d Apparently, our lackadaisical natures have been eroding even more since 2009, and so they also do their part in preventing us from restoring economic growth.<\/p>\n Note that the president believes that citing such extraneous causes is not blame-gaming. That\u2019s why, not long ago, he warned high-school students that \u201cIt\u2019s the easiest thing in the world to start looking around for someone to blame.\u201d<\/p>\n There are four factors that explain why the amorphous \u201cthey\u201d do all sorts of strange things to convince President Obama that our problems are not historic deficits, huge increases in entitlements, a vast new health-care program, anti-business rhetoric, federal interventions against private enterprise, and new government regulations, which collectively have terrified the private sector, demoralized consumers, and put us on the path to European-style stagnation.<\/p>\n First, much of the Obama blame-gaming is apparently sincere. The president and his economic advisers, most of them now departed, really did believe that too little government spending and not enough taxes accounted for the sluggishness. In almost religious fashion, they believed that near-zero interest rates, trillion-dollar-plus deficits, exploding government spending, greater regulation, and more entitlements would ensure recovery.<\/p>\n This religion was based on a misreading of the 2008 meltdown that put blame solely on Wall Street, rather than including federal lending agencies that, with their guarantees and mandates, warped market reality by encouraging risky home loans. Obama and his advisers also mistakenly thought Republicans were tax-cutting free-marketeers in need of Keynesian correction. In fact, a statist government grew enormously under President Bush. Millions of Americans were excused from the tax rolls, and vast new entitlements went unpaid for. In other words, Obama was a reactionary who vastly expanded what already was growing dangerous. He is not yet to the point of accepting that his worldview results in collective impoverishment \u2014 and he will continue to blame any and all until he faces that unpalatable reality.<\/p>\n Second, blaming is always a symptom of first-time responsibility. As a gifted rhetorician, Barack Obama charmed and talked his way into the Ivy League, law school, and a lectureship, and reinvented an unexceptional and brief Senate career as a mythical bipartisan achievement. He ran for president on grand talk about Bush\u2019s nefariousness from Guantanamo to Iraq. Now, for the first time in his life, he is responsible for something other than soaring platitudes and easy invective. He clearly is uncomfortable with that newfound responsibility and so blames others for his novel \u201cbuck stops here\u201d predicament.<\/p>\n Third, Obama has picked up a lot of technocratic data but little common sense, or even the sorts of basic facts that most people acquire in the workplace. Only a hothouse plant would think that inflating tires and getting \u201ctune-ups\u201d are a substitute for greater petroleum production. \u201cMillions of green jobs\u201d is the sort of pie-in-the-sky theorizing one hears in the faculty lounge among tenured apparatchiks, but which means little to a small businessman who must meet a payroll. No business or household off the subsidized campus or government dole could run the way Obama runs the government \u2014 and it shows in his na\u00efvet\u00e9 about what is ruining the recovery.<\/p>\n Lastly, there are no consequences for Obama\u2019s blaming his failed economic policy on someone else. The media long ago gave up their role as presidential watchdogs and became invested in Obama\u2019s success. Obama knew that he could golf far more with exemption than George W. Bush could. He could renounce public campaign financing and shake down Goldman Sachs and BP for record donations \u2014 and still demagogue Wall Street greed. Polls suggest that the public has finally grown tired of Obama\u2019s finger-pointing and his embarrassing contradictions. No matter \u2014 Obama himself knows that those who deliver and shape the news will never hold him to account.<\/p>\n George McClellan telegraphed President Lincoln weekly to tell him how other people and things had stalled the Army of the Potomac \u2014 in a way Ulysses S. Grant never did. Douglas MacArthur blamed the surprise Chinese invasion of Korea on the Truman administration, Congress, Communists, his Pentagon overseers, and other officers \u2014 in a way unknown to his successor, Matthew Ridgway. William Westmoreland thought the politicians and the Sixties lost him Vietnam \u2014 in a way foreign to the thinking of his successor, Creighton Abrams. Before David Petraeus, U.S. generals in Baghdad blamed their civilian overseers, Iraqis, someone else\u2019s strategy, Washington neo-cons, or enemy terrorists for their failure to secure Iraq.<\/p>\n Attention, Mr. President: History is not kind to blame-gamers.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online We are told there are lots of reasons why borrowing $5 trillion in less than three years and federalizing healthcare have not yet restored prosperity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[49,619,278],"tags":[119,42,77,105,74,620,580,1064,621,622,50,88,40,5,1052,67,592],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-vu","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1877,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-populist-president\/","url_meta":{"origin":1952,"position":0},"title":"Our Populist President?","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 27, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Obama and Populism I could believe President Obama\u2019s postmortem take that the same populist sentiment that propelled Scott Brown to office also earlier sent him to the White House \u2014 if we saw fresh liberal Democrats winning seats in places like Alabama against entrenched\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2010"","block_context":{"text":"January 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/january-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2345,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-road-to-oceania\/","url_meta":{"origin":1952,"position":1},"title":"Our Road to Oceania","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 17, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In George Orwell's allegorical novel\u00a0Nineteen Eighty-Four, the picture of \"Big Brother\" appears constantly in the adoring media. Perceived enemies are everywhere \u2014 supposedly plotting to undo the benevolent egalitarianism of Big Brother. Citizens assemble each morning to scream hatred for two minutes at\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "August 2009"","block_context":{"text":"August 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/august-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2336,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-follies\/","url_meta":{"origin":1952,"position":2},"title":"Obama’s Follies","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 22, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner The Race Card Gets Trumped I think almost everyone expected that once President Obama embarked on a highly partisan agenda at a time of record deficits in the midst of a recession, he was going to meet resistance. And I think almost everyone likewise\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "August 2009"","block_context":{"text":"August 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/august-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2488,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/is-the-president-in-recovery\/","url_meta":{"origin":1952,"position":3},"title":"Is the President in Recovery?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 1, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services President Obama does not care much about deficits \u2014 other than worrying that big debt might matter in his re-election campaign. In his first three budgets, Obama borrowed nearly $5 trillion. Currently, the government is borrowing about 45 percent of everything that it\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Debt and Deficits"","block_context":{"text":"Debt and Deficits","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/politics\/debt-and-deficits\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2129,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/where-has-the-thrill-gone\/","url_meta":{"origin":1952,"position":4},"title":"Where Has the Thrill Gone?","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 24, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The Harder They Fall? Who appointed over 40 ambassadors on the sole basis of campaign contributions, or has as many lobbyists in government as did any President in memory? And who releases touchy news \u2014 whether increased unemployment or trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2009"","block_context":{"text":"November 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/november-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2736,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/reelecting-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":1952,"position":5},"title":"Reelecting Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 23, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online We are beginning to see the contours of the upcoming 2012 reelection campaign of Barack Obama. Whether always officially sanctioned or not, Obama\u2019s campaign will focus on three general themes: a) the 2008 meltdown of the economy on Bush\u2019s watch; b) conservative heartlessness\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Campaign 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Campaign 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/campaign-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1952"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1953,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952\/revisions\/1953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}