by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n During the 2008 campaign Barack Obama ran more against lame-duck President Bush than against his Republican opponent, John McCain. The campaign is now long over, and yet President Obama still seems haunted by the ghost of his predecessor. Last week, for example, he was railing at the Bush phantom, whom he blamed for his received economic mess. In the world of Barack Obama everything he inherited was someone else\u2019s fault \u2014 unless he believes past policies offer him some advantage and thus are to be claimed as entirely his own.<\/p>\n The stock market is sliding. Gas and food prices are soaring. The housing market is as bad as it has been for the last three years. Unemployment is back over 9 percent. Economic growth is anemic. The national debt has risen $5 trillion in just three years. This year\u2019s $1.6 trillion budget deficit is not stimulating anything but uncertainty and despair. Medicare and Social Security are not sustainable at present rates of payouts. Record numbers of Americans draw food stamps and unemployment insurance. An unpopular Obamacare has not even been implemented yet, and the administration has already granted 1,400 exemptions from it.<\/p>\n In other words, much as Jimmy Carter took the hard times of 1975\u201376 and turned them into the mess of high interest, high inflation, high unemployment, and high gas prices \u2014 while blaming the American people for their malaise \u2014 so too Barack Obama has made almost everything worse and is getting angrier at other people and events (the European meltdown, the Japanese tsunami, the Middle Eastern unrest) in the process.<\/p>\n The administration\u2019s massive borrowing, new regulations, promised higher taxes, opposition to new oil leases and pipelines, takeovers (from GM and Chrysler to healthcare), and rhetorical assault on the successful in private enterprise have turned a bottoming-out recession into a near-permanent slump. Those with capital do not want to invest in new workers or equipment because they believe the president does not like them, in the sense that he will raise taxes to take away their hard-won profits, or will impose some sort of new regulation \u2014 like Obamacare or prohibitions against opening factories in right-to-work states \u2014 to make profits impossible. The result is that they have been for two years largely sitting out this \u201crecovery,\u201d as the economic witch-doctors \u2014 Peter Orszag, Christina Romer, Larry Summers \u2014 come and go.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Obama serially faults the Bush policies of 2008, not his own of 2009\u201311 \u2014 something that becomes ever more difficult as the Bush administration\u2019s average unemployment rate, GDP growth, deficits, and gas prices now seem not all that bad. And to the degree that economists fault Bush for the financial meltdown of 2008, they have cited his excessive federal spending, government intrusion into the housing market, and chronic budget deficits \u2014 just those areas where Obama has trumped Bush and turned his misdemeanors into felonies.<\/p>\n Sometimes Obama\u2019s obsession with Bush\u2019s ghost is more implicit. Take national security. He has quite boldly embraced and expanded all the Bush protocols he once trashed, largely because he has discovered that Guantanamo, tribunals, renditions, preventive detention, the Patriot Act, and Predator drones keep terrorists away from the United States. Yet to this day, Obama has not told the American people why renditions used to be bad and are now acceptable, or why the Bush Predator-drone program of targeted assassinations was wrong but needed to be quintupled. Instead, he makes it clear that a President Obama would have absolutely no patience with someone like a griping Senator Obama.<\/p>\n Obama has not changed the Bush-Petraeus plan for Iraq \u2014 but has never explained why he once denounced what he now advocates. Now the president has dropped his former multicultural reaching-out to the theocracy in Iran and the dictatorship in Syria. But again, what caused the reversion to the Bush-era distrust of these awful regimes? Has Obama matured in other areas, in the fashion that he recently confessed that his opposition to raising the debt ceiling in 2006 was the sort of irresponsible politicking that he now deplores in others?<\/p>\n When George Bush was president, promoting democracy was derided as an arrogant neoconservative imposition of our values onto different cultures. Now pushing democracy in the Arab world is called advocacy for human rights. Yet once more, Obama never explains why he channels the prior president\u2019s policies without even the barest reference to his name.<\/p>\n Obama knows the media are invested in his success. Therefore he feels no urgency to explain to the public why policies enacted years ago deserve blame for their failures and receive no praise for their successes. It is almost as if Obama on some days claims, \u201cBush did it,\u201d while on others insisting, \u201cBush didn\u2019t do it.\u201d<\/p>\n The young president, you see, cannot help it. He is haunted by the ghost of a president past.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online During the 2008 campaign Barack Obama ran more against lame-duck President Bush than against his Republican opponent, John McCain.<\/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":[271],"tags":[12,51,77,181,308,74,243,88,40,244,1052],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Iq","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1251,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/rethinking-george-bush\/","url_meta":{"origin":2754,"position":0},"title":"Rethinking George Bush?","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 20, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Former President George W. Bush left office with the lowest approval ratings since Richard Nixon. In reaction, for nearly two years President Barack Obama won easy applause by prefacing almost every speech on his economic policies with a \"Bush did it\" put-down. But\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "September 2010"","block_context":{"text":"September 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/september-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":454,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/let-bush-be\/","url_meta":{"origin":2754,"position":1},"title":"Let Bush Be","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 19, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The theme of the president's 2012 re-election campaign is that George W. Bush left such a terrible mess that Barack Obama could hardly be expected to clean it up in four years. In other words, 43 months of unemployment rates above 8 percent,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2694,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bush-obsessive-compulsive-disorder\/","url_meta":{"origin":2754,"position":2},"title":"Bush Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 1, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Obama continues to trash Bush in words--but his actions speak louder. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Last July I wrote a column entitled \u201cBarack W. Bush\u201d outlining how candidate Barack Obama was strangely emulating Bush policies \u2014 even as he was trashing the president.\u00a0 Nearly a year later,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "June 2009"","block_context":{"text":"June 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/june-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1295,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-derangement-syndrome\/","url_meta":{"origin":2754,"position":3},"title":"Obama Derangement Syndrome?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media I\u2019d say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you\u2019ve lost your mind. \u2014 John Edwards When does the legitimate \u201cI oppose Obama\u201d descend into the illegitimate \u201cI hate Obama\u201d? It is popular now to suggest\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2386,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/whats-off-the-table-in-2012\/","url_meta":{"origin":2754,"position":4},"title":"What’s Off the Table in 2012?","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 5, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services What should we\u00a0not\u00a0expect during next summer\u2019s presidential campaign, given what was put off limits in 2008 and later? There is much talk about what some are perceiving as the fringe religiosity of Republican candidates such as Michele Bachman and Rick Perry. But the\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":[]},{"id":2736,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/reelecting-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":2754,"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\/2754"}],"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=2754"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2756,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2754\/revisions\/2756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}