by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n One big thing<\/strong><\/p>\n In this fiscal crisis, the public wanted one big thing to quote Archilochus: A reform of the banking industry that offered federal-guaranteed lines of credit to ensure liquidity, and a new transparency so investors would at least know that their supposedly blue-chip AIG stocks or Lehman Brother portfolio was, in fact, a house of cards based on the serial reselling of sub-prime mortgages \u2014 and in the end hinged on whether a wage-earning Bill Smith in Merced could keep servicing an 8% loan on a $400,000, 3,000 San Francisco home that he bought with no down payment.<\/p>\n But that one thing was not to be \u2014 and instead from Obama we got the entire kitchen sink \u2014 drain, pipes, basin, and faucets thrown at us all at once.<\/p>\n Not the Obama they knew?<\/strong><\/p>\n I think Warren Buffet, Jim Cramer, Jack Welch and other in-the-news, conflicted capitalists counted on Obama being a sort of Robert Rubin, Clintonite neoliberal like themselves.<\/p>\n So he would come in, rail for a week at most about Bush this\/that, greed, Wall Street, extend the financial guarantees of Paulson, and then talk up the economy, calm fears, and pretty much do what every other President has done when faced with bad recessions: loosen money, stimulate a bit, talk up free trade, promise no new tax hikes, extend unemployment benefits, put other agendas on hold, forgo the class warfare talk, bring in captains of industry to assure them of calm, of long-term plans to encourage investment, and of soothing rhetoric of friendship and support.<\/p>\n In other words, they assumed that with an Obama Presidency they thought they would be in control, feel good about themselves for supporting a non-traditional candidate, and get a break from the Bush-bashing of their Euro and Asian friends when they jetted to conferences abroad, dropped in at Davos, or hit the party circuit in DC and NY.<\/p>\n It was not to be. Instead right away, Obama started the prairie-fire them\/us rhetoric about the \u201crich\u201d this and the \u201crich that. The more he denied he was for protectionism, the more someone in his cabinet evoked it. When one did the math on his proposed $250,000 income and above tax hikes, it was not hard (in high-tax states) to reach a confiscatory rate of 70%. And when Wall Street sighed thinking \u2018Hmmm, at least the money will pay down the debt\u2019; they were shocked to discover \u2018No!, the new revenue won\u2019t even pay for the existing deficits.\u2019 And now they fathom that Obama will be wildly trumping both the Bush deficits and the Clinton tax hikes all at once.<\/p>\n Moreover, in teen-age fashion, Obama daily blamed Bush for the mess, rather than talked up the U.S. To get an agenda across that would reshape American life, he evoked the Great Depression from November to February to scare the nation into increasing the government share of GDP. Ossified, secular, shrinking, pacifist, static, and statist Europe was clearly the model.<\/p>\n Instead of \u00a0Bill Clinton\u2019s \u201cfocusing like a laser\u201d on the economy and the \u201cIt\u2019s the economy, stupid!\u201d, we got talk of nationalizing health care, free education, cap-and-trade, 8,000 earmarks,and \u00a0trash the oil companies. And abroad, his team\u2019s massage was, \u201cWe dislike Bush even more than you (fill in the blanks: Europeans, Arabs, Iranians, etc.) did.\u201d<\/p>\n Again, instead of getting some old Wall Street capitalists or some crusty CEOs sprinkled here and there in the cabinet, Wall Street sees either novices like Geithner (who reminds me of what I remember of toady graduate students trying to conjugate the subjunctive mood in Greek for their professors), or nominees that are cheats, dodgers, and party hacks like Daschle, Richardson, and Solis, or left-wing crusaders like Holder (Americans are \u201ccowards\u201d) and Chu (California\u2019s farms are doomed).<\/p>\n In short, they don\u2019t see anything that is helping, and a lot that will make things worse. And the result?<\/p>\n Suddenly, American capitalists are at Rick\u2019s in Casablanca and shocked! \u2014 Obama is acting more like the Chicago organizer, the most partisan Senator in the Congress, the devoted Rev. Wright attendee, the pal of Bill Ayers and Rashid Khalidi \u2014 and not the neoliberal who both lets the financer alone and makes him feel better about himself.<\/p>\n Contradictions<\/strong><\/p>\n Is bailout money the same as aid? If so, will the new government adjudicate what professors make, given that their universities are recipients of federal largess \u2014 and in many cases the professors themselves get direct government support. If so, will thousands here in Fresno County in California also be told \u2014 in the manner food stamp recipients cannot use their charge cards directly to buy beer and cigarettes \u2014 that the government is mandating how they spend their dole (no galas for execs; thus no parties for those who receive housing vouchers and food support?).<\/p>\n A note on hypocrisies<\/strong><\/p>\n Speaker Nancy Pelosi is taking a beating because she seems to think the U.S. military must keep variously-sized jets on 24\/7 call for her private use. Once again \u2014 nemesis strikes.<\/p>\n So, CEO\u2019s cannot employ such toys, but their censors, as the proverbial pigs on two feet inside the farmhouse, surely can? In this new culture of Obama, confusion grows over public\/private spheres and the wages of hypocrisy. Two points we forget: zillionaires are free to use their private, non-federal bailout money to do all sorts of indulgent things; government officials who both emulate and castigate them are hypocrites for doing the same.<\/p>\n Second, an earth in the balance Al Gore who made millions chastising us for not being green should not fly on private jets. And yes, we don\u2019t care whether a Rush Limbaugh, who ridicules man-made global warming, takes off in his Gulfstream. Again, just as conservative moralists suffer the wages of hypocrisy for running up deficits and getting caught in unmentionable acts in public bathroom stalls, so in-your-face egalitarians like a Gore or Kerry or Kennedy suffer the same charge when their private lives they enjoy are at odds with the public lectures they give for others.<\/p>\n Where will they go?<\/strong><\/p>\n Another released Guantanamo detainee (#008; aka Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul; now a.k.a. Mullah Abdullah Zakir; now again a.k.a. Taliban military chief \u2014 southern Afghanistan operations against U.S. and coalition troops) has joined the Taliban ranks, this time as a major field commander. Next prediction: Obama will not close the base as promised by January 20, 2010. To do so would be like the U.S. letting out top Nazi generals detained in camps in the South during World War II (wait! \u2014 not quite: we usually shot any non-uniformed enemy combatant we caught on the field of battle). The danger at Guantanamo is that we are now whittled down now to the hard-core killers, and each inmate released increases the chances for something really terrible ensuing. Just one Khalid Sheik Mohammed who kills again will essentially destroy the Obama legacy \u2014 and I have to assume his team grasps that?<\/p>\n War \u2014 what war on terrorism?<\/strong><\/p>\n What happened to the war on terror? \u2014 in the sense that bin Laden\u2019s popularity ratings have plummeted, that we have not been hit again, and that even worldwide al Qaeda is somnolent?<\/p>\n That may change, but for now surely we are witnessing the wages of eight years of FISA, the Patriot Act, overseas renditions, Guantanamo, tens of thousands of Islamists \u2018attrited\u2019 in Iraq (cf. the much ridiculed \u2018flypaper trap\u2019 theory), the routing of the Taliban from Afghanistan, Predator attacks in Pakistan, and quiet European intelligence work that would be classified as \u201cshredding the Constitution\u201d if it were done here in the U.S.<\/p>\n In this regard, Obama\u2019s campaign rhetoric once again has boxed him in: \u201cBush did it\u201d doesn\u2019t work when Bush really did do it \u2014 and so kept us safe for seven years. Obama\u2019s problem is that if he overturns these protocols and we are hit, his Presidency is finished; but if he doesn\u2019t, his leftwing base continues to ankle-bite him as a hypocrite. (Note well: many on the left who demand that he close Guantanamo won\u2019t be so ready to support Obama should a released terrorist strike the U.S. homeland; if you doubt that, collate all the names of the D.C. neo-con insiders who demanded the preemptive invasion of Iraq, and somewhere along the line abandoned the war, bailed on the effort, and blamed Bush\u2019s \u2018screwed up\u2019 occupation for their \u2018brilliant\u2019 three-week war.)<\/p>\n Where does all this lead?<\/strong><\/p>\n A modest prediction, if the economy does not show positive growth by the third quarter of this year, the media will finally turn on Obama. His upper-middle class devotees will finally associate their shattered 401(k)s, their lost home equity, and their new tax hikes to come with Obama. And the world\u2019s vultures, as in 1977-80, will begin descending to tear and pull at the corpse of the U.S.\u00a0imperium<\/em>. At that point we will see a virulent backlash against the Obama critics, who will be castigated as unfair, hoping Obama would fail, mean, even racist who are colluding in ruining America\u2019s dream.<\/p>\n It won\u2019t be pretty, this national frenzy, but it was entirely avoidable. All Obama had to do was give Bush a little credit or at least frame his departures from prior policies in a sort of bad\/worse choice dilemma; focus on the financial industry alone; talk up the U.S. economy; rein in the Pelosi\/Reid lunancy; and stop all the messianic talk of highest ethical standards in cosmic history while nominating the likes of Daschle and Richardson.<\/p>\n But nemesis doesn\u2019t work that way \u2014 ask Oedipus or Hector.<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media One big thing In this fiscal crisis, the public wanted one big thing to quote Archilochus: A reform of the banking industry that offered federal-guaranteed lines of credit to ensure liquidity, and a new transparency so investors would at least know that their supposedly blue-chip AIG stocks or Lehman […]<\/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":[723],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-KP","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":416,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-problem-last-night-was-not-just-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":2903,"position":0},"title":"The Problem Last Night Was Not Just Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 6, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner The problem for Obama is not that his performance was disastrous, but rather that it was his normal workmanlike coasting. But this time, and for the first time, he was pitted against a skilled debater who had both the better argument and the better\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1871,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-versus-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":2903,"position":1},"title":"Obama versus Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 27, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Will the real Barack Obama please stand up? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There is little need any more to offer consistent opposition to Barack Obama, since he himself is already running hard against the many previous incarnations of Barack Obama.\u00a0 The first one we met was Barack\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":736,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/two-three-many-obamas\/","url_meta":{"origin":2903,"position":2},"title":"Two, Three, Many Obamas","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 1, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online As the campaign heats up, one problem is that we continue to meet lots of different Barack Obamas \u2014 to such a degree that we don\u2019t know which, if any, is really president. I think the president believes that private-equity firms harm the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9165,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-buck-never-stops-here\/","url_meta":{"origin":2903,"position":3},"title":"The Buck Never Stops Here","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 17, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Tribune Media Services In a cover story in the latest issue of The Atlantic magazine, President Obama offers astonishing scapegoating for his own foreign policy disasters.According to Obama, the deterioration of the ISIS wasteland that is now Libya was not due to improvident administration bombing followed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1853,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-usual-straw-men\/","url_meta":{"origin":2903,"position":4},"title":"The Usual Straw Men","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 5, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Cap-and-trade, statist healthcare, and an end to \u201cdon\u2019t ask, don\u2019t tell\u201d for thee. And for thou, Obama the tax cutter, Obama the gas-and-oil driller, Obama the budget freezer, Obama the anti-lobbyist reformer, Obama the bipartisan healer? This half-hearted pivoting was quite transparent: Obama made\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2010"","block_context":{"text":"February 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/february-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1295,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-derangement-syndrome\/","url_meta":{"origin":2903,"position":5},"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":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2903"}],"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=2903"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2904,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2903\/revisions\/2904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}