Obama’s Lame Policies

Obama talks a big game. We need courage.  We need hope.  Everything is going to be better.  But his policies are ordinary, and his entire life has been careful and cowardly. 

Respected economist Robert Samuelson calls him on it:

Repudiating racism is not a magic cure-all for the nation’s ills. It requires independent ideas, and Obama has few. If you examine his agenda, it is completely ordinary, highly partisan, not candid and mostly unresponsive to many pressing national problems. . . . .

American people not just what they want to hear, but what we need to know.” Well, he hasn’t so far.

Consider the retiring baby boomers. A truth-telling Obama might say: “Spending for retirees — mainly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — is already nearly half the federal budget. Unless we curb these rising costs, we will crush our children with higher taxes. Reflecting longer life expectancies, we should gradually raise the eligibility ages for these programs and trim benefits for wealthier retirees. Both Democrats and Republicans are to blame for inaction. Waiting longer will only worsen the problem.”

Instead, Obama pledges not to raise the retirement age and to “protect Social Security benefits for current and future beneficiaries.” This isn’t “change”; it’s sanctification of the status quo. He would also exempt all retirees making less than $50,000 annually from income tax. By his math, that would provide average tax relief of $1,400 to 7 million retirees — shifting more of the tax burden onto younger workers. Obama’s main proposal for Social Security is to raise the payroll tax beyond the present $102,000 ceiling. . . .

The contrast between his broad rhetoric and his narrow agenda is stark, and yet the press corps — preoccupied with the political “horse race” — has treated his invocation of “change” as a serious idea rather than a shallow campaign slogan. He seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story. The result is a mass delusion that Obama is forthrightly engaging the nation’s major problems when, so far, he isn’t.

I still kinda hope Obama wins, not because he’ll be good–I think he’ll be a typical liberal disaster and a bad leader in a crisis–but I want him to win over Hillary because it will be good to see the Clintons lose.  I also think a President Obama would be bearable, because he won’t be able to get his dumbest policies passed. 

By contrast, McCain would possibly be able to get his country-destroying amnesty through Congress with the help of Democrats and moderate Republicans.  There would be no real hope for national renewal after amnesty, but America can weather, and even bounce back stronger and wisened, from an ineffective liberal president. I also think a President McCain’s sins of commission in foreign policy–possibly leading to an intervention in Sudan and a war with Russia over Kosovo–would be far worse than Obama’s kumbaya, diplomatic initiatives.

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