Posted on 02/12/2009 4:54:50 AM PST by rabscuttle385
Well, that didn’t take long.
Less than a month ago, Barack Obama was sworn-in as chief executive amid historic promises of “change we can believe in.” But there won’t be a second Obama term if he doesn’t admit that, no matter how adroitly he wraps himself in Reaganesque rhetoric, Leviathan is no better suited for 2009 than it was in 1933 for FDR.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the New Deal’s Big Government spending failed to end the Great Depression. That is clear to anybody who reads Paul Johnson’s masterful chapter on the New Deal in “Modern Times.”
Or Amity Schlaes’ superb “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.” Or the utterly convincing data-driven study by UCLA professors Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian that concluded the New Deal lengthened the Great Depression by at least seven years.
FDR at least had nearly a decade for his Sisyphean labors. Obama won’t get a chance to end the current recession because, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the recovery will have long since started before most of the gargantuan $1 trillion stimulus bill’s spending crosses the Potomac.
But that’s not the main reason Obama’s prospects for gaining a second term in 2012 are already fading faster than a Maine RINO can forget what being a Republican means. Obama is making himself the symbol of what’s wrong with Washington rather than being the agent of change in Washington.
Democratic pols like Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York think voters don’t care about pork in the stimulus bill, but lots of now-former Republican members of Congress know better.
Earmarks are indeed, in Sen. Tom Coburn’s evocative term, “the gateway drug to federal spending addiction” and the basic ingredient of the culture of corruption in Washington that has driven the approval rating of Congress into the single digits.
Growing public awareness of the deeply porkified content of the stimulus package is the chief driver behind the plunge in a mere two weeks from modestly strong initial approval to only a third of those surveyed continuing to support passage.
That awareness is also why Rasmussen Reports this week found a virtual dead heat between the two parties in the generic congressional voting survey, with 40 percent saying they plan to vote Democrat in their congressional balloting and 39 percent going Republican.
“This marks the lowest level of support for the Democrats in tracking history and is the closest the two parties have been on the generic ballot,” Rasmussen said of a survey that points to the party most likely to gain a majority in the next election. This may be the best single piece of electoral news the GOP has received in three years.
By ceding to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the crafting of the economic stimulus package - the biggest single spending bill in U.S. history - and then vigorously defending them in the most partisan manner, Obama has recast himself from icon into just another Washington politico.
It is doubtful Obama will ever say anything more damaging to his credibility than his claim “there are no earmarks” in the stimulus bill. That one no doubt caused howls of disbelieving laughter from one end of Congress to the other. Even a few of Obama’s devotees in the Mainstream Media winced at those words.
Only the most deeply naïve don’t know that both the Senate’s $838 billion bill and the House’s $827 billion measure are swollen with pork barrel spending. That’s before the conference report is completed. Even as this column is being written, the Reid and Peolosi brigades are no doubt carpet-bombing the conference report with air-dropped earmarks.
We know this because staffers for Reid, Pelosi and the Democratic conferees met during the night Tuesday to draft the final report, so it can be voted on by the Senate and House Thursday, then sent to Obama for his signature late Thursday or Friday.
We’ll know before fall arrives that the stimulus package has failed and we will be hearing demands for another one. Then, while Obama’s place as America’s first black president is assured, the odds are great that the next line in his legacy will read “the last New Deal liberal in the White House.”
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on dcexaminer.com.
Less than a month in office, and everyone already knows he won’t get re-elected?? I don’t think anyone can rationally say that. Who knows what will happen next year, or the next, or even 6 months from now.
Yep. Nov 7, 2012 will probably be one hell of a riot.
I will be beyond shocked if he only gets one term. He, and the media, will blame everything bad that happens on Bush and say he needs more time to fix all the evils of the past 8 years. the only thing that can change this is if there is a major terrorist attack on US soil. And even then, he’ll likely get the sympathy votes.
I’m putting an “01.20.13 Obama’s Last Day” sticker on my car.
Tim: "On the upside of Obama being a one-term president is that his regime will be over in 4 years. The downside is, the whole country might be finished by then. I mean, quadrillion-dollar budgets, kazillion-dollar debts, who's to pay for it all? And how? The economy is collapsing, the environment is warming, er, cooling, er changing, unemployment is skyrocketing, satellites are colliding in space, dogs and cats living together. It's mayhem, people- maybe even a quagmire."
Willl there even be the “next election”? I didn’t know we had a chance of getting rid of THE king.
I can only hope that this is true, but I also wonder if we can survive four years of this idiot in the White House, or even two years of this nut-job Congress.
I’ll be surprised if he finishes his first term.
You have to survive a lesson to learn it. We will try to survive 4 years of 0bamics, but...civilization is a delicate mechanism.
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of people living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” —French economist, statesman and author Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)
But FDR did get re-elected. How does this argument prove that Obama will not get re-elected?
They are assuming
1) there will even be an election in 2012,
or 2) if there is an election, that it is fair (remember $4+ billion for more ACORN fraud in the PORKULUS bill)
This sounds soooooooooo nice BUT it makes nooooooooo sense. Four years is forever in politics. Obama is by no means finished at this point. He MAY be a jimmah carter one termer BUT it is way too early to pronounce him DOA.
I hope we see the riots well before that date.
Okay.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
Obama is already unraveling. Of course, the danger with despots is that they create emergencies to mask their incompetence. That is what is happening now before our eyes.
We very likely may be in a severe depression brought on by this idiot and his idiot congress critter’s policies. So he may declare martial law and suspend elections “temporarily”, so to speak.
I have a feeling this clown is going to fall in love with executive orders.
If he did that he would be dead within a month; possibly a week.
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