The Agenda and the Moment

National Review ^ | 7-10-09

[SJackson]

Pres. Barack Obama has made a tactical mistake, one that is characteristic of the man. Suffering, as he plainly does, from a tendency toward self-aggrandizement, President Obama has undertaken to do too much at once, seeking a radical re-ordering of American life: legal, political, economic, constitutional, and cultural. In some of these endeavors he is likely to be successful. On several critical fronts, however, Obama’s overreach has given conservatives an opportunity to put a halt to the worst of the president’s contemplated excesses. It is crucial that conservatives — congressional Republicans in particular — do not squander the opportunity that has been set before them.

Having assumed office in the midst of an economic crisis, and following a streak of congressional financial incontinence, President Obama had been positioned to claim for himself and his party the mantle of relative fiscal responsibility. Instead, he started shoveling money out the door and into the pockets of Democratic interest groups with as much speed as he could muster. The Democrats’ stimulus bill (which so far has stimulated nothing beyond the appetite of various liberal constituencies) was a financial hijacking, and Americans noticed. And while the corporate bailouts got underway during the waning days of the Bush administration, President Obama has made that agenda his own — radically expanding the role of Washington in the private sector, hiring and firing executives, strong-arming investors, violating contracts, and using the force of the state to insist on business models that reflect political goals rather than commercial ones. Americans noticed that, too, as anybody who attended any of the tea-party protests on Tax Day and Independence Day can confirm.

Obama hopes now to bring the corporate-bailout model to several new endeavors: one of them is health care, another is energy and the environment. In each case, what Obama plans to do is similar to what has been done with the interventions in such firms as General Motors and AIG: Washington will use taxpayers’ money to co-opt private industry when possible and will use the threat of ruinous regulation and punitive taxation to extort cooperation when it cannot be bought. If Obama is successful, two critical sectors of the economy — health care and energy — will come almost entirely under government’s thumb and, given the extent to which those sectors are intricately enmeshed with the broader economy, the dreamers and schemers in Washington will have a much larger theater in which to enact their ongoing tragedy of errors.

Averting the nationalization of health care will be difficult. The American middle class is particularly risk-averse when it comes to matters of health-care coverage, and its insecurity is rooted in sensible concerns: Americans are not accustomed to dependency, but most are dependent either upon their employer or the government for health-care coverage. Conservatives are in a reasonably good position on this issue, having an agenda that speaks both to the insecurity associated with the present arrangements and to the rising cost of health care, which is in no small part a consequence of the fact that health-care payments are mostly made by third parties (government and insurers) rather than by consumers themselves. Articulating an approach that is market-based and consumer-driven while satisfying the American public’s demand for health-care security will be a real challenge for conservatives, particularly up against a rhetorician with the president’s gifts. But Obama’s program has a weakness: It is over-ambitious, it is intrusive, and it must be sold to an American public that has seen how poor a job the government has done running a single insurance company, AIG, and that now must doubt it would do a better job running all of them.

In the same vein, Americans’ concerns about the environment are not mere Green sentimentality. We are right to be concerned about global warming and the role that human activity may play in climate change. But, here again, the Obama administration’s hubris has done half of conservatives’ work for us. Rather than enact simple, sensible measures to mitigate the possible consequences of global warming and to encourage greater energy efficiency, the Obama administration has instead prepared an enormous expansion of government that would see Washington manipulating everything from the design of industrial power-plants to scholarship programs for aspiring community-college career counselors, all in the name of preventing global warming, and all stuffed into a single piece of legislation, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. How intrusive is the Obama administration’s vision? Consider that you’d have to get Washington’s environmental sign-off before selling your house, for an indication. Cap-and-trade, on its own, is problematic enough; the vast expansion of government power over private life envisioned by Obama and Waxman-Markey is indefensible. It, too, can and should be stopped.

A third item that can and should be stopped is a second stimulus bill. Neither Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package nor Bush’s more modest package of $168 billion (mostly in the form of tax cuts) has lived up to its sales pitch. The returns are low, but the price is high: Even the government-approved credit-rating agencies, which were reliably asleep at the wheel throughout the buildup to the financial crisis, have roused themselves to warn that Washington is squandering America’s credit, and have forecast that U.S. Treasury bonds could lose their Triple-A rating. Adding another half-trillion or trillion dollars to this bonfire will probably do no more to stimulate the economy than the prior package did, but it threatens to undermine America’s financial stability. The camel never knows which will be the fateful straw until his back is broken. Obama has not yet declared in favor of another stimulus, though people close to him — including economic adviser Laura D’Andrea Tyson — are already are arguing for another dose. Republicans ought to head Obama off at the pass: Son of Stimulus can and should be stopped before it becomes an imminent threat.

There are strategic questions to be considered, of course. Republicans probably will not stop Obama from installing Sonia Sotomayor, a left-wing activist, on the Supreme Court. But they will want to make him fight for it, and in fighting expend some of the political capital that might go toward the rest of his agenda. Nationalized health care, a nationalized energy sector, a wet Green blanket smothering the manufacturing and industrial economy, and a national program of fiscal self-abuse in the name of stimulus will inflict damage on our country that will take generations to repair, if it is reparable at all. Providing better alternatives on health care, energy, and spending — and stopping the worst of Obama’s contemplated excesses — is the conservative agenda, and this is the critical moment.

[Kenny Bunk]

It is crucial that conservatives — congressional Republicans in particular — do not squander the opportunity that has been set before them.

ROTFLMAO Get out of the way, Mr. Jackson, the RINO's are charging!