The Agenda And The Moment [National Review Editorial]

National Review ^ | July 10th 2009

[Steelfish]

July 10, 2009

The Agenda and the Moment

By the Editors

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.