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The Day Obama Became “Old News”

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In his July 4 post, Roger Simon wrote, “Obama is already over.”

In six short months the now-spattered bumper stickers with “Hope and Change” seem like pathetic remnants from the days of “23 Skidoo,” the echoes of “Yes, we can” more nauseating than ever in their cliché-ridden evasiveness.

When I read that piece, it struck that I had felt something similar, only that I would have used a different expression, calling the president “old news.”   To be sure, there were some moments in the transition as he tapped to a bevy of moderate Democrats for top jobs in his cabinet and Administration, he genuinely seemed to be the “new kind of politician” he billed himself on the campaign trail.  I now believe he sealed the fate of his Administration two days after his election, the day he announced the appointment of hard-charging Democrat and left-wing firebrand Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff.

No one interested in governing from the center and reaching across the partisan divide would have tapped such as committed partisan as his top White House aide.  And while there may be some moderate faces in the Administration, most of policies have come from the liberal wish lists accumulated over the past four decades.  Perhaps building on a point Michael Barone first made nearly eight months ago, Daniel Henninger noted last week that, in a world of increasing choices, the Democrat favors a one-size-fits all approach to health care reform.

This, he found, is starting to make the Administration “look totally out of sync with the new zeitgeist, the spirit of the age“

Everything about the health-care exercise is looking very old hat, starting with the old guys working on it. Max Baucus, Patrick Leahy, Pete Stark—all were elected to Congress in the 1970s, and live on as the immortals in Washington’s Forever Land. But it’s more than the fact that Congress looks old. The health-care bill is big, complex, incomprehensible and coercive—all the things people hate nowadays.

In a column about which Bruce blogged about on Saturday, Peggy Noonan noted something similar:

. . . our government, from the White House through Congress and so many state and local governments, seems to be demonstrating every day that they cannot make things better. They are not offering a new path, they are only offering old paths—spend more, regulate more, tax more in an attempt to make us more healthy locally and nationally. And in the long term everyone—well, not those in government, but most everyone else—seems to know that won’t work. It’s not a way out. It’s not a path through.

Emphasis added.  Only offering old paths.  That sounds about right.  For every social and economic problem, Obama Democrats believe, the federal government must provide the solution.

Barack Obama put forward a different image on the campaign trail, but when the time came to govern, he tapped a Democratic hack to run his office and turned to a worn-out liberal playbook for ideas on the type of policies he would promote.

Comments

  2. In this very liberal state, I see a noticeable silence among my liberal friends. I don’t think this is what they had in mind when they voted for “hope and change.”Hope and change doesn’t mean mafia style politics, socialist domestic policy, groveling foreign policy, and narcissistic personal behavior.

  3. Obama campaigned with the repeated assertion that “the economy grows from the bottom up.” Dumb, dumb me: I thought he meant from the working stiff up. Now I realize that he meant that first he makes the economy crash to the bottom and then it will grow from the wreckage.

    In that light, health care for the elderly improves with death.

    I thought his concentration on the war in Afghanistan was something about “getting it back on track” for victory. Now I understand that he meant he was talking about changing a quagmire into a ditherfest.

    He appointed a general to go to Afghanistan to get the job done. I thought that meant reorganize and knock down the Taliban. Now I realize he needed his own appointed general to fail so he could cry “hopeless, hopeless, hopeless” and blame Bush for ever starting the thing.

    I thought “hope and change” was a series of calculated moves that would dazzle. Now I discover that Obama “hopes” that “changing” the faces on the business as usual bureaucracy will allow him to strut and preen and stay unengaged.

    Little did I understand that the Styrofoam columns at the convention were as much substance as there would ever be. Nor did I realize that all those people crying were way ahead of me and that they knew then the nation was in for one huge rectal reaming.

    Gosh I hope the littleletterpeople will come forth and straighten me out.

  4. Lots of independents and some Republicans voted for Obama. He was a community organizer and a freshman Senator who had served 150days. What on earth did you people expect?

  6. You heard it here, folks: Barack Hussein Obama and the Reid/Pelosi Congress will end up making more Republicans (and, better yet, more Conservatives) than Ronald Reagan.
    Heh, heh, heh.

  8. I heard this morning our young inexperienced President say
    “we are going to re energize and try to come up with any new ideas to create jobs and finally get this economy moving again”. DUHH
    It’s not new, try what Kennedy Reagan and Bush 43 did. Cut taxes morons.

  9. I don’t think [Obamunism] is what [liberals] had in mind when they voted for “hope and change.”

    Probably true of many liberals. By the same token, the Holocaust is what many Germans did *not* have in mind when they voted for Hitler.

    So what makes people vote for leaders determined to deprive people of freedom? Obama, like every such leader, told people what he was going to do. He published books about it. He said he favored redistributionism.

    He said a bunch of other moderate-sounding malarkey as well, but the only way people could have possibly believed all that is if they were willfully deceiving themselves, and if the media were actively conspiring to elect Obama. Oh… wait.

  11. >> He was a community organizer and a freshman Senator who had served 150days. <<

    He served WHAT?

    Dare I ask what the relevant figures are for Mrs Clinton (up to the date she dropped out of the running) and Mr McCain (as of election day)?