Yesterday, Jennifer Rubin began her must-read post, Is the liberal echo chamber a trap?, quoting one of the Gipper’s favorite sayings, “It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.”
“There is”, she observes,
. . . no better phrase than that to describe President Obama, hermetically sealed in leftist bubble to a greater extent than any Democratic president in history. He doesn’t imagine that there are facts or interpretations that lead his opponents to opposite conclusions. He therefore assumes they are dimwits or liars.
Liberals like Obama believe that a Keynesian “stimulus” must work because that’s what they’ve been taught in college and heard repeated by liberal politicians and policy wonks. No matter that such stimuli, while working well on paper, tend to work as well in the real world. (See, e.g,. our recent guest post.)
The liberal worldview notwithstanding, the New Deal did not lift the nation out of the Depression, indeed, FDR’s big-government agenda prolonged it. Japan’s lost decade wasn’t lost because of spending cuts and regulatory relief. And Obama’s “stimulus” may well have delayed our recovery from the most recent recession.
And then, there are things which liberals should know about the economy, but don’t — because it doesn’t fit their narrative. The economy rebounded in the 1980s despite the Gipper’s failure to offer a government “stimulus” and continued to grow in the 1990s despite the successful Republican filibuster of Bill Clinton’s “stimulus.”
Obama refuses to confront these facts, repeating instead his nostrum about Mitt Romney wanting to return us to the failed policies of the past. Given that Romney’s economic agenda more closely resembles Ronald Reagan’s than it does George W. Bush’s, it would be correct to say that the Republican nominee wants to return to the successful policies of the past.
Meanwhile the Democrat is determined double down on the failed policies of recent decades.
ADDENDUM: Perhaps Obama fails to understand conservative ideas because of the intellectual bubble in which he, like most liberals, finds himself. Conservatives, however, like Paul Ryan seem better equipped to confront liberal arguments as Rubin explains:
The right has traditionally had this sort of advantage over the left. (This is why a number of the best, smartest conservative figures hailed from liberal universities.) In the academy and media, conservatives are a minority. They must learn not only their own arguments but the other sides’s and what’s wrong with them. Liberals, secure in their elite bubble, need not bother themselves with conservative view or the facts they propound.
Read the whole thing.
Dan – the “FDR” link, you may have meant that to go somewhere else? (Rather than linking the ‘recovery-slowest-since-wwii’ post a second time.)
Anyway… There is a point where differing values cause differing interpretations of the facts. And another point, where differing values cause actual blindness to facts. Yes, Obama may have reached the second point. He values power, his ego, political correctness, the concept of “equality” or equal outcomes… and Big Government, as a means to all of the preceding.
Thanks, ILC, link fixed!
The more sinister interpretation is that Democrats know Stimulus doesn’t work to grow the economy, but can be used to funnel money to their cronies; be they Big Labor Unions or rich donors who happen to be heavily invested in solar energy companies with shaky business plans.
What was it Rahm Emmanuel said about not letting a crisis go to waste? I wonder how much of the Democrat base understand that they’re being played for patsies while their party bosses loot the Treasury for the benefit of a few fatcats?
It can also be used to cause society to collapse via debt so it can be replaced with a socialist utopia.