Sybil-In-Chief or Contradiction-In-Chief?

from I Own The World.com
May 17, 2009

Sybil-in-Chief

Is Obama merely testing how absurd he can go with his rhetoric while his trained seals still feed him grapes?

Obama's campaign rhetoric vs governing reality gap is wide

For the president, the distance between campaigning and governing has never been starker

from Pajamas Media
May 16, 2009
by Jennifer Rubin

We’ve heard the cliché: there is a difference between campaigning and governing. But in the last few weeks the contrast between the two could not have been more stark. And the gap between President Obama’s effectiveness at the former and shakiness at the latter is coming into focus.

Guantanamo is the most vivid example. As a candidate, Obama pushed the notion that George W. Bush was a constitutional Neanderthal and destroyer of American values. Now he’s discovered that it is really hard to figure out what to do with these really bad people. And he’s even discovered the virtue of the Bush-created military tribunals.

Republicans have kept up the drumbeat, forcing Democrats to include limits on funding and demands to “show them the plans” before funding a Guantanamo shut-down. And it may be that there is no plan, no viable one to allow Guantanamo to be closed. As Kimberley Strassel put it:

If so, Guantanamo will join the growing list of security tools that President Obama once criticized as out of keeping with American values but has since discovered are very in keeping with protecting the nation. Wiretapping, renditions, military tribunals, Gitmo — it turns out the Bush people weren’t a bunch of yahoos but often thoughtful defenders against terrorism. This is all progress, though America might wonder if it could have been spared the intervening drama.

Then we had the detainee abuse photo controversy. Before he took office, Obama seemed agreeable to the Left’s narrative that there was a massive policy of detainee abuse and the American people should see what it looked like. After the firestorm which followed his initial decision to release the photos, he adopted conservatives’ view that we should not let a few bad apples destroy America’s image and endanger our servicemen.

Although the president is tossing the ball back to the courts (at least for now) rather than signing an executive order to make sure the photos aren’t released, his message is clear. He’s not buying into the grand conspiracy vision of the netroots and he’s not going to throw matches on the tinderbox at the moment when we are doing our best to lessen the danger of a conflagration in Pakistan and Afghanistan and complete the mission in Iraq.

We have also had another round of rotten economic news. The deficit is exploding, unemployment is rising, consumers aren’t spending, and the stimulus is doing nothing for us.

In the campaign Obama effectively snatched the tax issue (cut 95% of Americans’ taxes) and the fiscal sobriety issue (”go line-by-line through the budget”) from the Republicans. But now in office (when he’s not flitting off to work on health care or cap-and-trade, or taking vouchers from D.C. school kids), he’s devising plans to raises taxes (on cigarettes, businesses, and energy) and ballooning our debt. Unlike his national security policies, he shows no sign of reversing course on economic policy or coming up with a coherent approach to reviving economic growth and job creation.

And finally on health care, we’ve been inundated with dog-and-pony displays and campaign-like events but haven’t gotten to the heart of the matter: how to pay for it and how to allow Americans to keep their doctor and access to un-rationed care. What’s even more startling, as Yuval Levin points out, is the president’s recognition that the endless cycle of spending and borrowing which his own administration has accelerated is “unsustainable”:

If he understands the consequences of the federal government spending trillions it doesn’t have with no plans for doing better, what does he make of his own budget, which calls for doing much more of precisely that? And what does he make of the health care plan emerging on the Hill, which would spend even more without paying for it and do very little about exploding health care costs except turn even more of them into government costs?

The president is fond of telling us that all the trade-offs which other administrations have made and which his political rivals wrestled with were “false.” But the essence of governing is choosing wisely, something he has struggled to do.

In some cases (e.g., detainee photos) the administration has been badgered into adjusting course and dropping silly campaign promises in order to maintain a coherent national security policy. In other cases (e.g., Guantanamo) they are tied up in knots figuring out how to reconcile their sanctimonious rhetoric and the public’s desire for security. And in still other cases (e.g., domestic policy) the administration hasn’t come to terms with how to spur economic recovery or pay for the ever-growing liberal wish list, even as the prospect for stagflation and/or a collapse of our borrowing capacity looms.

But in each instance the gap between campaign rhetoric and governing reality is wide. And while the administration remains adept at throwing a summit or trotting out industry leaders to tout the president’s ideas, the tough choices have largely been avoided. In the end, it’s not about receiving shout outs from fawning pundits or even about rounding up a simple or filibuster-proof majority; it’s about crafting effective policy. If you can’t do that, no amount of stagecraft will save an administration.

And if we’ve learned anything in the first months of the Obama administration it is that campaigning only gets you so far. Eventually you have to get the governance right, and so far the prospects for that are mixed at best.
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Obama can't lead a life of contradiction - Or can he?

from Pajamas Media
May 16th, 2009
by Roger Kimball

The Meaning of Obama, Part II, with a note from J. L. Austin and an epitaph for cognitive dissonance

Last month, President Obama assured the world that “words must mean something.”

Yes, but what?

The President has just informed us, in his most earnest tones, that current U.S. deficit spending is “unsustainable.” More amazing news followed: government borrowing will mean higher interest rates for U.S. consumers as foreign countries shy away from investing in the United States. He even had a line about “mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”

Now, I believe there is a lot to be said for all of these things. The debt carried by the United States is indeed "unsustainable." Interest rates are almost certain to rise; the gusty noise you hear offstage is, I’m told on reliable authority, that great asset acid, inflation, just waiting to make a comeback. And when I am not worrying about how I am going to pay for our children’s college education I worry about what sort of country we are preparing to bequeath them: what will their tax burden be in 2025, say?

As I say, these are all good points. The question is, does Barack Obama have the right to raise them? Democrats and their shills in the legacy (formerly the mainstream) media wailed and wailed about the deficits run up by the Bush administration. They had my sympathy, frankly. Much as I admire President Bush — and I do admire him — he spent money like a drunken Democrat.

Or so I thought. It turns out that Bush was a rank amateur when it came to profligacy. His $400 billion deficit, which seemed like a lot of money at the time, is not even a weekend’s “stimulus” bill for Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid & Co. A week or so ago, the White House told us that the budget deficit for the current fiscal year would be $1.75 trillion dollars

($1,750,000,000,000). Somebody forgot to include the party favors, though, because a few days later that estimate was raised to $1.84 trillion ($1,840,000,000,000), a difference of some $90 billion, or more than 4 times the $17 billion in “savings” that Obama announced with such fanfare recently. After the laughter subsided — after all, the President’s Potemkin cuts amount to 1/2 of 1 percent of his budget — Obama shot back: “In Washington, I guess [$17 billion is] considered trivial. Outside of Washington, that’s still considered a lot of money.”

Right on both counts, Prez! In Washington, $17 billion is considered trivial. To the rest of us, however, who will eventually be called upon to pony up for the dough, it is, as you say, a lot of money. That’s exactly the problem: Washington spends it, we pay for it.

The English essayist William Hazlitt once observed that “those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.” Most of us, encountering someone who lectures us about “unsustainable” levels of debt, “mortgaging our children’s future,” etc., expect that if we scratch the chap we find a fiscal conservative.

That, as Barack Obama demonstrates, would be naive. Obama may trundle over to Arizona to deliver a commencement address in which he warns students about those who “started living on credit, instead of building up savings.” But a look at the Obama Family Finances shows that he did a lot of living on credit himself. James Taranto, writing in his “Best of the Web” column, quotes this report:

A close examination of their finances shows that the Obamas were living off lines of credit along with other income for several years until 2005, when Obama’s book royalties came through and Michelle received her 260% pay raise at the University of Chicago. This was also the year Obama started serving in the U.S. Senate. . . .

Watson, what do you make of that conjunction: Michelle’s 260 percent pay raise and Obama’s ascension to the taxpayer-funded trough? Eyebrow raising? It got a bit of comment during the campaign. But the Hope and Change Express had gained far too much momentum to be derailed by any such . . . irregularity.

Am I too fastidious? Was it an irregularity? At the time, Bryon York reminded us that “Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office.” Why wasn’t that news to, say, The New York Times?

Water under the bridge by now, of course. But still. As we try to come to terms with the Obama Phenomenon and unravel the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside the enigma with which he presents the republic, it is worth facing up to the fact that it doesn’t matter what he says.

“Words must mean something,” he said when the North Koreans launched their ballistic missile a few weeks back. But what must they mean? I think of a withering remark from the philosopher J. L. Austin: “There’s the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back.”

Strophe: Our level of debt is “unsustainable.” Antistrophe: My budget will saddle us with more debt than all past presidents combined, from George Washington through George W. Bush.
Strophe: You mustn’t live on credit and neglect to save. Antistrophe: I will live on credit, spending more than I earn, until such time as I can more than double my wife’s salary by funneling taxpayer money to her place of employment.

Strophe: Military tribunals for terrorists are an outrage; as president I will an end to end. Antistrophe: Military tribunals are necessary for our national security.

It was the psychologist Leon Festinger, I believe, who coined the term “cognitive dissonance.” That’s the uncomfortable feeling we get when trying to entertain contradictory ideas. X and at the same time not-X. The discomfort is a salubrious reminder that reality counts for something, that you cannot live a contradiction.

Or can you? The spectacle of Barack Hussein Obama might suggest otherwise. Watching his pas de deux with himself is to understand that cognitive dissonance can be a vocation as well as a warning.

I can’t help worrying, though, that making it your vocation is only the first act of a drama that ends very badly indeed.
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