Posted By BillHeise on July 31, 2010

I don’t think so, but I found this article, entitled “Will Washington’s Failures Lead To Second American Revolution?,” on the Internet today. The article is filled with anecdotal evidence that we may be heading towards a future that only a new American Revolution can correct:

The Wall Street Journal’s steadfast Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote that Barack Obama is “an alien in the White House.”

His bullying and offenses against the economy and job creation are so outrageous that CEOs in the Business Roundtable finally mustered the courage to call him “anti-business.” Veteran Democrat Sen. Max Baucus blurted out that Obama is engineering the biggest government-forced “redistribution of income” in history.

Fear and uncertainty stalk the land. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says America’s financial future is “unusually uncertain.”

Listen, the IBD is an extremely conservative paper, and I don’t share their feelings of imminent disaster, but I do think that the article bespeaks the harm that comes from launching a legislative agenda without bipartisan support. LBJ, who Francis Fukuyama cites as one of three models that the legacy presidency of Barack Obama might follow, got support from some Republicans for his Great Society programs. Obama got none. None!

This is a short-term crisis, I think. The Republican revolutionaries will be forestalled in November, when I expect them to regain (at least) the House.

But what is going to happen if now shut out Republicans—following the example of the Obama White House—decide to undo the partisan political mandate with another partisan political mandate, effectively reversing the gains made by Obama? Obama’s legacy is not secure on account of his having taken such a partisan path. Moreover, this partisan political bickering is not what I thought I was going to get when I voted for Obama. I thought he’d be a uniter, not a divider. Instead, he is as divisive as the last great uniter, George W. Bush.

Americans used to blame Bush’s being an idiot for his problems with cooperation. Elect us, the highly-educated intellectuals said, and we will put things right again. Now, the intellectuals, who many Americans thought would save us from Bush’s idiocy, have become equally suspect. They have had their chance, and they have failed to convince a majority of Americans that they have answers. Instead, Obama is returning to his base, scrounging for every last vote from his political base. He can defend himself by saying that this is politics as usual, but I didn’t vote for him to continue politics as usual.

Both sides now appear to fighting partisan battles for control of Congress, because he who is in control gets to hold the purse strings. So the question remains: if Obama is as bad as George W. Bush, a well-intentioned man with poor cooperative skills, then what are the alternatives? Who speaks for the people if the people we elect to speak for us are too busy arguing over their own tiny bits of turf.

Categories: Economics, In the News
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