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COMMENTARY
February 24, 2010
What's not to like?
Now, before we start, I should correct a reader misapprehension about my views on President Barack Obama -- who has just announced that he wants to give radical healthcare legislation another try, notwithstanding the electoral setbacks the last round cost his Democratic Party.In a strange way I'm on his side. I want him to go for broke on this, and can only offer encouragement. In fact, I'm a little distressed that he's been watering down the proposals, taking the more overtly socialist bits out, to draw attention away from the other regulatory ingredients. But he passes the hypocrisy test: I'm sure he actually believes in what he is doing, which is, ramming legislation down the throats of Americans that they obviously do not want, and have been organizing themselves to resist. "When you're in a battle you can't possibly win, raise the stakes!" That's the advice any armchair general would give to an opponent. Far from despising the poor beleaguered man, who is being abandoned by more and more of his supporters every day, and now risks being turned on by the previously adoring mainstream media, the way they turned on Tiger Woods, I am beginning to adore Obama. I can't think of any American since Ronald Reagan who has done so much to advance the cause of conservatism. The Tea Party movement, which is currently changing the ground rules of U.S. politics, would be inconceivable without a President Obama; just as Ronald Reagan might never have been elected without a President Carter to precede him. Thus Carter, too, should be a hero to the right: in the way President Clinton could never be, for Clinton was able to remain plausible to the end. Now, technically, Jimmy Carter was no conservative, but rather a fairly batty liberal, masquerading as a "moderate" one, with somewhere between zero and very little understanding of how the world works. He was the president who openly admitted that he learned more about the late unlamented Soviet Union on the day it invaded Afghanistan, than he had previously known; who put the skids under the Shah of Iran, etc. A Nobel peace prize winner, of course. A sleepwalker in domestic policy. A deer caught in the headlamps of history, who became increasingly malicious as the world failed to meet his expectations. He was replaced by a president who'd known the Soviets were an "evil empire" for decades; who knew that taxes kill jobs and private enterprise creates them; who knew that Kafkaesque bureaucracies are nobody's friend. An ingenious man, he could know such things even from working in places like Hollywood and Sacramento. One thinks of, say, Sarah Palin, who has a basic understanding of which way is up, and which way is down, only from working in places like Wasilla and Juneau. For as Bob Dylan used to sing, "You don't need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows." There was a time when Carter was considered serious, and Reagan a bad joke. History corrected that. Obama was considered serious, Palin a bad joke at the last election. We will see what history thinks. Foreign commentators need have little to say on U.S. domestic policy, except as it impacts the interests of the whole western world. The U.S. stimulus bill of last year, and health-care bill of this year, had and have that potential, insofar as the first was and the second would be a trillion-dollar blowout, compounded over time. To succeed, the health-care legislation must be passed by November, when the party standings in the U.S. Senate and House are likely to change significantly, the way they did in 1994. But if it is passed, the floor will tilt in that midterm election more violently than it did 16 years ago -- and as we saw in Massachusetts, recently, no Democrat seat will be safe. Most Democrats know this, however, which is why I expect "health-care reform" will continue to float dead in the water, until such time as bills are brought forward that confront the actual problems of the U.S. health insurance system -- which are abetted rather than assuaged by attempts to make it more coercive. Even Obama is learning this, by very slow increments. But slower speed will not save him from proceeding in the wrong direction, nor save the Democrats from the consequences of their folly, in betting the shop on an inexperienced liberal demagogue. * There were two errors in my column for Jan. 10 -- the one that began by quoting Shakespeare: "First let's kill all the lawyers." Contrary to appearances, Nancy Pelosi was never a lawyer. And, the U.S. Senate majority leader, though a lawyer, is not "Bill" Reid. I keep confusing him with the famous shoe bomber, and the late illustrious Haida artist, who are Bill, Dick, and Harry (in reverse order). Mea culpa! David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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