Same Old, Same Old

In his remarks to the House Democrats' retreat last evening President Obama's growing frustration was palpable. Gone was the calm and even demeanor that had previously been an alleged virtue of his, replaced by a peevish partisanship bred from anger and dismay that he has not gotten his way on the "stimulus." Some of the national columnists have written about how his magic and mystique have disappeared, taking with it the aforementioned tranquility in mien and post-partisan utopia that were supposed to have been hallmarks of the Age of Obama.

This was destined to happen sooner or later, so I will avoid deeper examination of it here. What is worthy of response and examination is the President's angry charge that Republicans dissenting from the "stimulus" are engaging in the same old game and that the solutions they offer are the same prescriptions that got us into this mess. Perhaps President Obama's extreme disillusionment has caused him to be given leave of his senses, for both prongs of this argument are easily refuted.

Criticism of the bill is not the same old Washington game and the President runs into absurdity when he attacks opposition just by virtue of it being opposition to himself. The minority party's province is to oppose, especially when confronted with an egregiously excessive and misguided appropriations bill guised as something it self-evidently is not. President Obama won the election, as he is fond of reminding everyone, but that does not excuse him or Democrats from having to defend their measures on their merits, which they have not done (and really cannot do), or to enact whatever he wants regardless of how much it conflicts with how he presented himself as a candidate. As Rich Lowry writes today, "Obama didn't campaign on a sprawling, nearly $1 trillion new spending plan. If he had pledged in October to double federal domestic discretionary spending in a matter of weeks—including increasing the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts by a third, spending hundreds of millions more on federal buildings and throwing tens of billions on every traditional liberal priority from job training to Pell Grants—he'd have been hard-pressed to win at all."

What is really an exercise in the old Washington game is the boondoggle the President and Democrats are trying to enact. The "stimulus" package is the very same bit of excessive, pork-barrel spending that Washington has traded in for decades. The only distinction is the degree, which is multiplied by Democrats using the present economic crisis as an opportunity to enact all of the spending they've dreamed about for years within the Trojan horse of a "stimulus." President Obama should take a breath and realize that he is indeed in his present position because of tired Washington ways, but that it is himself and his Congressional cohorts who are indulging in it.

The charge that Republicans are offering as solutions the policies that incurred this downturn demonstrates that they don't actually understand its causes. It was not Republican policies of lower taxes that got us here (those policies were the source of twenty-five years of unprecedented growth prior to the recession) but irresponsible borrowing and lending, especially in the give and take of home mortgages. Democrats had more than a hand in this, encouraging "fair lending" standards that led to mortgages being given to people who should have never received them. Echoing Victor Davis Hanson, "What exactly does [President Obama] think was the cause of the current financial panic if not over-borrowing, unsustainable household and national debt, and reckless government housing policies, along with too accessible amounts of capital?" Between the two parties, which one is now proposing policies that resemble this? It is of course the President and Congressional Democrats, both of which are now trying to engage in more irresponsible debt creation which will only be another drag on the economy and future generations of Americans.

The next time the President decides to bitterly vituperate he should get his facts straight.