44 - An Outsider's View

Our 44th President will be sworn in Tuesday. Obama has been active enough it seems as if he is President already. President Bush is helpfully acceding to Obama requrests on TARP money and last Thursday gave a farewell speech. There will be no Obama inauguration events for me. I will be at work on Tuesday, and will not be doing anything special except working hard at my high-tech job that in recent days seems more at risk than ever before in a long career. (We have had several layoffs where I work in recent months.)

Anyone who thinks this inauguration is more ‘historic’ than any other that happens every four years is implicitly resting their case on a black guy becoming President. Certainly, there will be that 'first' item for the history books, a barrier breached, but to think it means something different about the President himself is to judge people by the color of their skin. Those people are either racists or race-hustlers caught up in the phoney ‘specialness’ of diversity.

The reality is more mundane, although it does have an epochal nature to it. The Democrats now own Washington DC more completely than at any time since the 1960s under LBJ. The result of Liberals in charge is what you would expect from bad liberal policies - an economy on the ropes, a world more dangerous, a culture more degraded.

Obama is swimmer in the conventional wisdom of the liberal elites. His ‘pragmatism’ is little more than calculating the dead-center of the liberal elites' thinking and tacking his sails to it. Hence his proposal on the 'stimulus' bill seems to be a recipe of moderate-plus-liberal creation. His ‘idealism’ is nothing more than academic liberalism. His political courage? Not in evidence yet, as he waffled on Burris, cut Richardson loose but hung on to Geitner (who did worse, is a tax cheat).

Since Obama was elected in early November, the economy shed almost a million jobs, the stock market went from the Dow at 9400 to 8200 (as of jan 17, 2009), companies are going bust, and the prospects for the future are dimming. They are not dimming in spite of Obama’s and the Democrat's plans, but in concert with them. The bailouts and TARP have been a stopgap, the trillion dollar deficit spending boondoggle will not be a stimulus for economic growth, but nothing more than an exercise in Government blundering. Alas, the people in charge do not have a clue how to enact economic growth policies. Result? Dont expect economic growth, as the history of Japan in the 1990s (and their failed Keynesianism) will be repeated here.

Those same Democrats who were hampering Bush’s efforts to keep America safe are now in charge of the same. Will they learn to keep us safe, or knee-jerk attack the people (DoD) and methods (waterboarding, Gitmo) that have kept us safe?

There is not much hope there. I had earlier (in the previous campaign) said that Obama would be worse than Carter. Maybe not. He seems to be smarter than Carter, perhaps more like a Clinton than even his supporters had thought. But on economy and foreign policy, it would be a stretch to expect anything above ‘mediocre’. Obama doesn’t have clue one about how to achieve the top line goals of economic growth and defense of our sovereignty, for the simple reason that the elite views he derives his worldview from are not focussed on that at all.

Every election is a mini-revolution, and the good thing is that our political system can evolve without violence and with the assent of the people.

Any good democracy needs a good loyal opposition, to keep those in power as honest as possible. The bogus meme that the opposition has a duty to "want him to succeed" has been played by the Obama side. Actually, we know his policies are contradictory and his goals are dangerous, so for the good of the country, we should want him to be stymied in enacting his policies, so America can succeed. However, at this moment of Democratic super-majorities, what Obama and the liberal Democrats want, they will get. It will be the job of the loyal opposition to 'speak truth to power' and point out where they are wrong. Since power corrupts, it’s easy to point out the foibles of those in power and be right about it. Yet a good loyal opposition needs to show the alternative path forward, and not just be in the position of saying “No” to the bad ideas of the liberals in power. That is our duty, and that is what we will do.