by Eric Kohn
Cutting through all of the (generally expected) pomposity surrounding President Obama's speech last night, one line in particular jumped out at me, as I imagine it did for a good many other right-thinking people:
As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President's Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government - I don't.
From the first days of his presidency, I've been willing - perhaps through a suspension of disbelief usually reserved for Michael Bay movies - to at least endeavored myself to take Obama at his word.
Here, he seems to suggest that a believer in bigger and the ever-expanding role of government he is not. Ok, yeah, sure, right. Yet, it was only recently that Obama was irresponsibly preempting, precluding and ostensibly quashing the potential for any true "clash of ideas" - the presentation of some serious, freedom-expanding, free market, limited government solutions that empower individuals to control their economic destiny as opposed to the largess of the state - in debate over the nature, content and direction of the ironically named "stimulus package". Take this gem for example:
President Obama said Monday that "only government" can shake the country out of recession, as he tried to settle doubts about his administration's costly economic recovery package during a prime-time press conference. ...
"It is absolutely true that we can't depend on government alone to create jobs or economic growth," he said. "But at this particular moment, with the private sector so weakened by this recession, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life. It is only government that can break the vicious cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending less money which leads to even more layoffs."
And yet here we are left begging the question: If, as Obama doth protest, that he does not believe in bigger government as the end-all, be-all solution to problems social and economic, than why the incessant proclamations such as the above that served little more purpose to shut out an honest, historical and serious debate over this stimulus boondoggle and those who believe (and are back by copious facts) that policies of diminished government interventionism and, generally, smaller government have proven clearly beneficial to the success not only of the United States, but also a plethora of former Soviet satellite states and a host of other free-market embracing nations?
In short, in what rhetoric does he truly believe? And what rhetoric are we left to believe? Does Obama really not believe in bigger, expansive, controlling government? Or does he believe, as he previously stated, that government and government alone is the sole solution to our current economic woes?
Over at National Review Online, Rich Lowery has a slightly different take: a concerted effort on the part of Obama's to redefine the vital thrust of the recent governmental mass-overreach:
He’s trying to redefine extensive government activism as simple pragmatism, and if he succeeds, might well shift the center of American politics for a generation.
Redefinition of the perceived pragmatic purposes of government activism aside, Obama has yet to square this with his own recent "Chicken Little" rhetoric as compared to last night's drivel. Does he believe that the expansion of government is a good in-and-of-itself, manifested in the sense that "only government" can solve or economic woes? (For more on how this most distinctly does not work, as demonstrated through the misanthropic, ad hoc, spendthrift approach to bloating government, please see The Forgotten Man, Liberal Fascism, and/or New Deal or Raw Deal - all of which consider the largely detrimental effects of the original New Deal and the extension and deepening of the Great Depression which it caused, and the clear similarities with the current Obama-initiated government interventionism and binge-spending we are currently suffering.) And, as such, in essence, to preclude anyone with a free-market based solution to what ails us as a nation, national economy and international economy? Or is this the Obama that professes to believe that he, indeed, does not believe in bigger government, bloating the size of the welfare state beyond the point of even hypothetically sustainability?
So, even still, I might be willing to take Obama at his word on this.
But first he needs to decide exactly what "that word is and how he would like to communicate said ideas to us, the American people.
Is this the "government as the end-all and be-all" Obama? Or is this the "I don't believe in big government" Obama?
As such, we are now left with two unavoidable conclusions: that Obama is a contradiction-in-terms and has personally invested himself fully in his own clearly contradictory rhetoric, or that he's simply duplicitous - as Rich Lowery noted - in redefining government interventionism and the unabated bloating of the welfare state as the only "logical" alternative for our economic crisis that will detrimentally obfuscate the big picture nature of America's political debate into the foreseeable future.
Cross-posted at EricKohn.com
