Obama’s Power Grab Will Be His Downfall
The establishment media are speculating that President Obama has lost all political capital and is too unpopular to be effective.
They’re coalescing around a narrative to explain why: The oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico is Bush’s fault. But since Obama is President now the ignorant voters blame him.
The first problem with this narrative is Obama himself, whose ego doesn’t permit him to acknowledge any circumstances are beyond his control. He invited the criticism we’re now hearing from both Left and Right by announcing that he was personally in charge and accountable for:
- stopping the leak,
- preventing environmental and economic damage to the Southern Coast, and
- ensuring that BP cleans up any damage and compensates those who are harmed.
So far none of these three is going very well.
But Obama’s problems predate the oil spill and are more fundamental. He is both an aggressive contributor to, and now a victim of, the century-long progressive campaign to idealize and deify government power as the means to a Utopian human condition.
In his Presidential campaign Obama presented himself as the man who could bring government power to its full glory as
- guarantor of health care,
- provider of financial security,
- provider of advanced education for everyone,
- investor in new alternative energy sources, and
- granter of prosperity for all through “green jobs.”
Indeed, the night he won the final primary he even claimed it was the moment…
…the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
The first 16 months of his administration have been an era of accelerated growth in government power. Speaker Pelosi, his point person in in the House of Representatives claims there are no Constitutional limits on Congressional power over health care. His “stimulus,” the measure that empowered government to borrow and spend an additional $800 Billion dollars, over and above its already bloated budget, has utterly failed to deliver the on the promise that it would “immediately jumpstart” new job creation.
The private sector was forced to shed almost 10,000 jobs per day from the moment the stimulus was enacted in February of last year through December. From January through April the private sector grew by 3,800 jobs per day. In May it grew by 1,322 jobs per day. After the May jobs report was released Obama bragged about this record and claimed, preposterously:
…these numbers do mean is that we are moving in the right direction and the economic policies we put in place are working.
As the draconian health care law ramps up, with 51 new bureaucracies creating their own powers and authorities, The People’s gag reflex will grow stronger by the month. If the cap and trade legislation passes, with it’s ruthless restrictions and taxes on energy production and energy consumption, enriching insiders who will buy and sell government issued permissions called carbon credits, The People will become enraged.
Obama’s popularity will continue to decline because he strives to acquire and exercise powers and authorities that violate the Constitution and that no President could possibly administer without causing broad-based misery and hardship. No politician or legislative body can effectively micro-manage The People’s lives better than they can manage their own lives.
