Obama Can't Walk On Water?

Obama Can't Walk On Water?

This article in the February 4, 2009 Newsweek might give you impression he's not even managing walking on solid surfaces so well anymore--but then you read the rest of the article, and you realize that someone is so in love with government that much of it can be replaced with non sequitur raised to the fifth power:

Barack Obama began making his comeback Wednesday, apparently aware that he has all but lost control of the agenda in Washington at a time when he simply can't afford to do so. Obama's biggest problem isn't Taxgate—which resulted in the Terrible Tuesday departure of his trusted friend, Tom Daschle, and the defanging of his Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. Nor is the No. 1 problem that the president can't seem to win a single Republican vote for his stimulus package. That's a symptom, not a cause. The reason Obama is getting so few votes is that he is no longer setting the terms of the debate over how to save the economy. Instead the Republican Party—the one we thought lost the election—is doing that. And the confusion and delay this is causing could realize Obama's worst fears, turning "crisis into a catastrophe," as the president said Wednesday.

Obama's desire to begin a "post-partisan" era may have backfired. In his eagerness to accommodate Republicans and listen to their ideas over the past week, he has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending. This makes very little economic sense when you are in a major recession that only gets worse day by day. Yes, there are still some very legitimate issues with a bill that's supposed to be "temporary" and "targeted"—among them, large increases in permanent entitlement spending, and a paucity of tax cuts that will prompt immediate spending. Even so, Obama has allowed Congress to grow embroiled in nitpicking over efficiency when the central debate should be about whether the package is big enough. When you are dealing with a stimulus of this size, there are going to be wasteful expenditures and boondoggles. There's no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles. It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply. [emphasis added]

So he agrees that the bill has problems because little of it will prompt immediate spending--then argues that the problem is that we need to spend $800 to $900 billion quickly--but that's just nitpicking to point out that it won't really create the immediate spending required.

The intellectual midgetry of the self-styled journalistic elite is becoming more apparent. Call your Senate tomorrow and tell him: it's too big; it's too far out. It needs to be mostly tax cuts, and anything not spent in calendar year 2009 is going to be too late to matter.

A recurring point that our side made was that Sarah Palin, while she was definitely short on experience to be President, if that happened suddenly, had more executive experience than Obama--who is doing on the job training for a job that is brutal even to people who have experience running state governments. Only Republican stupidity (of which there is no shortage) can make Obama a two-term president at this point.