The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Help Wanted
“Police Looking for Bank Robber in Pink Pants”–headline, Journal Star (Peoria, Ill.), March 12
Please Get Serious, Mr. President
By common consent, the die was cast for last year’s presidential election in September, when the financial panic hit and Barack Obama stayed cool while John McCain responded in dramatic but ineffective fashion. As president, however, Obama has fallen far short of the constancy voters thought they would be getting.
Yesterday, Obama was cool as a cucumber, as the Associated Press reports:
Confronting misgivings, even in his own party, President Barack Obama mounted a stout defense of his blueprint to overhaul the economy Thursday, declaring the national crisis is “not as bad as we think” and his plans will speed recovery.
Challenged to provide encouragement as the nation’s “confidence builder in chief,” Obama said Americans shouldn’t be whipsawed by bursts of either bad or good news and he was “highly optimistic” about the long term.
The president’s proposals for major health care, energy and education changes in the midst of economic hard times faced skepticism from both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, as senators questioned his budget outlook and the deficits it envisions in the middle of the next decade.
But Obama, speaking to top executives of the Business Roundtable, expressed an optimistic vision and called for patience.
Optimism and patience were not on offer just a few weeks ago, when the president was telling us we were on the verge of CATASTROPHE!!!! unless Congress immediately authorized the spending of some $800 billion. Obama is asking us to believe that the so-called stimulus was both necessary and sufficient to turn things around in less than a month. He is straining the limits of our credulity and testing the limits of his own credibility.
Obama’s new “optimistic” tone seems to reflect an adjustment in political tactics. Early in his term–until about a week ago, that is–administration officials were acting in accord with Rahm Emanuel’s dictum “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” The theory seemed to be that if people felt the situation was dire, they would be more amenable to Obama’s vision of transforming America into a European-style social democracy.
Now, it seems, Obama has concluded that the sense of crisis is an impediment to his goals. Therefore, he is counseling optimism and patience in the hope that that will win support for the things he wants to do.
But everyone knows the crisis is real, even if it falls short of a catastrophe. And hardly anyone is gullible enough to think that socializing the health-insurance business, imposing massive taxes on energy, and increasing the power of unions are going to resolve a crisis that has its origins in the credit markets.
Obama seems to care about the economic crisis only to the extent that it is an impediment to or an instrument for winning support for policies in unrelated areas. It is as if President Bush had responded to 9/11 by launching an all-out campaign for private Social Security accounts.
Obama is president today not because Americans were enamored with his policy proposals but because they were persuaded that he was, by dint of temperament and intellect, the better man to lead the nation in a time of crisis. If he fails to live up to that expectation, he risks letting the crisis worsen–and finding himself in the center of a political catastrophe.
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