Monday, March 4, 2013

Why President Obama Keeps Campaigning

The Austrian caped crusader Joseph Schumpeter wrote that, considering that politicians are professional election-winners, it's amazing that they do any governing at all.

And President Obama seems to want to prove his point.  Everyone is writing articles right now about how the president is ignoring governing for the more enjoyable job of politicking. "Do we have a president or a perpetual candidate?" asks Michael Barone.

The conventional wisdom is that the president is amping up the political volume, including the funding of his permanent campaign vehicle, Organizing for America, in order to win back the House of Representatives in 2014.

How could that be?  A president has never taken back the House in his second midterm, nor ever got into a double-digit increase in any midterm.  My guess, though, is that the president and his people are just trying to avoid the usual second-term debacle.  They are fighting hard just to stay even in 2014, and even will be good enough.

After all, their second-term goal is to get Obamacare implemented and beyond the hope of repeal.  For that they need to maintain enough power in Congress to prevent a wrecking crew from getting to work.

And anyway, the Obamis are doing plenty of governing.  They are writing regulations and issuing executive orders to advance the progressive agenda as far and as fast as humanly possible.  When we say that the president is politicking, not governing, what we really mean is that he is doing everything in his power to avoid ever compromising with the Republican agenda.

The main thing for Obama is to get to the next presidential election without the roof falling in.  And how likely is that?

Those of us that want a new and a better America need to understand that it won't come with political reform or with bipartisan deals with the Democrats.  It will only come after the moral and economic collapse of the administrative welfare state.   It will only come after liberals have completely lost their moral and cultural power, and the administrative welfare state has run out of money.

In that sense, President Obama is doing our work for us.  His resistance to spending cuts and his insistence on tax increases only bring forward the inevitable collapse.  A practical and bipartisan president that sat down with Republicans to plan entitlement reform and school-choice reform would be a president that was preserving the welfare state for future generations at a sustainable level.

Instead, the president seems to want to go for broke.  And broke is probably what he will get.

It's a pity, but minorities and women will be hardest hit.

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