You Just Don't Get It, Mr. President

We conservatives are living in a kind of hog heaven, right now, what with Democrats in a retreat that is getting close to a rout. We predicted something like this. Only we didn't expect quite such a meltdown. My prediction was a year ago: "Obama's First Fumble."

Guess what I wrote? I wrote that the stimulus bill was a mistake. I said that people were expecting something different, something serious after years of Republican "corruption."

Voters were told that the new administration of President Obama was going to put the corruption and the partisan wrangling of the Clinton-Bush years behind us and clean up government. But right now it looks like same-old-same-old.

I said that, after the meltdown the previous fall, upscale voters expected an administration that "would get serious and urgently fix the economy."

How right I was. And that was just the beginning with the unserious, same-old-same-old stimulus bill. Since then we've seen the unserious, same-old-same-old cap-and-trade bill, and then the grand-daddy of them all, we had the administrative monster of ObamaCare.

Here we are, a year later, and the Obama administration still hasn't done anything serious on the economy.

But now, get this. Peggy Noonan reports President Obama telling US Senators:

"If the price of certainty [i.e., getting reelected] is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression . . . the result is going to be the same. I don't know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us in this fix in the first place."

Good God, Mr. President. Don't you realize that, contrary to your assertion, YOU are continuing exactly the same proposals that led us to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression? How can you expect the result to be different when your policies are same-old-same-old?

I'm afraid that you may have been reading too much of The New York Times. You see, Mr President, it wasn't greedy bankers and silly quants that got us into the financial mess. The real problem was the tsunami of debt unleashed by Fannie and Freddie, the $5 trillion in too-big-to-fail government-subsidized mortgage debt that engulfed the housing market. The greedy bankers were just sluice operators on the Grand Canal of government subsidized credit. Of course, they should be executed, pour encourager les autres, but that doesn't alter the fact that government created the problem.

And Mr President, from where I sit, you have done nothing to solve this problem. In fact, if anything, you are sluicing credit at the housing market worse than before, in the desperate hope of seeing signs of life before you are up for reelection.

As for the rest of your agenda, the way I see it, you are just applying tired liberal nostrums, the knee-jerk reaction of legislating or administering another subsidy, setting up new political special interest or propping up an old one, whether it's in education, health care, or energy. Green energy jobs. What a joke.

Evidently you don't have a clue, Mr. President. I suspect that most Democrats don't have a clue either. They all read The New York Times and listen to NPR and so they live in the cocoon world of liberal self-congratulation, just like you.

But the Democratic officeholders you were lecturing are reading the polls and they know that something bad is coming. They don't know what, but they know, as practical politicians, that it is time to get in out of the rain.

I can't say I'm upset by all this. I can't say I'm surprised. I wanted you to be elected, Mr. President, because I felt that once the American people got a real taste of Democratic governance, legislative and executive, they would be ready to upchuck. After the American people had hurled their lunch all over the incumbent politicians, I reckoned, then a chastened "educated class" might be ready to stand aside, for a brief moment, to allow some genuine reform. And by that I mean reform that doesn't increase government spending and doesn't increase government regulation.

But first we have to go through the maelstrom of 2010.

Here's a another prediction. In 2011 the political landscape will be utterly transformed. I'll tell you, Mr. President. It can't come soon enough.