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Townhall...
Obama
Makes Us Eat Our Peas
by Bill Murchison
7/12/2011
“This
is part of the problem with a
political process where folks are rewarded for saying irresponsible
things to
win elections.”
No!
Couldn’t be! Saying things like “hope
and change”? And now -- so as to strike the pose of adult calm amid
riotous
kids -- “Pull off the Band-Aid. Eat our peas. Now is the time to do it.”
President
Obama’s inability to rise
above the silly and superficial -- in tribute perhaps to the silliness
and
superficiality he apparently attributes to the voters -- is one reason
silly,
superficial press conferences dominate the news about the debt ceiling.
You
know -- like the one Monday during which Obama, striving to look and
sound like
an authority figure, urged attention to a problem he and the Democratic
leadership of Congress mostly helped shape over the past two years.
It
would be, well, silly and
superficial to imply Republicans, like the “Captain of the Pinafore,”
never
overspend the resources entrusted to them. The raising of federal debt
ceilings
is an exercise occasioned by the reluctance, inherent in all
politicians, to
tell voters no: the real parental stuff. “Irresponsible things” do get
said at
election time. By many.
Rarely,
though, has any administration
been so disconnected from Reality as is the one now lecturing us. Who
strong-armed through Congress a health insurance measure on the
supposition
that somehow we, the taxpayers, will cough up the hundreds and hundreds
and
hundreds of billions necessary to pay for it forever? As everyone and
his dog
knows, the Affordable Care Act was the Obama administration’s bright
idea.
Ironically,
the president plans next
year, while seeking re-election, to pat himself enthusiastically on the
back
for winning passage of the very measure that makes control of federal
spending
so devilishly hard. Having told us to eat our peas, he plans next to
remind us
how good they tasted.
The
democratic political process is a
wonderful thing until it becomes -- like now -- not very wonderful at
all. A
little foresight is necessary to make it work. A little care and
caution. A
little civilized restraint. Of these treasured commodities, none has
been
visible in American politics for some years. If the Bush administration
went
overboard with creation of an expensive Medicare prescription program,
the new
president and his helpers dived with glee and gusto into the
surrounding sea of
red, whooping it up. We didn’t have the money to do what they wanted.
Bless
their hearts, they didn’t care. They wanted to do it.
The
debt ceiling battle might in
retrospect prove a blessing in disguise if it made the participants
finally
look around them and acknowledge the mess into which their own
incaution has
dumped them. There does have to be a long-term deal of some sort -- one
that
controls spending, hence the appetite to spend.
The
prerequisite to such a deal is of
course the kind of leadership to which President Obama seems, ahem,
indisposed.
He has to look around, say something like, what a mess, we’re not doing
this
anymore, folks! -- and mean every syllable of it. He won’t otherwise
get much
help from particular Republicans whose virtue, when it comes to
spending, is no
greater than his own: in some cases, maybe less.
Virtue
is the hardest act to pull off
in electoral politics, hence the rarest. The Constitution presupposes
it
without requiring its performance. Of the presidential office, Hamilton
says in
“The Federalist Papers,” No. 68: “It will not be too strong to say that
there
will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by
characters
pre-eminent for ability and virtue.” From presidents, we expect more
than
little lectures about pulling off the Band-Aid when it’s time. We
expect hard
work and ideas.
“Let’s
do it, quoth the president. Do
what? Most of all, do it how? Obama’s gift for snappy injunctions --
the kind
he deplores even while issuing them -- looks like his highest talent:
the one
that got him where he is. And us along with him. Sigh.
Read
it at Townhall
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