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Townhall...
Obama’s Audacity of
Hype
By Ken Blackwell
6/21/2011
President Obama got a good laugh from his liberal audience at the
nationally televised meeting of his Council on Jobs and
Competitiveness. At least all those who joined in the laughter there
had jobs.
‘Shovel-ready was not as . . . uh . . . shovel-ready as we expected,”
the president jibed.
He certainly seemed to be a good sport about it all. One half expected
the Daily Show’s puckish Jon Stewart to chime in: “Maybe you better not
quit your day job, dude!” There’s a real problem when the President of
the United States feels the need to become the entertainer-in-chief,
especially when the joke’s about very serious matters that have
long-term consequences.
Take this line, Shovel-Ready. It became the signature phrase of none
other than Barack Obama himself as he rushed through a jumbo $787
billion stimulus package in the opening days of his administration. Why
must we bypass the normal, drawn-out process of committee hearings,
markups, amendments, debates, and extended votes? With the economy in
free fall in the days leading up to Inauguration, there was no time for
that, Mr. Obama assured us. This would be like FDR’s Hundred Days. He
had only to say a measure was needed to get folks back to work and
Congress—especially a Congress filled with make-work,
make-hay-while-the-sun-shines liberals—would get cracking.
Even some Republicans, normally the green eyeshade folks, muted their
criticisms. They were surely uncomfortable with this gusher of
spending. But they didn’t want to be bottom-line skunk at the liberals’
recovery picnic. Reality would not be allowed to intrude on this
hurry-up bit of spending projects.
Now, when FDR summoned the nation’s energies (and its wallets) to
jump-start the economy with make-work projects, it didn’t really work,
either. By 1936, after four years of his “bold experimentation,” the
unemployment rate was still 16%. But it had been 25% in the depths of
the Great Depression, so most folks gave Roosevelt credit for trying.
As Amity Shlaes has admirably demonstrated in her powerful book, The
Forgotten Man, much of Roosevelt’s New Deal actually prolonged the
Depression.
Still, you have to give Roosevelt credit for this much. When he looked
for shovel-ready projects to fund, he actually found them. We have the
Appalachian Trail, hundreds of bridges, lots of hydroelectric dams,
and, of course, the Tennessee Valley Authority to show for all that
spending.
FDR didn’t just shovel money. We got tangible projects from his
administration. And millions of Americans to this day give him the
credit. Even President Ronald Reagan would tell interviewers in the
White House how he voted four times for FDR, despite the fact that his
administration worked daily to curb the excesses of Big Government.
How could President Obama have sat in the U.S. Senate for four years
and not know that there are no shovel-ready projects? Every senator who
wants to build a post office in, say, Dixon, Illinois, knows you must
wait years before putting the first spade to the dirt. Franklin’s
cousin Theodore “made the dirt fly in Panama,” true, but neither the
U.S. nor Panama had to do environmental impact studies a hundred years
ago.
Barack Obama should have known that what he was really selling was
snake oil. And his opponents should have been bolder in stopping his
raid on the Treasury.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is right: This
Obama joke about no shovel-ready projects is no laughing matter to the
14 million unemployed Americans. But it’s even worse than that. If the
President was unaware of the fact that it takes years to break ground
then he is woefully unprepared for his office. If he knew this and
cynically plowed ahead, then he is willfully misleading us.
Government by consent is debased when the people say Yes and later
learn they’ve been sold a pig in a poke. Obama’s election campaign was
based on the audacity of hope. His economic recovery based on
shovel-ready projects was based on the audacity of hype. I sure hope
the Obama Library is shovel-ready.
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