---------------------------
The Case Against
Re-election
Washington
Post
Published:
August 9, 2012
There are two
ways to run
against Barack Obama:
stewardship or
ideology.
You can run against his record or
you can
run against his ideas.
The
stewardship
case is
pretty straightforward: the
worst
recovery in U.S.
history, 42
consecutive months of 8-plus percent unemployment, declining economic
growth —
all
achieved at a price of an additional
$5 trillion of
accumulated debt.
The
ideological
case is
also simple. Just play in
toto
(and therefore
in context) Obama’s Roanoke riff telling
small-business owners: “You didn’t
build that.” Real credit
for your success belongs
not
to you —
you think
you did
well because of your
smarts
and sweat? he asked mockingly — but
to government that built
the
infrastructure without which you
would have nothing.
Play it. Then ask: Is that the governing
philosophy you want for this nation?
Mitt Romney’s preferred argument, however,
is stewardship. Are you better off today
than you were $5
trillion ago? Look at the
wreckage around you. This
presidency is a failure. I’m a successful businessman. I know how to fix things. Elect me, etc.
etc.
Easy peasy, but
highly risky. If you run
against Obama’s performance in contrast to your own competence,
you stake your case on
persona. Is that how you want to compete against an opponent
who is not just more likable and immeasurably cooler but spending millions to paint you as an unfeeling,
out-of-touch, job-killing, private-equity
plutocrat?
The
ideological
case, on
the other hand, is not just appealing to a
center-right country with twice as many conservatives as liberals, it is also
explanatory. It underpins the stewardship
argument. Obama’s
ideology
— and the program that
followed —
explains
the failure of these
four years.
What
program?
Obama
laid it out boldly in a series of major addresses
during the first months of his
presidency. The
roots
of the nation’s crisis, he declared, were
systemic. Fundamental
change was required. He had come to deliver it.
Hence
his signature legislation:
First, the $831 billion stimulus that was going to “reinvest” in
America and bring unemployment below
6 percent.
We know
about
the unemployment. And the investment? Obama loves to cite great federal projects
such as the Hoover
Dam and the interstate highway system. Fine. Name
one thing of any note created by
Obama’s
Niagara of borrowed
money. A modernized
electric grid? Ports
dredged to receive the larger ships soon to traverse a widened Panama Canal? Nothing of the sort.
Solyndra,
anyone?
Second, radical
reform of health care that would reduce its ruinously accelerating cost:
“Put simply,” he said, “our health-care
problem is our
deficit problem” — a financial hemorrhage drowning us in debt.
Except that
Obamacare adds
to
spending.
The Congressional Budget Office reports that
Obamacare will
incur $1.68 trillion of new expenditures in its first
decade.
To say nothing of
the price
of the uncertainty introduced by an
impossibly
complex remaking of one-sixth of the economy
— discouraging hiring and expansion as trillions of
investable private-sector dollars remain
sidelined.
The
third part of Obama’s promised transformation
was energy. His cap-and-trade
federal takeover was rejected by his own Democrat Senate. So
the war on fossil
fuels has been conducted unilaterally by bureaucratic fiat. Regulations
that will kill coal. A no-brainer
pipeline (Keystone) rejected lest Canadian oil sands be burned.
(China will burn them
instead.) A
drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico that
a federal judge severely criticized as illegal.
That was the program — now so unpopular that
Obama barely mentions it.
·
Obamacare got exactly two lines in
this year’s State of the Union
address.
·
Seen any ads touting the stimulus?
·
The drilling
moratorium?
·
The Keystone
pipeline ban?
Ideas
matter. The
2010 election,
the most ideological since 1980, saw the voters
resoundingly reject a Democrat Party
that relentlessly
was expanding the power,
spending, scope and reach of government.
It’s
worse now. Those who
have struggled to create a family business, a corner restaurant, a medical
practice won’t take kindly to being
told that their success is a
result
of government-built roads and
bridges.
In 1988, Michael
Dukakis famously said, “This election is not about ideology; it’s about
competence.” He
lost. If Republicans
want to win, Obama’s deeply revealing, teleprompter-free
you-didn’t-build-that confession of
faith needs to be hung around his neck until Election Day.
The third
consecutive summer-of-recovery-that-never-came is
attributable
not just to Obama being in over his head but, even more
important, to what’s
in
his
head: a
government-centered
vision of the economy and society, and the policies
that flow from it.
Four years of
that and this is what you
get.
Make
the [ideological] case and you win
the White
House.
-----------------------------------
Dr. Krauthammer
writes a politics column that runs on
Fridays.
