February 06, 2009
So Much For Hope Over Fear

By Charles Krauthammer


"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."
-- President Obama, Feb. 4.

WASHINGTON -- Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.


The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.

He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don't get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence.

At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been working for years as a humble international civil servant earning non-stratospheric wages.

Daschle, who had made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal's private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he'd come to Washington to upend.

And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress' own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock insurance.

The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports The Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

obama..like the good little democrat he is . is sitting in is his office trying to think of who he is going to blame for his failure to FIX the economy .maybe he can blame the democrats in congress that will give him anything he wants.to include another 9 trillion plus dollars in spending.the hand writing is on the wall right now.this country is completely fucked.

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everything i print write or show on here is a complete and utter lie..i cant help myself i am a terminal liar..all of this shit is just fiction and made up for entertainment purposes ONLY..

I hear Daschle said his biggest regret in this whole thing was that he paid his back taxes for nothing

The right is wrong!

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

So you're saying two wrongs make you right? :P

Uhhh, nope, Here it is again: THE-RIGHT-IS-WRONG. Doesn't imply there are two of anything,. But just for your interest, referring to the bailout and the rightys wanting all tax cuts, that is wrong. Won't stimulate anything except millionaires bank accounts and companys' treasuries. In this economic climate, no employer is going to hire more people unless he has more work for them. Conversely, rebuilding infrastructure and bailing out upside down states will create jobs and keep many employed that would be losing their jobs. If more people have jobs, they will spend money creating need for more products, producing more jobs ad-infinitum. What we need is a trickle up economy to get this thing jumpstarted, that is what Obama is proposing. Look, the rich are doing just fine. Maybe they cant afford that 300 ft. yacht this year, but if they save up and the economy turns around, they can get it next year. What we are "HOPING" for is a turn around, and anyone that has watched the results of the Bush tax cuts with eyes wide open, can see just how well that worked. The rich got richer and the poor and middle class got fucked. It's time to give us some relief.

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

Check for wind burn Medman cause it went right over your head.

Why don't you just explain it for my dull dimwitted mind then, please.

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

Don't put words in my mouth medman, it was a good natured joke.

Two wrongs make YOU right.

Like committing two wrongs makes you right wing.

Got it, beautiful, sorry, I guess I wasn't looking for humor. You're exactly "Right", I mean correct.

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.