Why Did He Do It - Road to the Middle Class

THE QUESTION is: Why? Why did he do it? Why did President Obama abandon his promise of unity and divide the nation, in three short months, as never before? Let’s have liberal pundit Michael Gerson say it:

Polarization in American politics has its own disturbing momentum, aided by some strident Republican voices. But that does not require a president to make it worse. And it is a sad, unnecessary shame that Barack Obama, the candidate of unity, has so quickly become another source of division.

It could be that Obama and his team are just small-minded men, expert political tacticians, that cannot see the larger picture. It could be that they cannot see beyond the next partisan skirmish. They seen their opportunity and the took it, in the words of fictional Washington ward-heeler George Washington Plunkitt.

But perhaps there is a feeling in Obamaland that it is now or never. Perhaps Obama and his liberal cohorts decided that if they didn’t get their visions of health care and education implemented now they would never get to do it. So they have put the pedal to the metal and pushed through a budget resolution without a single Republican vote.

But that’s’ not what they said they would to. Here’s what Obama strategist David Axelrod said in the campaign:

"If there’s an enhanced Democratic majority, I think that he’s going . . . to urge a special sense of responsibility to try and forge coalitions around these answers, not because we won’t be able to force our will in many cases, but because, ultimately, effective governance requires it in the long term."

In other words, you can’t expect your political program to survive unless you compromise and co-opt the opposition. But that is not what happened.

Not a single Republican in the House or Senate supported the bill, largely because the Democratic majo0rity forced its will. Republicans were flattened, not consulted.

In the silence after a great massacre, there has to be the first woman who gets up and, without a word, goes on with life. In the deafening silence after the partisan Obama massacre, conservatives are experiencing that overwhelming feeling, of something momentous, something sacrilegious, having taken place.

The thing is, the Obama stimulus, the Obama budget, the Obama economic centralism clarifies and simplifies the issues. The next conservative agenda is simple.

Begin the advance from the centralized compulsion of government health care. The great gains in human life expectancy did not occur because of government health care but because of a bunch of things, among them sanitation, vaccination, neo-natal, education. Spending 20 percent of GDP on health care rigidly controlled by the government is stupid and wasteful.
Begin the advance from the centralized compulsion of government education. We cannot keep any longer our children incarcerated for twelve years in government custodial institutions. It is cruel, it is unjust, and it destroys the souls of our children.
Begin the advance from government welfare to social welfare. Government welfare has destroyed the low-income family. It is perhaps the greatest injustice of all time, slavery excepted.
Begin the advance from government pensions to social pensions. In this prosperous age it is monstrous to expect other people to provide for your old age. The average person can, with a modest amount of prudence, provide for their old age through saving and judicious use of the capital markets made available to the little guy by Fidelity and Vanguard. It is unjust to tax young people struggling to create and build young families in order to support people who should be able to support themselves.

Of course, all this is clearly laid out in the record of the last century of government expansion and waste that is assembled and published at usgovernmentspending.com.

Why did Obama do it? We will never know. But in the clarity of the moment we certainly know what we must do.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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