By: Anthony Dent
Times are tough for President Obama. Republicans won control of the U.S. House after the midterm elections, unemployment still stands above eight percent, and he’s on track to lose to a “Generic Republican” this November- a far cry from the Messianic figure who was supposed to move us beyond partisan bickering while enacting Great and Comprehensive reforms that would fundamentally change America. The Left, befuddled, has gone from one excuse to another trying to explain why their man Obama has fallen so far so fast. The first few excuses they proffered had limited utility: Americans were racist; Obama was the president we needed, not the one we deserved; the Bush legacy was just so bad. While they each may have contained a kernel of truth, they were simply unpersuasive (i.e., if Americans were so racist, how did Obama win a majority in the popular vote?).
Even the most patient independent grew weary of the “It was Bush’s fault” mantra. Next up was blaming Republican intransigence, an excuse which hasn’t disappeared since it has become the focal point of Obama’s campaign against the supposed “Do Nothing” Congress. While this excuse gained some currency, Americans weren’t so credulous as to believe Republicans could actually thwart legislation with a large Democratic majority in the House, a filibusterproof Democratic majority in the Senate, and a Democrat in the White House. Then it turned out the bills that couldn’t pass (e.g., cap-and-trade) weren’t too popular with the public anyways. So the Left went back to the drawing board. Finally, eureka! They decided Obama is actually a moderate conservative. This was already conventional wisdom among fringe academics like Cornel West, but soon Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein, Bruce Bartlett, and other progressive voices had reached the same conclusion. Conservatives made a similar argument about Bush—he didn’t fail because he was too conservative, but that he was too liberal—though there perhaps there was more justification.
It’s just like Andy Murray: he’s British when he wins, but Scottish when he loses. They point to the size of the stimulus package as an example of Obama’s conservatism. While Christina Romer initially estimated that the stimulus needed to be $1.2 trillion, President Obama only sought $787 billion in an effort to win over Republican support. This ignores the fact that Romer actually said that the package would be more than adequate in a speech to the U.S. Monetary Policy Forum after the stimulus bill was enacted. In an interview with Klein, she and her colleague Jared Bernstein argued that even if the most ardent Keynesian’s dreams came true and the stimulus package was $2 trillion, implementation constraints would have neutralized any added advantage. In reality, the actual $787 billion package itself was difficult to spend. Krugman’s criticism is especially ironic considering that he was on record in support of a $600 billion stimulus package and only after the fact claimed that the final $787 billion package was too small. Even ObamaCare is submitted as evidence that Obama is conservative. The fact that he adopted the individual mandate is more a comment on the Republicans who signed on to the idea in the ‘90s than on the merits of the individual mandate itself. Nor can we attribute the failure to include a public option in the bill to Obama’s conservatism since he continued to support the public option after the bill wa passed. It’s important to note that the Democrats held a fillibuster- proof Senate meaning the public option was untenable to some Democratic Senators. It was simply a political failure on the part of President Obama.
Even more nonsensical is the suggestion that President Obama delayed a new Environmental Protection Agency rule because he is conservative. The EPA rule would have lowered permissible ozone levels to be between 0.060 and 0.070 PPM. The only problem was that 85% of monitored counties in the United States would have failed this mandate and compliance costs would have exceeded $90 billion over a seven-year period meaning fewer jobs and, thus, fewer votes. He was simply bowing to political realities. Foreign policy may be the left’s strongest case, but that is more accurately attributed to the relative dominance of neoconservative or internationalist voices in the foreign policy arena, not evidence that the president has been reading his Burke On the domestic front, however, the assertion that Obama is a conservative is ridiculous and indicative of the Left’s unwillingness to confront the fact that their policy prescriptions are simply unpopular. The failure to implement a progressiveagenda wholesale does not by default make Obama a moderate conservative. It just makes him a failure.
