In the final year of the Bush 43 presidency the President worst nightmare came true when the “perfect storm” of the financial kind blew into Washington. It began with the housing market correction in December 2007 followed by the subprime mortgage crisis and soaring oil prices.
You policy wonks out there will find me sorely lacking if your expecting a blow-by-blow on just where W made his mistakes and to what degree the Senate and Housing Banking committees’ actions played in this disastrous turn of events. I know what I like and that’s about it. Suffice to say there was plenty of fault to go around.
What I do know is that the mega crisis set the stage for the subsequent epic that followed and is playing out before our eyes today.
You have no doubt heard Glenn Beck speaking – sometimes ranting – about the “paradigm shift” that the nation is currently undergoing, and all of that is certainly true. But what we are seeing with the Obama administration is the result of that shift, which actually began in the 1950s and resulted in the New Left revolution of the sixties.
Obama is probably more anonymous heir-apparent (the child who steps out of the woodwork at the last moment to claim the will) than anything else to a government that has been pathologically dysfunctional for decades. The same scenario played out in a Hillary Clinton presidency would have likely ended with similar results, although it can be argued that Hillary has a certain Machiavellian flare lacking in the Alinskyite from Chicago.
Be that as it may, accurate or not, the age of crises-oriented government is upon us, and it began with a Republican president, much as what I believe was the less significant crisis that we now know as the Great Depression began 80-plus years ago. Bush handed them the sword and they have used it with relish, to paraphrase Richard Nixon.
Now 2.6 million jobs later and not yet even in the eye of this Perfect Storm we are seeing the end result of a nation driven by the impulse shoppers in Washington for nearly a century.
And now they have their Messiah, Barack Obama. The housing-subprime crisis couldn’t have been timelier if he himself had created it for the first year of his presidency. Now “crisis” is the keynote of virtually every speech he makes, and will be until, hopefully, he is defeated in November 2012.
The one crisis, however, that he cannot “fix” is the unemployment crisis, not that he would if he could. It suits his short-term purposes like a glove. Number 1 chink in Obamanomics. If he can ease it by two points by the end of 2011 he indeed stands a good chance of being reelected but he must do it.
Still at the forefront of The President’s crisis agenda is Energy – read climate crisis – which of course necessitates the creation of hundred of thousands of “green jobs” for which the technology much less the need do not exist. Then sandwich in a broad-sweeping Amnesty plan. There will be assaults on gun rights and myriad other basic freedoms, all cloaked in the crises scenario Obama has embraced.
The Tea Party movement is Obama’s current cause extraordinaire, which at its base is Freedom of Speech repackaged and filtered out by the likes of Bill Clinton, CBS anchor Harry Smith and other prominent lefties. The result of course is a mess that cannot be cleaned up in the most perfect of all Obama’s outcomes.
There is, however, cause for hope. Barack Obama, with all of his flare and type-A aggressiveness, has an Achilles heel.
He is unbelievably arrogant, and that, accompanied with a big mouth can defeat him in 2010 and beyond.
More Americans would buy the guy hook, line, and sinker were in not for these two character defects. This country – even left-leaning so-called moderate Democrats – hate a know-it-all. And Barack is the mother of all know-it-alls.
The GOP in my estimation is not ready to lead the country out of this mess but they are none-the-less our only hope if we are to bring the government back to sanity in the next three years. The problem right now as I see it is twofold and one much more serious than the other. First we must destroy the Democrat New Left, beginning in November and continuing into the 2012 cycle.
Secondly, we must fix what ails the Republican Party. If we do not craft and execute a cogent plan over the next few months we may well see a truly disastrous second Obama term in 2012.
And that will be a crisis of our own making.
Left Coast Ledger 