Catastrophe - Dick Morris [5]
We are hostage to an ideologue who wants to use this crisis—not solve it—to promote his dogmatic agenda.
How did we let things get this far?
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: HOW OBAMA GOT INTO POWER
From the moment he first realized he could win the presidency, Barack Obama has known exactly what he would do in the Oval Office. He just wasn’t sure how to pull it off.
He told us his agenda with unusual specificity and elaboration. He hid nothing. He pulled no punches. Not for him the tack taken by Charles de Gaulle as the anxious French pressed him for his agenda before assuming power in 1957. “When I achieve power,” de Gaulle replied haughtily, “I will know what to do with it.” Obama not only knew what he wanted to do; he told everyone who would listen. If he hid his program, he did it in plain sight.
But most of America wasn’t listening. Enthralled by his charisma and the trappings of his candidacy, they tuned out his program and mindlessly applauded his sound bites. Willfully suspending skepticism, they eagerly believed his superficial promises to change the way Washington worked, to exclude the lobbyists and special interests, and to end partisan bickering. Only after he was elected, when we started to see him appoint lobbyist after lobbyist and ride roughshod over the Republican opposition, did we come to realize that these vague commitments were just the window dressing on his program. The parsley around the meat.
But his program was never obscured. In a mind-numbing series of debates with his fellow Democrats, he spelled it out for us all to hear.
But we weren’t paying attention to the boring programmatic details. How much more exciting it was to focus on the fact that we were witnessing the end of the color bar that first blighted America centuries ago, when the early slaves stepped onto these shores in chains. How much more thrilling to watch Barack Obama overcome the inevitable nominee, Hillary Clinton, by outsmarting her, defeating her, and making a mash of her strategy. What a relief to watch Mrs. Clinton’s ill-conceived focus on experience, in what was clearly a moment that called for change, backfire on her.
But what change did Obama represent? The truth was hard for us to accept: that the man who was marching inexorably to the White House was a genuine radical from Harvard and Chicago. We heard the rantings of Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the stories Sean Hannity told about William Ayers, but we wouldn’t believe the clues. The conclusion was too horrible. Were we really about to elect a man who would change not just Washington but our values, our nation, and our own lives?
But the program lay out there in the sun day after day. It never varied. Obama never temporized. He trimmed his tax proposals from time to time and waffled on details of his national security stance, but the basic thrust of his administration was as clear on the day he announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, as it was when he spelled it out in his first address to Congress as president.
Most presidential candidates don’t bother. Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and John F. Kennedy all took office with only a vague idea of what they would do with the power. George W. Bush told us what he had in mind, but the agenda was so limited that it never much mattered. In our recent past, only Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan took office with as clear an idea of what they wanted to achieve. And, like both of these presidents, Obama did not trouble to hide his proposals as he campaigned for the job. Like Johnson and Reagan, Obama let it all hang out.
Didn’t he plainly and frankly tell us that he would:
Socialize health care
Raise taxes sharply on those making over $200,000
Raise capital gains taxes on high-income