Post-Shellacking Wrap Up

Andrew Glidden, Guest Columnist
Ideology: Libertarian | Writing from: Berkeley, CA

President Obama, understandably, has an interest in ignoring the election results. It’s far easier for him to advance his agenda if he can dismiss his “shellacking” as a backlash against “the economy,” rather than his policies. His post-election speech reveals a lot about his thought process.

First, Obama identifies that this election was fundamentally about the economy: “They want jobs to come back faster, they want paychecks to go further, and they want the ability to give their children the same chances and opportunities as they’ve had in life.” Still, it’s strange that this admission comes at the exact same time the Federal Reserve is announcing a second round of “quantitative easing,” better known to the public as “driving inflation by printing money”. How do paychecks go further during inflation? He goes on: “…they do expect Washington to work for them, not against them. They want to know that their tax dollars are being spent wisely, not wasted, and that we’re not going to leave our children a legacy of debt.” How does an ever-expanding set of rules and regulations, from banning beverages to requiring citizens buy particular types of insurance to implementing “Freedom Fondles” at our airports, qualify as improving our quality of life, wisely spending our tax dollars, or reduce the debt?

Well, maybe we should cut Obama slack for how well he translates his guiding principles into action. Maybe he meant we should focus on the political process itself – you know, the one that has only “two parties in this country”. After all, he correctly observes that “They want to know that their voices aren’t being drowned out by a sea of lobbyists and special interests and partisan bickering. They want business to be done here openly and honestly.” Wait a minute. What about the vocal majority opposing his flagship law, Obamacare, and the insurance companies and medical providers expected to gain immensely from the guaranteed markets it gives them? What was “open and honest” about telling people “if you like your plan, you can keep it”?

So maybe his speech wasn’t about the political process either, but about the policies themselves: “reducing our deficit, promoting a clean energy economy, making sure that our children are the best educated in the world,…making the investments in technology…” Clearly, Democrats and Republicans are united in their search for higher taxes (since “deficit reduction” never means “cutting spending”), nationalizing and further politicizing education, and second-guessing the prevailing judgments of an infinitely complex marketplace. But above all, “what the American people don’t want” is “refighting the political battles of the last two [years].”

Apparently, November was really about falling in with the Democrat’s party line, particularly letting Obamacare stand as it is. Perhaps, given Mr. Obama’s mastery of evasion, he should forego basketball on the White House’s new courts and take up fencing instead. Whereas Clinton largely resigned himself to a Republican Congress, Obama is protesting that voters really still wanted his agenda, and – now that the wind has shifted – that elections really don’t have consequences, giving him the freedom to pursue his agenda unconstrained by his recent public censure. So what does he see as his role? “[The President's] core responsibility is making sure that we’ve got an economy that’s growing, a middle class that feels secure, that jobs are being created.” Not faithfully executing the laws Congress has passed, not protecting citizens’ natural rights, but directing the economy. The sheer arrogance required to even conceive of this as right, let alone Constitutional, let alone possible, is astounding. Voters’ resistance really wasn’t about the wrongheadedness of this grand vision of executive power, merely an expression that “it felt as if government was getting much more intrusive into people’s lives than they were accustomed to”. It’s not that voters disagree on any kind of intellectual level – voters just “felt” like it was more “than they were accustomed to” (and presumably, if we stay the course, we’ll just get used to it and all will be well).
Despite all this, there is a glimmer of hope: Obama conceded that American prosperity came from free markets, and, startlingly, promoted “individual rights and individual freedoms”. Sure, his idea of free markets is ones in which the government can micromanage consumers and producers alike, and his idea of “freedom” is emancipation from reality, but at least he’s using the right words.

On second thought, there are two rays of hope: we’re also fast approaching 2012 and the opportunity to tell this President, “Keep the Change.”