The conventional wisdom among conservatives is that President Obama has failed in his misguided efforts to improve the economy.
They are wrong: One cannot “fail” at something one never attempts to do.
Barack Obama is a movement leftist. Leftism is his religion and his life’s passion. He began his political career at the home of Bill Ayers, an unrepentant leftist terrorist. He spent twenty years attending a church with a stated Communist agenda headed by a preacher who was recorded delivering a sermon asking God to “damn America” after the 9/11 attacks. That pastor presided over his marriage ceremony.
In the Illinois State Senate, Obama opposed legislation to protect the lives of babies who survived attempts at abortion. And in a radio interview, he stated his plans to move incrementally to a socialized medicine program in a series of steps designed to destroy the health insurance industry and leave no choice but for the government to take over the system.
In the short time that he served in the U.S. Senate, Obama amassed a record that made him the most liberal of all 100 senators. And despite his best efforts to obscure his history, record, and agenda on the campaign trail, Obama could not help but occasionally let his radicalism slip through, such as when he told his San Francisco financial sponsors that mainstream Americans are racists who “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” and when he told Joe the Plumber that he wanted to “spread the wealth around.”
Upon assuming office, this supposedly “post-partisan” president appointed Rahm Emanuel – one of the most hyperpartisan Democrats in the country – to be his Chief-of-Staff. Obama had inherited an economy in recession, and Emanuel revealed the Obama mindset when he stated, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
In that statement lies the heart, soul, and mind of Barack Obama.
Obama took office in a time of economic crisis, but unlike any other president in American history, he did not seek and assume office for the purpose of solving this crisis. He sought and assumed office for the purpose of exploiting it.
When Obama took office, he did so with Democrat super-majorities in Congress that were so large that the Republicans lacked the numbers to stop anything that the Democrats wanted to do. Obama and his congressional Democratic allies had unlimited and unchecked power to do whatever they chose.
What they did with that power is instructive:
- They appropriated over $800 billion in the guise of “stimulus” to support and strengthen their public sector union sponsors while lying to the American people that the money would be spent on “shovel-ready” public works designed to create 500,000 jobs per month and keep unemployment below 8%. (In fact, only 6% of that money went to shovel-ready jobs, and when this fact became known, Obama shrugged it off with a joke. And unemployment continued to rise and has remained between 9-10% since the “stimulus” was passed. In fact, this year, for the first time in 45 years, no jobs were created in August.)
- They passed a scheme designed to realize Obama’s dream of destroying the private sector health insurance industry and lead to a socialized medicine system.
- They nationalized car companies and the entire student loan program and created a “czar” to regulate the compensation of officers of private sector companies.
- They cranked up the regulatory process to impose their statist agenda on the country by executive fiat and bypass the people’s elected representatives in Congress to the maximum extent possible.
The key to understanding Obama is to understand that he would have taken every single one of those actions regardless of the economic conditions if he had the ability to do so. None of those actions were taken to address the economy as it existed. All of those actions were taken because the economic conditions as they existed made those actions possible. The intention by Obama and his Democrats to enact these “solutions” preexisted the problem.
So, it is hardly surprising that Obama’s policies have not corrected our economic problems. Those policies were never meant to correct those problems. They were meant to advance a leftist agenda that Obama and his Democrats have sought to advance for decades before the current economic downturn. How else do you explain the fact that in his recent “jobs” speech to Congress, he proposed more of the same policies that he previously implemented that did nothing to improve the economy?
Albert Einstein defined “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Obama is not insane. He doesn’t expect different results. He just wants to take every possible opportunity to exploit a bad economy to advance his leftist religion.
A portrait in contrast to Barack Obama is Virginia’s Republican Governor, Bob McDonnell.
McDonnell assumed the governorship after a distinguished career in the House of Delegates and as Virginia’s Attorney General. In the legislature, McDonnell quickly established a reputation as a hard worker who was determined to get results on tough and intransigent issues. He was the primary sponsor for Governor George Allen’s criminal justice reform package, including the repeal of parole. He went on to become the Chairman of the Courts of Justice Committee, where he continued to reform and improve the courts and the justice system as a whole. At the same time, McDonnell was serving his country as an officer in the Army Reserves, where he ultimately retired as a Lieutenant Colonel after 21 years of service.
As Governor of Virginia, McDonnell has amassed a record that has earned nationwide attention and respect – specifically because of its contrast with that of Barack Obama. He inherited a $2.2 billion budget deficit from former governor Tim Kaine. He balanced both of his first two budgets without raising taxes by cutting $6 billion of spending, and in August of this year he announced a surplus of $544 million. He also succeeded in procuring $4 billion for transportation infrastructure over the next three years at record-low interest rates and construction prices and without raising taxes. He accomplished this turnaround by applying conservative principles: He kept taxes low, budgeted conservatively, and worked in consultation with private sector leaders to generate pro-business policies.
Bob McDonnell took office with the objective of solving the tough problems that he inherited, and he succeeded in doing so by applying conservative principles. Barack Obama, by contrast, took office intent on imposing his leftist religion on the American people without caring whether those policies would improve the economic crises that he inherited. The predictable result has been that those economic problems have worsened over his tenure.
In a recent exclusive interview with Bearing Drift, McDonnell explained Obama’s poor record as president as follows: “There’s no question in my mind that part of the problem with this administration is that the president had no executive experience – and he brought in a lot of people that didn’t [have experience either]. It’s now becoming evident why they can’t solve problems. They can’t bring the Republicans and Democrats together in the Congress. And they can’t lay out a practical set of principles and policies that are going to create jobs, reduce spending – nothing.”
McDonnell’s explanation of Obama’s failures assumes that Obama shares McDonnell’s objective of strengthening the economy. To a public servant of Bob McDonnell’s caliber and character, it is unfathomable that a president of the United States would not put the good of his country first.
But Barack Obama is not Bob McDonnell. McDonnell, like most Americans, seeks a strong economy and a strong country, and he is a conservative because he has seen that conservative principles achieve those objectives. Obama, by contrast, does not start with the objective of strengthening the economy and the country. His policies are designed to advance his statist agenda without regard to whether it strengthens or weakens the economy and country.
Barack Obama was elected because he was an unknown quantity who was able to define his image through dynamic but illusory speeches. Now that he and his policies are known quantities, however, his approval rating among the American people is at an abysmal 38%.
Bob McDonnell, by contrast, was elected because he was a known entity whose record and accomplishments spoke for themselves. Now that he has continued his record of success based onresults-oriented application of conservative principles, he is recognized as one of the most popular governors in the country and is considered to be an emerging national leader with a stratospheric approval rating among Virginians of 67%.
And so, Bob McDonnell’s star is rising as Barack Obama’s is plummeting. Such is the contrast between an incumbent president focused on the advancing a radical agenda without regard to its effects on the country and an accomplished governor focused on responsibly and responsively serving the people.
