Many wonder just what the new President will do regarding the fictitious “peace process” in the Middle East. He gave some indication (which is straight out of the Dennis Ross, post-Arafat playbook of “Lessons Learned at Camp David”) this week:
Whether or not the Gaza fight has ended, Mr. Obama has promised a quick start by his administration on Middle East diplomacy. In a meeting with The Post’s editorial board on Thursday, Mr. Obama said that he didn’t believe his administration would “have that luxury” of standing back from the deteriorating situation. Yet the president-elect appeared to have a healthy appreciation of the limits of what U.S. diplomacy might be able to accomplish. “That doesn’t mean we close a deal or we have some big, grand . . . Camp David-type event early in my administration,” he said. “The notion is not that the United States can dictate the terms of an agreement.”
Mr. Obama pointed out that “most people have a pretty good sense about what the outlines of a compromise would be.” The problem is political weakness on both sides. So, he said, his aim would be “to provide a space where trust can be built”; he cited the suggestion of former British prime minister Tony Blair “to build some concrete deliverables that people can see,” such as greater security for Israelis and economic benefits for Palestinians.
That is modest enough, and if we were dealing with the Middle East before the emergence of Hamas it might actually be a path to “peace.” But we should all be honest. This is a stall, a holding maneuver to throw crumbs to the international community, please the Arab powers who insist this sort of thing be done to quiet their own “Arab street,” and — most importantly — just buy time. But let’s be clear: this isn’t a “peace process.”
For “peace,” as Mort Zuckerman put it, “Hamas, in short, must be made to fail and be seen to fail. ” We’ll see if the Gaza war moves us in that direction. When Hamas is decimated and the lesson of its destruction internalized then a real peace process might begin. By signing off on the robustly worded Memorandum of Understanding between Israel and and the U.S. yesterday – which made clear the extent of the U.S.’s support for Israel, identified Hamas as the instigator of the violence, and the pointed to the continued support (read: from Iran) for Hamas as the continuing cause of the violence and state of war –the new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested she understands this as well. That is a good thing indeed.
We are a long way from peace. But recognizing that is the first step.
“That is quite right. The banking and credit crisis generally, and toxic assets in particular, are what is pulling our economy and the markets down, as if it is caught in a whirlpool. Yet on this central issue, President Obama and Secretary Geithner — after having promised us a plan weeks ago — have produced no solution.”
That’s because the solution is so scary to them,and to everybody, that Denial wins the day. The solution is the replacement of our old toxic currency with a viable,asset backed currency. The new currency will kill all the toxic assets that are destroying our current system. I would guess that one dollar of the new currency would replace $20 of the existing stuff. Nothing else is going to work. Even if we recover now, or later, this currency transplant needs to take place.
What happened with the “stimulus” bill was a legislative riot where the Democratic Left decided this was their historic opportunity to do everything they always wanted, that the election was vindication of the old Big Government creed and that the people had spoken. Only “the people” never did. To get a mandate from the electorate you first have to be honest with them. If you run on a Big Government agenda and the electorate goes for it, such is democracy. But the level of fraud and sham perpetrated by the entire Obama phenomenon is extreme even in the cynical context of electoral politics. Candidate Obama was a moderate and a pragmatist. President Obama is a doctrinaire. And a liar.
It is almost as if there is a disconnect between the President and those responsible for the economy. The President has to be engaged and help the market psyche; however it appears he has disengaged and wants to focus on re-engineering our country.
Where is his administrations’ discipline he said was so lacking in the previous one?
With Obama, it has always been “what you see is what you will get.” What could one see during the campaign?
- an “incurious” mainstream media that would not pursue any negatives about Obama
- training of Obama by Saul Alinsky in the methods of being a “community organizer”
- 20 years of close association with Jeremiah Wright and his jolly crew of anti-American anti-Semites
- no accomplishments beyond running for office and writing two autobiographies. Not one. Two.
Obama is a lefty, and is hardcore. No surprise there. Those who claim to be surprised, especially so-called conservatives who boosted Obama (e.g. Chris Buckley; David Brooks), were placing hope ahead of thinking.
BO is a dedicated socialist first and foremost. Whether the stock market tanks or toxic assets plunge our economy deeper into recession is irrelevant to him. The problem in his mind is that there is not enough central control of the economy. I sense he wants the private sector to deteriorate (with government inducement). That way, only government, run by him of course, will be left making it easier to transform society into some collectivist utopia.
This has been tried before in the last 100 years, all with well-documented disastrous results. The results of central planning have only resulted in equal misery. Like all new Leftists that comes along, perhaps BO thinks he can somehow do it better and make it work this time. He can’t, of course, and the world will suffer.
I’ve been writing that I see three options: (1) Obama does not know that his policies are economy-killers, (2) he does know but is willing to pay the cost in exchange for achieving other goals, or (3) he does know and is happy to drive the economy into the ground in order to generate more need for government and more power for himself and for Democrats. #1 is plausible given the power of ideology to blind intelligence. #3 is plausible if you really think the worst of him. I’ve settled on #2.
Today I found myself imagining a conversation with President Obama. I would tell him that I think his actions are exacerbating the financial crisis, prolonging our miseries and would diminishing our long-term growth in the future. If he were in his usual campaign mode, Obama would repeat the absurd claims we’ve all heard that these things are really good for the economy in the long term. But what if he were being honest? What would Obama really say?
I imagine him saying something like this. “Well, okay, let’s say you’re right. Let’s say that my policies have brought the stock market down a few thousand more points than they would have come down otherwise, and let’s say that they’ll keep us in a recession for 6 to 12 months more than otherwise, and that after the economy has begun to recover they will restrain our growth rates by 2 percent. Let’s just say all of that is true. So what? Does that mean that those policies are wrong? A lot of wealthy people will lose a lot of money, and some not-so-wealthy people will lose jobs, in the short term. But what if those losses are offset by greater gains? Isn’t it worth it, if we’re able to create a society that truly takes care of its poor? Isn’t it worth it, if we are able to provide health care for every single person in this country, and able to reduce the obscene gap in this country between the wealthy and the poor? So yeah, maybe I’m bringing the markets down for now and maybe we won’t grow at quite the rate we had grown before. But the markets will recover sooner or later, and we’ll still grow–and in exchange we’ll have a more just society.”
Obama is trading economic vitality for economic justice, or at least his vision of economic justice. This is why he can watch the tumbling market with such benign passivity. He’s decided to make the deal, and he’s cool with it. In his view, the Reagan economic explosion was built on greed and exploitation, and wealthy Americans have gotten their wealth by leaving the poor behind. They need to be made to share. Perhaps we won’t be quite so wealthy anymore; perhaps our economy won’t grow quite so dynamically as before. But we’ll be a better, more ethical society, more able to provide health care and welfare to everyone who needs it.
I think that’s how he sees it. This is where we need to start, I think, in explaining why he is wrong.
Before today, I was willing to consider Obama as just “clueless”. But after his remarks today about the market, I’ve finally decided he’s out to destroy wealth, if that’s what it takes to get his policies through. He doesn’t care one iota about the market or peoples life savings that are being swept away. It’s all about him and his plans. If the market suffers, oh well. For him it’s just collateral damage. Government is the be all and end all, and to hell with the free market.
People might be slowly coming to a realization of who Obama truly is, but it’s a little too late, isn’t it. Our hapless GOP leadership, content in nitpicking his budget or the stimulus, aren’t going to step into the void because they don’t understand or believe in the recovering power of the private sector. They have been drinking from the Beltway trough for too long so their rhetoric about limited government falls on deaf ears.
Give him a chance. We haven’t even heard his 5 year plan yet.
I disagree, anybody who chose to look could see this coming. Prior to running for president, Obama had NO experience – zero, zilch, nada – at doing anything productive. Community organizer, college lecturer, state and US senator, author (chuckle at that last one) Obama has always lived off of someone else’s dime. So what good could anyone expect would come from putting someone who’s never earned an honest dollar in his life in charge of the world’s largest economy? It should not be a suprise to anybody that Obama is clueless on economics; the suprise is that ANYBODY is suprised by it.
Ahithophel:
It terrifies me to think you may be right about his philosophical motivation, which places us in real national jeopardy.
But there is a second relevant issue, which is his personal motivation. This fellow is an egotist, and he relishes basking in the limelight. How is he going to respond as it becomes increasingly apparent (as I think it is and will) that his popularity is dissipating and he, himself, is being increasingly regarded as something of a bad joke? He will move vigorously, in campaign mode, to re-establish himself. But what can he do?
Are we likely to see a Schwarzenegger, who, his principled policies having failed, adopted whatever policies would help him get re-elected? Or an ideologue who, when thwarted, becomes increasingly shrill and aggressive in pursuit of his cherished goals?
I bet on the Schwarzenegger, and predict (with all available hope if not with confidence) that by Fall he will be on the phone daily asking the pollsters what he should do. The alternative prospect scares the heel out of me …
The Schwarzenegger Maneuver is a good bet if his polling breaks down and his agenda goes with it – though the Clinton debacle is probably a closer parallel, for obvious reasons. One suspects that few of the poll-spewing Obama-bots were even in grade school when Clinton enraptured the nation with his Health Care speech (68% approval as I recall), so can perhaps be forgiven if they don’t understand how opinion numbers can turn into sand in the hour glass.
I wonder if deep in the belly of the White House there are aides – still low-level ones, still starry-eyed for a glimpse of Axelrod, savoring an occasional visit from Favreau – already war-gaming “if 2010 ~= 1994″ scenarios and rough-drafting burn-after-writing “This is not the budget I knew” statements. “I always said that I would go through the budget line by line… That’s why I held a Fiscal Responsibility Summit in the first month of my term…”
Good point, CK,
But now I wonder if there isn’t a third possibility that is even more likely, given that we are talking about a man who wrote not one but two autobiographies about a life in which he had accomplished absolutely nothing of significance. That is that he simply hunkers down – surrounds himself with sycophants and pretends that he is the presidential leader he imagined himself to be. Scary … but such a person can blithely opine on the “up and down bobs” of a stock market that has been among the most determinedly monotonic in the history of finance.
#6
You’re probably right. But even if those are his modus operandi and goals, he can’t accomplish it all by himself. He needs the cooperation of the media, the congress, and the judiciary and he also needs an unimpeded path. No unforseen person or event from the past or the future can appear to block the road. And life has a way of presenting those obstacles. Three millenia ago this man, with his astonishing arrogance and hubris, would already be fodder for poets.
I do see your #12 as a possibility, materialist. It would be truly ironic and yet appropriate if he becomes another high-achiever going John Galt, or maybe Oblomov, amidst a general disappearance of incentive. His budget is already a kind of liberal fantasia – a hopium-addict’s hallucination.
I’m not sure that this scenario – which also fits the so far paltry evidence of his “involvement” in the stimulus bill – would be the worst alternative, however. It probably beats Socialist Fascism, Trolls on the March to the Abyss Edition. Pelosi and Reid know how to play power politics – obviously – but I’m not sure they could organize or even understand a bake sale in the real world: It would be up to the various committees to come up with quasi-real counterparts to the fantasy, and the basic unpopularity and total impracticality of the spendathon when separated from the prince’s charismatic penumbra may check congressional efforts.
The wild card would be the deteriorating global situation, which threatens to go critical or multi-critical at any time, all the more so as neo-imperial influence diffuses in an inflated Obamian Haze. Unless it involves an attack on the homeland, however, I’m not sure Oblamaov would even notice…
Yes, we are hanging by our fingernails off a cliff over an abyss. We must use all our strength to chin ourselves back up on a ledge. The administration sees this moment as the right time to weigh us down with tons of new programs.
i think #6′s comment is too true to be good…it seems consistent with one of obama’s autobio’s and most of the [incautious] rhetoric deployed during the campaign….
would a reid/pelosi go along with this…? i think yes…
would the swing voters who honestly but foolishly thought obama a, umm, ‘moderate’ allow him to pursue this agenda with a democratic congress? that’s the $6 trillion question…
unless we see something positively substantive and substantively positive materializing over the next 90 days, i think we’re in for a hot summer…
CK-
Right on. The global situation is a huge wildcard, and I haven’t the slightest doubt that it will come into play. Somebody’s going to really challenge this neophyte.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Russia went first (over Georgia or Ukraine). And, when the going gets tough, I fully expect our leader to be found with his head in the sand. The alternative, a wild lashing out, is also our there, and at least as scary.
I’m really trying to be optimistic about the near-term future. The less I think, the better I manage. Perhaps it’s a good time to spend a few months on the golf course.
EU bank are holding 24 trillion dollars. That’s why the TARP money has never work. Investors are pulling out becuase genius Geithner could not come up with a plan. The market has no confidence with Obama either.
If Iran wants to bring the great Satan to his knee, this should be it.
myna – what are you referring to on the EU bank(s) and the effect on TARP? Do you have a link to an article that explains it?
The lifelong radical candidate who was unqualified to be President of the United States is now governing as a lifelong radical who is unqualified to be President of the United States. The empty suit has surrounded himself with advisers and cabinet members who have always espoused the failed policies of the past, and now they are implementing those failed policies during a time of national crisis. The Affirmative Action Candidate has turned out to be as incompetent at this job as he was at all of his previous jobs. His economic remedies are going to kill us.
People say the election of Barack Obama as President was the most historic election in our nation’s history and they may be right. It looks to me that he’s making history as our nation’s most destructive President. Voters were so busy ignoring everything he’d ever done or said except for his “hope and change” slogan that they failed to see who he really is.
Now it’s too late. We cant even begin to clean up Congress for another two years, and Obama Christ Superstar will be with us for another four, barring impeachment. I’m terrified of how much damage these radicals can do during the remainder of their terms. How long will it take to clean up their mess? Decades? More? We’re still dealing with problems created by Administrations and Congresses of decades past that are inconsequential compared to the rape of the American economy being committed by President Obama and the Democrat controlled Congress.
Whatever happened to Larry Summers and Paul Volker? I thought they were part of the team – but they seem to have disappeared.
here…
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13690.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/4590512/European-banks-may-need-16.3-trillion-bail-out-EC-dcoument-warns.html