Who Got It Wrong, and Who Got It Right
Peter Robinson, writing in Forbes, notes three guys who are shocked to find that Obama is such a liberal.
“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell famously asserted, “needs a constant struggle.”
Congratulations this week to three journalists who have finally taken up that constant struggle: Christopher Buckley, David Gergen and David Brooks. All three used to insist that Obama was some species of centrist or moderate. Now that Obama has proposed the most massive expansion of government in the history of the republic, each has recognized that just conceivably he might have been mistaken.
I touched on Brooks last Friday, but read the article for details on Buckley and Gergen. The wool over their eyes is slowly being pulled back up, and they don’t like what they see.
What’s interesting is to hear Robinson compare who got Obama wrong with who got him right.
Buckley, Gergen and Brooks all attended expensive private universities, then spent their careers moving among the wealthy and powerful who inhabit the seaboard corridor running from Washington to Boston. If any of the three strolled uninvited into a cocktail party in Georgetown, Cambridge or New Haven, the hostess would emit yelps of delight. Yet all three originally got Obama wrong.
Contrast Buckley, Gergen and Brooks with, let us say, Rush Limbaugh, whose appearance at any chic cocktail party would cause the hostess to faint dead away, or with Thomas Sowell, who occupies probably the most unfashionable position in the country, that of a black conservative.
Limbaugh and Sowell both got Obama right from the very get-go. “Just what evidence do you have,” Sowell replied when I asked, shortly before the election, whether he considered Obama a centrist, “that he’s anything but a hard-left ideologue?”
The elite journalists, I repeat, got Obama wrong. The troglodytes got him right. As our national drama continues to unfold, bear that in mind.
Please?
Filed under: Doug • Government • Liberal
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Now that Obama has proposed the most massive expansion of government in the history of the republic
Actually, this happened famously during the Reagan/Bush years and then again during the Bush II years. It’s a bit early to see if this truly will be an expansion of gov’t or if it (as it appears to be) is merely a short term expansion of gov’t spending to ward off an economic depression, only to be followed up by paying down of this one time gov’t expansion/spending, as has historically happened in Democrat administrations.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: If conservatives had been more opposed to the Reagan/Bush/Bush super-expansions of gov’t, we’d be less cynical about their complaints two months in on the Obama administration. As it is, it just strikes many of us as hypocrisy and not very believable.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating; the spending during the Reagan years was primarily directed at a constitutional role of government; defense. And again I would add that I’d rather we spent the Soviets into the ground than bomb them.
Congress makes the budgets; the President only has a thumbs-up-or-down on them. I fault Congress mostly for the overspending. I fault the Republican Congress during the first years of Bush II for abandoning their principles. I credit the Republican Congress of the Clinton years that gave us a glimmer of surpluses. And I fault the Democratic Congress of today for, again, spending more now and for planned spending in the months to come, that will positively dwarf anything prior Congresses have ever done, even during the Great Depression.