The Aspirational President
"Aspirational" was the word thrown around most during his candidacy. Here was a guy who wanted the best for America. Here was a guy who promised to solve our problems. Here was a guy that was going to tap into all that is great about our country and put it to work.Obama seems to have carried the aspirational rhetoric into his presidency. The problem is that his policy is aspirational too - the guy with no executive experience seems to think policies are good simply because they mean well (Bush wasn't free of this vice either). He wants everyone to go to college because a nation of smart people would be neat. Nevermind that some people don't benefit from high school. He champions only "Government That Works" and promotes this as hard-nosed pragmatism. Nevermind that his idea of "what works" is rote liberal orthodoxy.
Foresight is 20/20
So far President Obama has done nothing to disconfirm my notions of Candidate Obama; his innovation is talking about American greatness but his proposed path to greatness was formed by all those radicals that reared and mentored him.Obama hasn't shown a hint that he thinks any policy he likes includes tradeoffs: His three planks are Energy, Healthcare, and Education. He promises that producing all our energy from wind/solar will save us money in the long term, create jobs, and generally be teh awesome. Ditto on healthcare, we can save money, create jobs, and everyone will live longer (since when is spending less and more jobs compatible?). Education is also a freebie - just by subsidizing more of it we can magic the population into being more productive; the most generous estimate of literacy says 3 million people in the US can't read.
[update] From the transcript of his presser:
At the end of the day, the best way to bring our deficit down in the long run is not with a budget that continues the very same policies that have led us to a narrow prosperity and massive debt. It's with a budget that leads to broad economic growth by moving from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest.The rhetoric is good but it doesn't match the action. This year's budget includes $1.8 Trillion (spoken as "one point eight trillion fucking dollars") in deficit spending. His ten year plan averages $1 Trillion a year in deficit spending and in his last year the deficit will be "cut in half" - meaning half of his biggest deficit year. That smallest deficit year is comparable to Bush's biggest one.
In a aspirational world this deficit spending is "investment" because if those trillions were left in the private economy the proles would just spend it on the wrong things.