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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Barack Obama was an accident of history

Roger Kimball believes that the national mood and the electoral momentum that swept Obama into officed is now sweeping Obama out.

In addtion to being the "first black president" and the horrible campaign that McCain ran, he made promises:
•Promises, promises, promises.
  • Obama was going to be ◦America’s first post-racialist president.
  • He promised that we would cut the annual deficit in half by the end of his first term.
  • He promised that unemployment would be under 6% by the end of his first term.
  • He promised that his $50 billion bailout of GM would restore the flailing carmaker to profitabilty.
  • He promised that the $800 billion “stimulus” package would create “millions”of jobs.
What we got instead:
We didn’t know in 2008 (although some of us suspected) that Obama’s promises were hollow.
  • We didn’t think that he would add more than $5 trillion to the federal debt in less than four years.
  • We didn’t know that he would run a deficit of $1.4-$1.5 trillion.
  • We didn’t know that the credit rating of the Untied States would be downgraded for the first time history. (Perhaps that is part of what Obama meant when he said, just before the last election, that he was only a few days away from “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”)
  • We didn’t know that the government’s takeover of GM would leave the car maker in the same uncompetitive hole from which the taxpayers’ money was supposed to rescue it.
  • We didn’t know that $800 billion in stimulus money would be spent primarily to line the pockets of Obama’s union supporters.
  • We didn’t know that, after nearly four years, official unemployment would be at 8.3%, or that the more comprehensive “U6” unemployment would be at nearly 15%, or that the U.S. economy would be growing at a sluggish, job-killing 1.6%.
  • We didn’t know that the man who promised a “post-partisan” administration would contrive to pass a deeply controversial and far-reaching package of legislation to bring some 20% of the economy under government control in the name of “health care reform.”
"Cleanup at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!"

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