What They Are Saying About Obama

Foreign English-speaking media are worried. Here's Martin Wolf at Financial Times, Terence Corcoran (fantastic last name!) from Canada's National Post, and Bartle Bull at The Prospect. Writing about the bank rescue and Bernake's monetary policy, respectively, Wolf (especially) and Corcoran are pretty convincing, but Bull's piece is astonishingly biased. There are dozens of faulty conclusions among his thousands of words, but I'll just focus on a few:

His challenge today is to sell this big debt, big government revolution to a public that thought—or rather hoped—that it was electing a post-partisan centrist.

[Break]

But the greatest moment of candour to emerge from this administration to date came when chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief handler within the Chicago political machine that groomed this brilliant political phenomenon, said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” Hillary Clinton, the other great power in the administration, made the same point in Brussels recently: “Never waste a good crisis… Don’t waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security.”

This is breathtaking stuff. Obama’s top people are publicly (if inadvertently) confessing to precisely the sort of cabalistic secret agenda that was most loathed about the Bush administration. Imagine the apoplexy of Obama’s political base if Dick Cheney had called 9/11 a “good crisis” because it provided cover for a long-intended invasion of Iraq.

As far as his umbrage about not wasting the crisis, this is just willfully misleading. A) It's not a cabalistic secret agenda if the chief of staff and secretary of state are speaking openly about it; B) It's not a cabalistic secret agenda when Obama spent much of the election season campaigning on the very issues (health care reform, energy reform) he's now trying to enact; and C) The 9/11 comparison is off-base, too put it mildly; Bull knows darn well that the administration is talking in terms of FDR creating social security, not capitalizing on the murder of 3,000 Americans. Lastly, Obama did campaign on being post-partisan, but not on being centrist. Just because his temperament is conservative doesn't mean anyone should have thought that his politics were. He's fallen short of his post-partisan potential, but at least half the blame for that should be tossed at the Republicans.

Later Bull tells us, "Ideology is back." If ideology was put into mothballs during the previous administration, Bush did a hell of a job hiding that fact. He finishes his piece with a similarly confused flourish: "More war and less growth is bad leadership and bad politics." Again, that's Obama he was talking about.

(Thanks to The Plank for the Bull and Wolf pieces.)