Too much change, not much hope

Wednesday, May 27, 2009 11:53 PM

Barack Hussein Obama's bloviating speeches contain little that is either quotable or memorable, but three themes are repeated ad nauseam: "hope," "change," and "failed policies of the past." Well, Obama promised change, and on that promise he delivered. He is changing the United States of America into a country that has been described, with some justification, as moving rapidly towards socialism, fascism, or both. He plans to make much more change, reportedly intending to create a government-run health insurance system that will drive the existing system to the fringes of the economy, like private grammar schools. He has appointed a jurist to the US Supreme court who is overtly racist and sexist (anti-white male, of course), and who makes snide jokes about her intentions to legislate from the bench. It is unlikely that her appointment will be stopped, even if Senate Republicans object unanimously, which itself is unlikely. These acts by Obama are non-lethal flesh wounds to the American nation, but deep bleeding gashes nonethless. Change: you got it.

Then there were Obama's promises about "the failed policies of the past." That was and is a code phrase referring to Bush and Cheney. The promise was to depart from the Bush-Cheney policies. Obama has sort of kept that promise and sort of not. He is not only a fuzzy leftist but a fuzzy everything, and if the more extreme "progressives" can get past their euphoria over his election, they can see that he is ever ready to welsh on many of the promises he made to them, while declaring brazenly that he is keeping those promises.

There are, however, some failed policies of the past that Obama has actually revived from the dead: a "private-public partnership" that failed when Mussolini tried it, and a central planning scheme to create whole industries (in Obama's case, it's the "green jobs" industry) that failed miserably when Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Gorbachev tried it.

To be "fair and balanced" (no, this isn't Fox News) there are some other failed policies of the past that Obama has not dusted off: a gulag archipelago, disarmament of all the citizens of a nation except the police and military, a compulsory military draft, a pervasive Gestapo/KGB apparatus, etc. Though there is reason to worry that he might try such hard-line tactics, Obama's plans to do so, if he has any at all, are below the line of sight on the horizon.

And that brings us to the question, what is on the horizon? And that brings us to the question, what about the "hope" that Obama promised?

For his fans, and the percentage who "strongly approve" of Obama in the Rasmussen poll has hovered in the mid-thirties since March, just the fact that he was elected and makes promises is hope enough. The phenomenon has been called a secular religion: in place of "In God We Trust," the feeling, and it is a feeling more than a thought, is "In Obama We Trust." For Obama's legion of admirers, that is all they need to have hope, much hope, but always for the future, never realized in the here-and-now.

For the rest of us, however, the people Ayn Rand called the producers and the men of the mind, in contrast to the moochers and the looters, there is very little hope. Can we hope for lower taxes to revive our damaged economy? Forget it. Can the unemployed hope for "shovel-ready" or "green" jobs coming soon? They can hope but only the rhetoric is shovel-ready, and whatever the green is, it is not fattening their wallets.

At best, we can hope for a congressional turn-around in 2010 or 2012, for Obama to be voted out of office, to be termed out in 2016, or impeached. Nice things to hope for, but not much to count on.

It seems that the best way for every American to find any hope these days is to take a long, hard look in the mirror.