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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Jonah Goldberg
You've got to give Barack Obama credit. His learning curve gets steeper and steeper, but he continues to climb.
"I'm going to let him speak very briefly," Obama said Friday before making the fateful decision to allow a smirking Bill Clinton a none-too-brief moment in front of the cameras. It was the sort of famous blunder that comes after getting into a land war in Southeast Asia or getting into a contest with a Sicilian when death is on the line.
He might as well have said, "I'm going to let this grizzly bear have just one lick of my ice cream cone."
Still, that Clinton is a camera hog, or even that he puts the lie to Obama's reputation as the most eloquent Democrat, are easy lessons to learn compared with accepting the need to embrace George W. Bush's tax cuts and ask Clinton for help selling the decision.
You have to think Obama is wondering where he took a wrong turn.
The obvious answer: his stimulus bill, which is so unpopular now that Bill Clinton joked on Friday, "I guess we're not supposed to use that word anymore."
But that's not how it was when Obama took office with an approval rating near 70 percent (83 percent of Americans approved of his transition efforts). Contrary to the spin, many congressional Republicans were either eager to work with the new president or terrified of opposing him. They weren't opposed to a stimulus bill either.
But the
The Republicans discovered that opposing Obama's partisan agenda was good politics. By the health-care debate, independents flocked to the
But what if Obama had gone another way? What if he had rejected both the Democratic and the Republican stimulus bills and gone for a one-year payroll tax holiday of some kind, as many economists suggested at the time?
No bells, no whistles. No too-clever-by-half tax credits or subsidies. Just a straightforward suspension of some or all of the roughly
After all, if you want more of something, tax it less. If you want less of something, tax it more.
Such a stimulus would have been very progressive because payroll taxes are decidedly regressive, hitting the working and middle class harder than they hit the wealthy. According to
Ironically, this is exactly the argument the
Lord knows how much money -- and time -- was wasted on the original Obama stimulus. Shortly before the 2010 election, Obama himself admitted that he learned the hard way that there's "no such thing" as a "shovel-ready job." That's an awfully expensive lesson.
I think the initial appeal of the stimulus for many liberals, Obama included, is that it dovetailed with progressive hubris and Democratic resentment, the two defining characteristics of Obama's base. The experts, with Obama as first among equals, insisted that all of the answers were obvious for the smart set.
Meanwhile, the partisans insisted they deserved unfettered rule after enduring the Bush captivity. Obama was elected by exploiting and exemplifying both sentiments. In his arrogance, he even disparaged the Clinton presidency as too mincing and modest. Then, on Friday, Obama recruited Clinton to help save his more ambitious presidency from ruin.
Bill, like everyone else, recognized Obama's comeuppance. Indeed, you could see it in Bill's smile.
Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Available at Amazon.com:
Courage Grows Strong at the Wound
Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-81
The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy
The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics
Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks
The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House
Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House
Renegade: The Making of a President
Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War
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