Victor Davis Hanson reviews the last seven years:
…the mad hatred turned to the mad worship. Do we remember the great campaign of 2008? The madness now metamorphosized, as an obscure, heretofore unremarkable rookie senator became the Great Savior who would deliver us from Bush. Newsweek declared him a god; almost nightly we heard of leg tingles and speeches comparable to the Gettysburg Address. To doubt was racist, to really doubt was un-American. But now there was no shrieking, shrill Hillary Clinton to scream that such dissent was not really un-American.(She would soon charge that doubt about Libya was a sort of un-American support for Gaddafi.)
Denial was part of the madness. Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright were right-wing slurs. “No more disown Rev. Wright than…,” “typical white person,” “cling to their guns…” either never were uttered or were irrelevant. Soon the Pied Piper had everyone leaving Hamelin into the Weser. I rode a bike in the Palo Alto suburbs and watched as Obama signs on lawns were replaced each month by larger ones, until this “keeping up with the Joneses” reached billboard proportions — the more and larger they sprouted, the more the Stanford-affiliated community felt less guilty about never venturing into nearby downtown Redwood City or East Palo Alto.
The liberal press warned darkly of the dangerous months to come between November and January, the scary 80 days in which the discredited lame duck Bush might do terrible things (start another war somewhere like Libya? Make some dreadful Van Jones appointment?), until the savior came at last down from the mountain top. So we waited in terror until the danger passed and the salvation arrived in January. “Cool,” “competent,” “assured” were the media epithets; “reset” became the national motto.
In this second-stage madness, suddenly mediocrities like Timothy Geithner were deemed messiahs, tax-cheating or not. Tax-delinquents Hilda Solis and Tom Daschle were not quite tax delinquents. Geniuses like Peter Orszag, Larry Summers, Christina Romer, and Austin Goolsbee (as either formal or informal advisors), were going to apply Paul Krugman-like Keynesian borrowing (“stimulus”) to save us from the Bush “he did it” meltdown. Money was a construct and need not be paid back — whether at the Federal Reserve or at your own credit card, home mortgage, or tax problem level.
Relief was finally here. You see borrowing was not really printing money but a new sort of math in which the “people” would be saved from Wall Street chicanery by brilliant new stimulatory theories. Borrowing money “created” more money; spending “money” was stimulus that made even more money. Most of the debate centered around the pitifully small size of the new deficits: a three-year plan to print $5 trillion was deemed conservative or too timid by many of the Obama geniuses. Joe Biden, given his sterling credentials and vast knowledge (re: his call for Bush to rally the people — as FDR supposedly did as president “in 1929″ and “on television” no less) would oversee the trillion-dollar borrowing to ensure it was “shovel-ready.”
We only started to come to our senses last November. We still have a ways to go.
[Update a couple minutes later]
It’s the economy, stupid:
Last year, Obama used Pennsylvania’s Allentown Metal Works as a backdrop to tout his stimulus and job-creation success. A couple of months later, the plant closed.
Vice President Joe Biden told a Pittsburgh crowd that 250,000 to 500,000 jobs would be created each month by the start of last summer. The numbers never even came close.
To date, this administration’s handling of our economy is a failure.
“Excepting some unanticipated major event, the election will largely ride on the state of the economy and public perceptions of how Obama has handled it,” said Mark Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University.
I never had confidence that these people knew their fundaments from a hole in the ground when it came to economics. What I don’t understand is why anyone did.
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