Obama Capitulates!

As economic conditions deteriorate, President Obama proposed last week a new measure to create jobs.  Like his 2009 stimulus bill, however, the jobs proposal is a mish-mash of tax relief (payroll tax forgiveness), gifts to the public sector unions (grants to local governments to forestall layoffs), extended unemployment insurance, etc. that will have no practical effect in encouraging businesses to hire more workers.  To pay for it, he proposes raising taxes on “millionaires and billionaires”, measures he could not pass when he had huge Democratic majorities, and has less than zero chance passing now that the Republicans control the House.   And HE KNOWS THERE’S NO CHANCE OF CONGRESS PASSING HIS PROPOSALS!

Why does the President resort to cynical political maneuvering like this when the country’s bleeding?  Because he’s given up hope.   A President who campaigned as a conciliator has decided that he will not be re-elected unless he panders to the anger in his own political base. You almost get the feeling in watching the President’s body language that we, the people, have let him down, that we weren’t as good a country as he envisioned when he told us he could unify us and move us past dysfunction and pointless partisan division.

The people who really let Obama down were his economic advisors who saddled him with absurdly optimistic economic forecasts if we bought a poorly conceived economic agenda.  Then, they scurried back to academia or Wall Street to resume their brilliant careers and left Obama twisting in the hot winds of political reaction. 

The President seems lost, and grasping at straws, as the economy continues to suffer.  People are beginning to wonder who the real Obama is:  the fiery, partisan class warrior (who would never have been elected President in the first place) or the hopeful conciliator who appealed to our better instincts.  We may  never know…