Obama's Tangled Contradictions

Obama's Tangled Contradictions
by Donald Devine

Everything President Barack Obama touches is caught in a tangle of contradictions. Every time he tries to follow his leftist “progressive” handbook on one issue, it conflicts with another dogma as both hit hard reality, which causes him to flinch.

The most important matter for Mr. Obama is the economy. His presidency will sink or swim depending on how it performs. As a good progressive, he embraced a straight John Maynard Keynes line by adopting a $787 billion stimulus and a $2 trillion Federal Reserve increase in monetary liquidity. This unprecedented infusion of funds into the economy did produce a recovery of sorts. The economic optimists like Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein even think growth will rise to an impressive 5.5 percent annual rate. But they also warn that the Fed and Treasury will have to tighten money and spending at least by 2012, when inflation will become impossible to overlook any longer, leading to another slowdown and possibly a new recession and stagflation.

At least this scenario might get the president past the next election. But it is doubtful the dollar’s weakness can be ignored that long and a more immediate contradiction will get him first. The fact is, all that money produced few jobs, and even fewer long-term ones. Indeed, unemployment is still increasing. Since the start of the late 2007 recession, 8 million jobs have been lost - the first time there has been a decline from a decade earlier since the big 1930s crash. Economists Joseph Seneca and James Hughes of Rutgers estimate that even with a go-go 1990s growth rate, it would take until 2017 to reduce unemployment from the current 9.8 to 5 percent. Even many like Robert Samuelson who think the Fed/stimulus package worked do not see a jobs effect and no one thinks another large infusion is possible. Unfortunately for the president, voters care more about jobs than growth rates and stock prices.

Samuelson says the president’s only option is to eliminate government restrictions that discourage job creation. He recommends starting with the proposed Environmental Protection Agency rules requiring firms to use “best practices” to reduce six greenhouse gasses and then prove to the government that they are actually the “best.” The EPA would decide whether it actually was the best on a case-by-case basis, delaying or denying permits that could have produced jobs. He was not optimistic that Congress or the president would act because green interests would not let them. He also mentioned current restrictions on oil and gas drilling as costing jobs. He could have added Obama’s proposed new cap-and-trade energy limits making such matters even worse, or “fuel efficiency” standards that make now profitable U.S. autos unprofitable by having to subsidize smaller cars, hardly job creators. But the unions and the green lobbies will not let this happen, whether it means lost jobs or not. Job creation and progressive goals just happen to be in conflict.

Or take health reform. The president has demanded a plan that would expand coverage to the sick and all who are uninsured, would lower costs, and would not increase the federal deficit. Needless to say these clash with each other – trying to insure millions more people at less cost. But even the health goals collide. One of the top progressive goals for the past half century has been “community rating” –not allowing insurance companies to charge higher premiums based on preexisting poor health status or high risk factors. Yet, another goal is to positively make people healthy, promoting so-called wellness, both to satisfy the progressive altruistic instinct that leads it to promote health reform in the first place and to supposedly save money on future treatment. It turns out that both Senate bills enable higher premiums for people who smoke, who do not manage their obesity, who do not regulate their glucose intake, who do not exercise and so forth. Unfortunately, propensity in these matters is mostly pre-existing so insurance companies will be able to get around community rating restrictions with higher non-wellness premium increases.

The other top goal of progressive health reform has been to assure that everyone is covered by insurance. The reality is that the young are less ill than the elderly and so they often take the (minor) risk of being uninsured to avoid insurance premiums. Requiring all to purchase insurance or pay a penalty means that healthy young people who will tend not to need health insurance will have to subsidize the elderly who tend to get sick – costing thousands of dollars per year for mostly low-earning young entry workers. Presumably to offset this, retirees are asked to bear somewhat more of the burden. The result of this conflict is that both groups oppose the plan. A poll by the Galen Institute shows 71 percent of Americans oppose mandating insurance coverage with a penalty for not purchasing it and 68 percent oppose even small restrictions on seniors. In addition, if additional taxes, penalties and premiums are actually imposed, job growth in this one-sixth of the economy will be further restricted.

The inconsistencies are not restricted to domestic policy. President Obama has been consumed for weeks in making a decision about Afghanistan. Progressive doctrine has always supported nation building, guaranteeing world peace and promoting global democracy, with Woodrow Wilson’s “14 Points” setting the shining example. Ronald Reagan was often criticized for supporting right wing “dictators” who helped advance U.S. interests or for removing American marines from the Middle East (by Clintonite Louis Freeh, for example) rather than idealistically pursuing human rights and democracy in the Wilsonian manner. Yes, progressives shrunk from Vietnam at the end and opposed Iraq – but that was because Richard Nixon and George W. Bush managed them. Under John Kennedy and Bill Clinton nation-building was fine. But now, as in Vietnam and Iraq, things are getting tough in Afghanistan, in what Mr. Obama called “the necessary war.” Will he chose progressive nation-building or progressive peace and understanding? It has all become very confusing.

A particularly perplexing challenge to progressive orthodoxy rose at a recent football game when Nikole Churchill, having been elected Hampton University homecoming queen, was “heckled” at the game and later on-line because of her race, according to the Washington Post. But both Hampton and its opponent Howard University are black and the beauty queen was white. The incident was simply ignored until Ms. Churchill wrote President Obama and asked him to come to her university and explain to her fellows why they should “stop focusing on the color of my skin” and look at her qualifications. How is a progressive bureaucracy like the Civil Rights Commission supposed to solve something like this? It is “supposed” to be the other way around. Not surprisingly, Ms. Churchill has, as yet, to receive a reply.

If it were not so serious, one would be forced to laugh at the perplexity of the president’s position. The contradictions inherent in progressivism are becoming painfully obvious now that it has the power to force its program. Instead, everything in President Obama’s liberal playbook has become irreversibly tangled. He is still doing rather well in the polls personally but everything he attempts to do results in contradictions that ultimately will tie so tightly around the progressive ship-of-state propeller, it will simply stop. Then real reform can begin.