Last September 1st, I wrote a post in which I wondered what Barack Obama really believes:
Is he really the left-wing liberal that his votes in the Senate in 2007 told us he was and like he was earlier this year when he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, criticizing all those bitter people clinging to their religion and guns? Or is he the more moderate, almost centrist Democrat we have been seeing in the last couple of months who supports the death penalty for child rapists and gun rights?
My conclusion, at that point, was that we didn’t know. A month and a half later, though, after then-Senator Obama’s discussion of tax issues with Joe Wurzelbacher, i.e., Joe the Plumber, it began to appear that then-Senator Obama really was the very liberal Democrat who was ranked as the "most liberal" Senator in a 2007 National Journal survey. (See here.)
So where are we today? Is he a liberal or moderate? He has poured billions into General Motors and Chrysler, but so did George W. Bush. Key parts of his defense budget are getting support from people like John McCain.
But more interesting than how liberal he has been (and I do think he has been on the left side of the Democratic Party) is the fact that, for a man who ran so hard to be President, he seems surprisingly disconnected from the policy-making role of being President. He is still good at giving speeches. He connects with certain groups of people in a way his predecessor never did. He has traveled all around the world telling people why the United States will be better and do things better now that he is President.
But back home, he turned the writing of the stimulus bill over to the Democrats in Congress, especially the Democratic committee chairmen in the House of Representatives. And instead of a bill that started spending lots of money right away, we got a bill full of programs Democrats had been wanting to pass for years.*
The cap-and-trade (a/k/a cap-and-tax) energy bill was handled much the same way. Even though President Obama talked about global warming and how important the bill was, it was House Democrats who wrote it – and who gave away so many concessions and freebies to get it passed in the House that it is unclear whether it will even cut carbon emissions, let alone affect global warming.**
The defense budget is the work of Defense Secretary Robert Gates. It is a good proposal,*** but it is Secretary Gates’ proposal, not the President’s.
And then we come to what is supposed to be the number one priority of the Obama Administration: health reform. But while President Obama is giving speeches and holding news conferences to support the concept, it is the Democrats in Congress who seem to be actually writing the plan. During the campaign for the Democratic nomination last year, then-Senator Obama had the most conservative of the plans proposed by the various candidates. Now, the plan that the House Democratic leadership wants to pass is considerably more liberal than that.
And where is the President? When it comes to the details, he seems to be missing in action. It is almost as if he does not care what passes, as long as he can say a health bill passed.
This pattern (i.e., the President talks generalities while others actually come up with the plans) has happened so often that it is beginning to seem like the norm. I do not know if the President isn’t interested in the details of the plans or doesn’t know the details. He hasn’t been involved in national politics that long. He only entered the Senate in 2005 and within two years he was running for President full time. When you can talk as good as he does, you don’t need to know much detail to participate in the kind of "debates" that we have in our political campaigns these days. And when he was running for President full time, he probably didn’t have time to learn much more than the kind of sound-bite answers a campaign requires.
While it may be too early to tell, things like the stimulus bill, cape-and-trade and even the health plan tend to make one believe that the comments made during the Democratic primaries about then-Senator Obama’s lack of experience may not have been too far off the mark.
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* Administration supporters would probably say that this shows the President’s efforts to involve Congress, not his giving in to them.
** One national columnist (I don’t remember which one) admitted that the bill was not very good, but he said the important thing was to pass the bill, as a start on the problem. It could always be fixed later, he said. Yeah, right. Like Congress is good at fixing bad bills and bad programs.
*** While I dislike many of the things the Obama Administration is proposing, I do think the proposed Defense budget is, overall, quite good. I particularly applaud the shift in focus from more and more expensive weapons to more and more weapons. Our equipment needs to be good, but quantity counts, too. I think Secretary Gates is finding the right balance.
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