Mr. Obama reflects on his presidency, admitting that he let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend Democrat,” realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” and perhaps should have “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” in the stimulus.Great. What else is the President going to learn after the damage has been done? That global warming is largely a fraud? That raising taxes and increasing regulations on business is no way to stimulate an economy? That bowing to people is no way to win their respect? That taking money from those who earn it and giving it to those who don't doesn't make anyone less poor?
Perhaps he'll also learn that the reason he appears to be "the same old tax-and-spend Democrat" is because he is the same old tax-and-spend Democrat. How else could he have expected to appear?
There really is a problem in this White House. Either the President was deliberately lying when he promised that "shovel-ready jobs" would be created by the $800 billion stimulus or he really didn't know that there's no such thing. If it's the former then he's malicious. If it's the latter he's incompetent. In either case he's unsuited for the office he holds.
There's a scene in the movie A Serious Man in which an adolescent Jewish boy visits an elderly rabbi for counsel. The rabbi poses a question to the boy by slowly and incongruously reciting a line from an old Jefferson Airplane song:
"When the truth...is found ... to be lies ... and all the hope ... within you dies ... What then?"It was an amusing scene in the movie, but I think a lot of Obama supporters are feeling the despair in this very question today, and they're not finding it so amusing. An electoral tsunami appears to be building on the horizon and is threatening to wash Mr. Obama's party into political oblivion. They're going to pay an awful price for his on-the-job training.