California Conservative

Then-Sen. Obama is credited with running a near-perfect campaign. Then President-Elect Obama was credited with running a near-perfect transition. Sixteen days into President Obama’s administration, he’s fighting for legislation that stands a good chance of hanging a political anchor around the Democrats’ necks in 2010. As I told a good friend this morning, intellectually honest historians will discuss this in the context of how not to make a great first presidential impression.

This Opinion Journal article highlights how badly President Obama and the Democrats have responded to the Republicans’ pushback against the Political Allies Payoff Act.

Republican proposals are “rooted in the idea that tax cuts alone can solve all our problems, that government doesn’t have a role to play, that half measures and tinkering are somehow enough, that we can afford to ignore our most fundamental economic challenges,” the president said in an address at the Department of Energy Thursday. “Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed.”

Seeking to regain the momentum on economic policy, Mr. Obama on Friday is expected to announce the members of his newly formed Economic Recovery Advisory Board, led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

President Obama won’t “regain the momentum on economic policy” until he renounces this bill. President Obama can’t “regain the momentum on economic policy” until he strips out all the excessive spending that pays off the Democrats’ political allies and that is fueling an inflation rate spike.

President Obama says that a crisis will turn into a catastrophe that we might never recover from if Republicans don’t support this stimulus package. Why should Republicans support this bill considering partisan Democrats crafted it to pay off the partisan Democrats’ political allies? Why should Republicans support a bill that does more harm than good?

Let’s dispose of this silly notion immediately: the American economy’s succeeding or failing doesn’t hinge on the passage of a single bill. That’s fearmongering of the worst sort.

Another bit of silliness being propagated by the Democrats is that the bill doesn’t contain any earmarks. Whether it does or doesn’t is irrelevant. That’s irrelevant because, whether it’s earmark-free or not, (a) it pays off almost every special interest group that Democrats are beholden to and (b) it still wastes hundreds of billions of dollars.

Mr. Obama’s allies on and off Capitol Hill are also turning up the political heat, with e-mail and phone blitzes, television and radio advertisements, all designed to break the GOP’s united front.

“I was hopeful he would have done this even sooner,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), who pressed the president to take his case to the American people in a closed-door meeting with him Wednesday.

Let the Democrats do this media blitz. That isn’t what’s important. What’s important is the fact that calls from mainstreet Americans is running 100:1 against this bill. The Democrats’ threatening targeting 28 House members for voting against this bill just proves that the most extremist Democrats have taken over the Democrats’ campaign committees.

The DCCC should get attacked for threatening 28 Republicans for voting against this massive waste of money but are remaining silent about the 11 Democrats who joined all 177 Republicans in voting against this monstrosity.

President Obama is acting desperate and it doesn’t have anything to do with his wanting to get something accomplished for the American people. It has to do with the fact that he wanted to spend unprecedented amounts of money on the Democrats’ pet projects but the Republicans started pointing out all the wasteful ways that this bill spends money.

I think it’s also the first time he’s been substantively challenged on anything. He wasn’t challenged in the Illinois state senate. He spent all of 140-something days in the U.S. Senate before launching hsi presidential campaign so it’s unlikely he was seriously and substantively challenged there.

When he criticized Republicans that they “can’t listen to Rush Limbaugh and expect to get things done”, he brought someone into the equation who has as big a microphone as he has. Worse, Rush knows how to use his Golden EIB microphone with devastating effectiveness.

When President Obama criticized Republican about Rush, Rush started airing all the pork in this bill. Day after day, Rush exposed the pork in the bill. It didn’t take long for the Right Blogosphere jumped in. The damage was already done before this NRO article appeared but it’s worth looking into. Here’s a few of my favorites:

• $448 million for constructing a new Homeland Security Department headquarters
• $600 million to convert the federal auto fleet to hybrids
• $450 million for NASA (carve-out for “climate-research missions”)
• $600 million for NOAA (carve-out for “climate modeling”)
• $4.5 billion for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

This is what’s written about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers:

Not only does this effectively double the Corps’ budget overnight, but it adds to the Corps’ $3.2 billion unobligated balance—money that has been appropriated, but that the Corps has not yet figured out how to spend.

If President Obama and Capitol Hill Democrats want to waste political capital fighting to waste this much money, that’s their right. They won the election. It’s just that, like many other things they do, it’s squandering capital on questionable priorities.

Technorati Tags: Priorities, President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Political Capital, Pork, Stimulus Bill, Democrats, Rush Limbaugh, Conservatism

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Conservatism, Domestic Policies, Economy, Liberals, Obama, Special Interests. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.