Required Reading

Stephen Hayes calls it “the disintegration” of the Obama Administration:

As we approach the sixth anniversary of his election, the Obama presidency is in tatters. Obama’s policies, foreign and domestic, are widely seen as failed or failing. His approval rating is near its lowest point. Obama’s base of support is loyal and fierce and shrinking. Much of the country sees him as incompetent or untrustworthy, and government, far from being “cool,” is a joke on good days and a threat on bad ones.

Barack Obama came to office with hugely ambitious goals for transforming the country, changing its trajectory, and putting America on a fundamentally different path. He advertised his audacity and boasted of his boldness. He told audiences he was compelled to run for president by what Martin Luther King Jr. had called “the fierce urgency of now.” He launched his campaign in Springfield, Illinois, and invited flattering comparisons to that other president from Springfield, Abraham Lincoln.

Obama sought to portray himself as a new kind of politician​—​a “post-partisan,” pragmatic problem-solver, not so much a centrist as someone who couldn’t be pinpointed on the left-right ideological spectrum because he floated above it. Traditional labels were anachronistic constructs that didn’t apply to such a transcendent political figure.

Journalists not only swallowed this legend, many of them promoted it. Obama didn’t appear ideological to influential political reporters because they shared his views. He wasn’t liberal, he was right.

And yet Obama didn’t attempt to conceal his embrace of big government. In nearly every stump speech, he touted government as the answer to virtually every problem facing the country.

How’s that working out for us? At the moment we face three crises. One, in the Middle East, is the direct result of Obama’s indifference towards Iraq and his hostility to “anything Bush.” The second is the ebola crisis, where the Administration’s response has been so slow, bordering on nonexistence, that even the most basic quarantine actions have yet to be taken. The third is the disintegration of our southern border, which seems to be the kind of political conspiracy for the consolidation of political power you usually only see in movies.

The idea that both our border should be open to anyone and that our airports should welcome flights from West Africa at the same time a new Caliphate promises us destruction and an infectious hemorrhagic fever spreads from overseas…

…I don’t know whether to call it incompetence, contempt, conspiracy, or all three.

If after all this Americans are still clamoring for more and more big government, we’ll deserve whatever it is that we get.