George Will wryly notes that our young president is benefiting from his lengthy spell of on-the-job training. Too bad the nation has to suffer through it.
“The education of this president is a protracted and often amusing process . . . as he continues to alight upon the obvious with a sense of profound and original discovery,” Will said.
“The president is saying, ‘the trouble with big government is it’s so darn big.’ And like a lot of other big organisms — dinosaurs spring to mind — it has a simple nervous system, it’s sclerotic, it’s governed by inertia, and it’s hard to move,” he said. “This from a man who’s devoted his life to increasing the power of government as an instrument of the redistribution of income because government is wiser than markets at that.”
Barack Obama claimed to be a different kind of politician who would reach across the aisle to work with others, and who didn’t care where good ideas came from. He promised, for instance, to go through the budget line-by-line and root out waste and fraud. He got around that promise by never having a budget at all.
If he actually was the man he claimed to be, he was probably the best placed president we have ever had to come into office and enact sweeping reforms to streamline government. He could have come in an leveraged his position on the Democrats’ far left to force reforms through Congress.
But he wasn’t that man. He is not a reformer. He is a Chicago thug politician who loves big government, hates opposition and believes government is the solution to all problems, and at the same time a weapon he can personally wield against those opponents he hates.
Even the education he claims he is getting now is not sinking it. If it were, he would abandon Obamacare and try a market approach to healthcare reform. He isn’t doing that. Because he still loves big government, and is also a stubborn, egotistical, dishonest man.
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