Obama's State of Denial

Yuval Levin:

Toward the end of his State of the Union address, President Obama delivered a paragraph that was so blatantly absurd and self contradictory as to actually become clarifying—so incoherent that it shed a bright light on his thinking and his grave dilemma. It’s hard to believe he actually said this, but he did:

I’m a Democrat.  But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed:  That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.  That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States.  That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work.  That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a Government program.

The examples he chose of course jump out as ludicrous: K-12 education in America is thoroughly dominated by the government, and the president has not proposed to make it less so. (And state governments, by the way, are also governments.) “Getting rid of regulations that don’t work” is certainly an unusual way to describe the regulatory agenda of this administration, which has involved a series of unprecedented delegations of authority to regulators (especially in health care and financial regulation) and which continues every day to spew forth an interminable array of costly, complex, and highly assertive rules that will give the federal government (and the executive agencies in particular) previously unimagined discretion over vast swaths of our economy. And “relies on a reformed private market, not a government program” is surely the most unabashedly dishonest and Orwellian way yet devised to describe Obamacare—a law that begins from the premise that the solution to our health care financing problems is to make the government an even greater provider and purchaser of health insurance, would spend well over a trillion dollars in the coming decade on yet another health care entitlement program and on the expansion of an unreformed Medicaid system, would micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely to make it even less efficient, would employ even heavier price controls in an otherwise unreformed Medicare system, and would raise half a trillion dollars in taxes on employment, investment, and medical research.

 

But even more galling than the examples was the very use of the Lincoln quote itself, which makes precisely the opposite point to the one made by the rest of the president’s speech. This speech offered a vision of a profoundly technocratic and activist government, with its hands in every nook and cranny of the nation’s economic life—a government guiding particular business decisions and nudging individual choices through just the right mix of incentives and rules to reach just the right balance between fairness and growth while designing the perfect website for job retraining programs and producing exactly the proper number of “high-tech batteries.” The president described the government’s bailout of the Detroit automakers as a roaring success and then said “What’s happening in Detroit can happen in other industries.  It can happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh.” If he thinks that all the tasks he laid out for government are things that people “cannot do better by themselves” then he must have a very high opinion of how well government can do things, or a very low opinion of how well people can do things by themselves, or (most plausibly) both.

 

The intensely activist tone of the speech also meant, of course, that no real attention could be paid to what was the dominant theme of our political debates over the past year: Our out-of-control deficits and debt....

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There is more.

This is a good take down on Obama's performance.  It is a response he probably thought he had defeated with his own rhetoric, but Levin makes clear how disingenuous that rhetoric was.  Obama tries to roll his opponents arguments, but fails