By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Barack Obama has a habit of identifying a supposed crisis
in collective morality, damning the straw men “them” who engage in such ethical
lapses, soaring with rhetorical bromides — and then, to national quiet, doing
more or less the exact things he once swore were ruining the country.
Washington will always be a city of hypocrisies, as one would expect when
astronomical amounts of money and political power collide. What is striking
about the recent disclosures about Obama’s tenure is not that his
embarrassments are all that different from embarrassments of other
administrations, but that they are at odds entirely with almost everything
Obama has professed. And that realization is starting to damage his presidency
as much as its actual shortcomings.
Take the recent drone memo and the context in which it
was leaked. When Harold Koh was dean of the Yale Law School, he used to berate
the Bush administration for its supposedly criminal anti-terrorism policy. He
went so far as to call President Bush “torturer in chief.” But as State
Department legal counsel in the Obama administration, a metamorphosed Koh and
others gave President Obama the go-ahead to up the Predator-drone kill tally
tenfold over the Bush administration’s, and insisted that it was legal to kill
American citizens suspected of al-Qaeda affiliations.
The centerpiece of Obama’s 2008 campaign was the
simultaneous unlawfulness and superfluity of the Bush anti-terrorism protocols.
But Obama embraced most of them while failing to implement any of his supposed
correctives — such as trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York City
courtroom, transferring Guantanamo inmates to prisons within the United States,
and subjecting CIA agents to scrutiny for their enhanced interrogations. So
what are we now left with? Historians will see American anti-terrorism policy
post 9/11 as a Bush-Obama continuum — albeit with a vast expansion of targeted
assassinations by the civil libertarian and Nobel laureate Obama. Oddly, there
has never been any acknowledgment by the administration that Obama adopted the
policies of his predecessor that he had once damned, much less that in the case
of drone assassinations he far exceeded them, while most of his own innovations
were quietly dropped.
Obama also promised a radical reform, both legal and
spiritual, of the big-money nexus between Wall Street and the federal
government. He especially jawboned firms that had taken federal bailout money
and then given big bonuses to executives who had overseen losses — while he
made frequent promises of implementing fair-share taxation and ending offshore
tax avoidance, lobbyists in government, and the revolving door. Obama’s two
appointments to the position of secretary of the Treasury scarcely meet his
rhetorical flourishes. Timothy Geithner was a confessed tax dodger in a fashion
that was both trivial and selfish. Treasury designate Jack Lew took a
million-dollar bonus while a grandee at Citigroup, an ailing company that was a
recipient of massive infusions of federal cash. Recent disclosures suggest that
Lew had Caribbean offshore investments in the very Potemkin building in the
Caymans that Obama so dramatically derided as symptomatic of 1-percenter
pathology. Former budget director Peter Orszag went from the administration
into a six-figure job at Citigroup. By Washington standards, none of this is
unusual; but by the standard of Obama’s own sanctimonious rhetoric it is
shocking.
Until the advent of the Obama administration, Bush was
sharply criticized for adding $4 trillion to the national debt over eight
years. His defense that he inherited a recession, that 9/11 sent the economy
into a tailspin, and that he was funding two wars fell on deaf ears. Likewise,
Bush’s explanation that, as a percentage of GDP, his deficits (on average 3.4
percent of GDP) over eight years were smaller than either Reagan’s (4.2
percent) or his father’s (4.3 percent) likewise was ignored. Yet Obama in just
four years borrowed a trillion dollars more than Bush had in eight, and set a
peacetime record of serial deficits averaging 8.7 percent of GDP. The problem
is not just that Obama took a model of reckless spending and doubled it in half
the time — Washington is full of wild spenders, both Democratic and Republican
— but that Obama was zealous in his castigation of Bush’s much lower spending
(“unpatriotic”) and strident in his vows to stop the borrowing, going so far as
to vote against the debt ceiling while in the Senate and to promise as
president to halve the deficit by the end of his first term.
It is hard to blame the president when the huge U.S.
economy is showing a weak pulse. But Barack Obama did just that in repeatedly
damning Bush for the 2007–09 recession. He is now in his fifth year of
governance, and the economy has not seen a single month with the unemployment
rate below 7.8 percent, when in the prior eight years there was not one month
of unemployment above 7.8 percent. After over $5 trillion borrowed, by the end
of Obama’s first term, the economy was contracting and unemployment was higher
than when he began his presidency.
One of the keystones of Obama’s promised reset foreign
policy was the premise that George Bush’s obstinacy had needlessly antagonized
our enemies like Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela — and, in fact, most
of the Arab world. But at the beginning of his second term, Iran refuses even
to talk with his administration as it presses ahead with its nuclear program.
North Korea just issued a video of an envisioned nuclear strike on New York
City. And Syria has suffered 60,000 killed in a cruel civil war. Obama
campaigned on the bad war in Iraq and the good war in Afghanistan, but when he
entered office the war in Iraq was over, in terms of American losses, while the
Afghan war was about to explode, costing more American lives since the end of
2008 than it had in the prior seven years since 2001. Add in the Benghazi
disaster and the spread of Islamic extremism across North Africa from Egypt to
Mali, and one could argue that the world is a more dangerous place than it was
when George Bush left office. Presidents cannot be blamed for such events, but
they can be called out for their hypocrisy when they have made the case that
prior presidents were in fact culpable for chaos abroad.
There is a pattern here, and the list could be expanded:
the Affordable Care Act, which will send health-insurance premiums
skyrocketing; the bragging about new oil and gas development that came despite,
not because of, administration action; the moralizing about the selfish and
high-living 1 percent amid the president’s vacationing at Martha’s Vineyard,
lavish entertaining, and golfing at tony links; and the platitudes about a new
civility and a new politics while raising record amounts of money in order to
blacken Mitt Romney as a sexist, racist, veritable crook, and near killer.
In 2008 Obama was not just a fierce critic but a
sanctimonious critic of just the sorts of practices and protocols that he has
later embraced. Why? Partly, Senator Obama was inexperienced and really
believed that the presidency would be as easy a task as had been his
opportunistic brief tenure as a senator. Partly, because during the 2007–08
campaign the media never asked questions of Obama in the manner that they did
other candidates, he naturally assumed, quite correctly, that they were so
invested in his symbolism that they would never critique him when he was
president. And partly, as a man of the Left Obama believed that the means
really are justified by the ends — and so the reactionary Bush should be judged
by standards that can hardly apply to the egalitarian progressive Obama.
Will the abject hypocrisy continue for another four
years? There is no reason to believe that Obama has become more circumspect and
now understands that he cannot meet the very expectations he demanded of
others, or that the media will try to salvage their tattered reputation by
applying the same scrutiny to Obama that they did to others. But who knows — in
2016 we may see a young charismatic senator like the Barack Obama of 2007 who
creates a messianic persona through hypnotizing the media, insisting that the incumbent
is an utter failure, and promising “hope and change.”
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