By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Republicans and Democrats are still name-calling in their
arguments over the government shutdown, out-of-control federal spending and the
implementation of Obamacare.
Yet if both sides would agree to just follow the earlier
advice of President Obama, tempers might cool and a deal could still be
reached. And had President Obama himself just listened to earlier guidance from
Barack Obama, his opponents might have had no cause for either a government
shutdown or another debt-ceiling crisis.
In 2006, Obama rightly called for an end to the Bush
administration's intemperate deficit spending that had resulted in an annual
deficit of $250 billion that year. Accordingly, Sen. Obama voted to shut down
the government rather than automatically to extend the debt ceiling. He
explained his resistance this way: "Washington is shifting the burden of
bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has
a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better."
Obama rightly added an additional warning in forcing an
impasse over further borrowing: "Every dollar we pay in interest is a
dollar that is not going to investment in America's priorities. Instead,
interest payments are a significant tax on all Americans -- a debt tax that
Washington doesn't want to talk about."
The next year, Obama voted "present" rather
than to approve another $160 billion in annual borrowing that would add to the
debt. Then-Sen. Joe Biden, Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi agreed with
Obama's worries over serial deficits, at various times voting no to President
Bush's requests to raise the debt ceiling to allow more annual deficits.
Unfortunately, the calls of Obama, Biden and Reid for
fiscal restraint were largely ignored by now suddenly deficit-obsessed
Republicans -- and the 2006 shutdown effort failed 52-48 on a close but
strictly partisan Senate vote. While President Obama has repudiated his earlier
"political vote" against raising the debt ceiling, then-Sen. Obama
was mostly right in trying to shock the Bush administration into curtailing
unwise expenditures.
In 2008, candidate Obama returned to the issue of
profligate spending again. He went so far as to call the continued Bush
deficits "irresponsible" and "unpatriotic," even though the
deficits at the time had been far smaller than they are at present, and the
national debt was trillions less than it is now.
Nonetheless, Obama was right again. Even in the period
before the present five consecutive $1 trillion deficits, the U.S. government
was already courting danger.
Yet this year, the Obama administration's smallest
deficit in six years will still exceed $600 billion -- even with the sharp
sequestration cuts, even with the supposedly recovering economy, even with the
curtailment of two wars abroad, and even with taxes on the top income brackets
returning to the Clinton-era rates.
Candidate Obama once had a vision of a new national
health coverage that would lower premiums. His dream coverage was not supposed
to affect existing health plans. It was promised to make American businesses
more competitive. New universal insurance would even decrease deficits.
Had President Obama followed his own guidelines, perhaps
we would not be fighting over the Affordable Care Act -- or the employer
mandate would not have been postponed, or there would not have been an online
bureaucratic maze.
Well aside from its botched online inauguration,
Obamacare is already raising existing premiums and requiring new taxes. It is
forecasted to spike the debt. The rules of existing health plans are changing.
Businesses are discouraged from hiring permanent employees. Obama in 2008 might
have agreed with all the present criticisms of his own, or any rival, universal
health-care plan.
For most of 2008, candidate Obama also called for a
kinder and gentler Washington politics. In early 2011, Obama admirably reminded
Americans to conduct themselves more civilly during political debate and
disagreement: "Only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us
face up to our challenges as a nation."
Unfortunately, during the present shutdown, the president
in a single press conference called his Republican adversaries names of the
sort that he earlier had warned the nation about. Through a series of
metaphors, similes and allusions, Obama reduced his opposition to little more
than ransom takers, house burners, defaulters, global economy crashers, nuclear
bomb users, extremists, threateners, extortionists, hostage takers, plant
burners and equipment breakers -- who are apparently also untrustworthy and irresponsible.
Just as the obstructionist Obama was not an arsonist in
2006 and Joe Biden was not a hostage taker, Republicans who now likewise wish
to follow their examples to control the spending of a government even deeper in
debt, and additionally beset with a costly but unproven new entitlement, are
not either.
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