THE CONSERVATIVE REVIEW – June 29, 2010

Another Failed President?
By: Pat Buchanan

In Year One of the Reagan Revolution, in which he was a
shining star, Budget Director David Stockman told reporter
William Greider: “Kemp-Roth (President Reagan’s 1981 tax
cut) was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.
…It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down.’ So the supply-
side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that
was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’
theory.”

An astounding admission. The president’s principal salesman
of tax cuts was confessing that the altarpiece of the
Reagan policy was a ruse — to cut tax rates of the richest
Americans.

Stockman had dealt a pair of aces to the president’s
enemies.

Yet, a betrayed Reagan did not fire Stockman. Instead, he
walked him down “to the White House woodshed.”

Few suggested that this showed that Reagan was weak.

For Reagan had already survived an assassination attempt,
summarily fired an entire union of air traffic controllers
and rammed through a hostile House led by Tip O’Neill the
largest tax cut in history.

Yet, most everyone here said Barack Obama had no choice
but to fire Gen. McChrystal, or reinforce the impression
he is weak and indecisive.

The Wall Street Journal/NBC Poll out today confirms that
the nation that entertained such high hopes for Barack
Obama has lost confidence in his capacity to lead.

Sixty-two percent of all Americans believe the nation is
headed in the wrong direction. For the first time, more
Americans disapprove of Obama than approve. Fifty-seven
percent would prefer someone else, rather than the member
of Congress they now have.

Though green shoots have appeared in the economy, Americans
no longer believe it. Only one-third thinks things will
get better before they get worse again. Independents are
deserting Obama. One in six Democrats now disapproves of
the job he is doing.

Americans have been through periods of malaise before. But
where FDR raised spirits after Herbert Hoover, and Reagan
did after Jimmy Carter, the optimism about an Age of Obama
is vanishing like the morning mist.

Disenchantment appears pervasive, and the causes apparent:

The Obama economic program — $800 billion in stimulus
money piled on top of the Federal Reserve’s doubling the
money supply, giving us two straight deficits of 10 percent
of gross domestic product — has failed to ignite a robust
recovery. Unemployment still hovers just below 10 percent.

The two-month-old oil spill, where BP’s malfeasance was
matched by government incompetence in preventing it from
destroying the gulf ecology and economy from Louisiana to
Florida, has cast a pall over America’s spirit as wide
and deep as the oil slick itself.

The war in Afghanistan is not going well, casualties are
running at a nine-year high, and the country no longer
wants to fight it, but to get out and come home.

Obama’s “reset” in foreign policy seems to have yielded no
more fruit than George W. Bush’s crusade to “end tyranny
in our world.”

Three months after Iraqi elections, there is no government
in Baghdad. The August deadline for withdrawal of all U.S.
combat troops will likely be missed. U.S. relations with
Israel have rarely been worse.

Turkey, black-balled by the European Union, a friend and
ally of 60 years, is thickening ties to Tehran and Damascus
and emerging as first Muslim state of the Middle East and
principal patron of the Palestinian cause.

The Russians are pushing Kyrgyzstan to force the United
States out of Manas air base, a critical link in the
resupply chain to Afghanistan.

Brazil is bitter that America trashed the deal it helped
to negotiate to transfer half of Iran’s nuclear fuel out
of the country.

For the first time since the late 19th century, the United
States is about to be surpassed as the world’s first
manufacturing power — by China, which in Mao’s time was
still trying to make steel in backyard furnaces.

The British, rejecting Obama’s call to continue stimulating
the world’s largest economies until sustainable growth is
achieved, have decided to follow Greece and Spain into
austerity and retrenchment.

Fearing debt defaults, European nations are slashing govern-
ment payrolls and pensions, just as California, New York
and other states are being forced to do to meet the
constitutional requirement to balance their budgets.

America is facing a crisis of confidence in government,
with the nation unable to win its wars, balance its
budgets, control its borders, stop the bleeding of its
manufacturing base or plug a hole in the ocean floor.

Should the sovereign debt bombs start going off, as they
have lately threatened to do in Greece, bringing on another
financial crisis to dwarf the one we have lately gone
through, the crisis of democratic governments will become
a crisis of democracy itself.

Perceived to have failed the country, the Bush Republicans
were summarily dismissed in 2006 and 2008. Obama’s
Democrats go to the wall in November. Republicans will
inherit the windfall. Yet, few harbor great hopes that the
GOP has the cure for what ails America.

Perhaps the answers lie beyond the parameters of our
present politics.

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