By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, February 6, 2009; A17
"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."
-- President Obama, Feb. 4.
Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural
address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear."
Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.
And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence
peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning
lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen
current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury
secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions
in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword
according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than
one tax delinquent.
The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more
than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real
scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes is one
thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal
dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.
He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not a
lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don't get paid this kind of money
to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for
picking up the phone and peddling influence.
At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been
working for years as a humble international civil servant earning
non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a
year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal's
private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he'd come to
Washington to upend.
And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the
appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He
inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the
House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just
bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.
It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways
and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade
war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new
construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and,
quite logically, no plans for new construction.
It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal
rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are
suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate
job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions
that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office
says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than
the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that
Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.
Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where
the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give
way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what
made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now"
includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish)
insurance.
The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics
influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus
bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical
and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to
repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings.
California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to
change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for
"ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus
depreciation" incentive.
After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that
at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation
would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The
hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical
transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all
presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.
I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half
weeks.
Certainly the political wrangling of the past month has dispelled optimism that President Obama can change the contentious nature of American politics. Both Democrats and Republicans have spurned Obama’s leadership. The free-for-all over the stimulus bill portrayed Congress in the worst possible light — no surprise there — and led Americans to view not only the process but the bill with utter skepticism. Delivering a 1000-page bill to our legislators just two hours before the signing deadline (and then going on a long-weekend holiday before signing it) was outrageous. The mortgage relief plan hasn’t been received much better. Most Americans (ninety two percent, by some estimates) pay their mortgages on time; they’re darned if they know why they should bail out their neighbors. So let the right percent fail, get out, and let the people who can buy and pay move in!