Pres. Obama's Legacy

1. It's too soon to prove a legacy Not long ago a Chinese historian was asked what he thought of the American Revolution. He said, “It's too soon to tell.” My opponent has the burden to prove what future generations will think about President Obama. This depends upon not only what President Obama has done in office, but how the future unfolds and how the people change. My opponent has set himself an impossible task of proving what President Obama's legacy will be. The best we can do is say what Obama has put in motion. What he's done promises a poor future, but the twists and turns of history might redeem him. I contend it's unlikely. 2. Obama envisions an ideological president with bureaucrats ruling President Obama has met his promise of transforming the country. The point of owning private property is to control what is done with it. Traditional socialists seize private property so the government could control it. Obama has discovered that effective control is better achieved through massive regulation. The advantage is that when plans fail, the government can blame the nominal owners for the failure. At the same time people grow more and more dependent on government so the elite remains in power. President Obama views the job of the president as a political and ideological, not executive and managerial role. He remains aloof from the running of the government. When government shutdowns were threatened under Carter, Reagan, and Clinton, those presidents directly negotiated with opponents to strike a compromise. President Clinton met daily with House Speaker Gingrich and in prolonged negotiations struck a deal that led to a balanced budget and welfare reform. [1. http://ideas.time.com...] Obama gives speeches telling Republicans he will never negotiate. Senate Majority Leader Reid has the job of trying to negotiate a compromise. President Obama made about 130 campaign-style speeches claiming the virtues of Obamacare, but never negotiated with Republicans or provided leadership in crafting the legislation. President Obama passed his landmark Obamacare legislation without negotiating with Republicans. All of the work was done by Reid and Pelosi, and the legislation was imposed without a single Republican vote. This is a strong contrast to, for example, President Bush getting the prescription drug extension to Medicare passed with bipartisan support. Many of President Reagan's accomplishments came under Democrat-controlled Congresses. All past entitlements were passed with bipartisan support Bureaucrats control health care. Obama has moved decision making out of the legislature and into the hands of faceless bureaucrats who are never held accountable. Obamacare is the obvious example, with health care decisions made by a federal bureaucracy. Even leftist Democrat Howard Dean, also a physician, has figured it out and complained. [2. http://thehill.com...] There are private insurers, physicians, and hospitals, but what they are allowed to do is determined by government rule makers. This is effective, because while government employees are rarely punished for failure to obey rules, but “private” individuals can be put in jail for not obeying. Bureaucrats control banking. Dodd-Frank has put banking and finance under government control. Who gets a loan is now subject to Federal rules. A major cause of the economy failing to recover is that local banks cannot make loans to small businesses. It's illegal for banks to make a risky loan, but the specifics are undefined. The legislation authorizes bureaucratic rule, but they still fear being overruled by the legislature. [3. http://finance.fortune.cnn.com...] The long term vision is that congress will step out of the picture. Bureaucrats control of housing.The Americans with Disabilities Act controls many of the details of building construction on the sole initiative of bureaucrats. The bureaucrats decided door knobs are banned, so door knobs are banned. They ruled that all public swimming pools, including hotels, must have permanent elevators. [4. http://www.weeklystandard.com...] Government policies have greatly the private mortgage market. That allows the government agencies making mortgages to specify the construction details of houses they deem qualified for mortgages. Bureaucrats control energy.The Environmental Protection Agency has total authority over energy. The courts have upheld the authority of the EPA to control carbon dioxide. If they want to require you to get a permit to exhale, theoretically they have the power to do so. Under Obama, the EPA required consumers to pay, through utility rates, $7 trillion over 90 years to prevent 0.00375 degree of global warming. [5. http://wattsupwiththat.com...] That was done without voted taxes or legislation. The EPA has recently moved to ban new coal-fired power plants, while admitting that there will be no observable effect on global warming. [6. http://www.startribune.com...] The ban will cost up to 17,000 jobs, most before Obama leaves office. [7. http://dailycaller.com...] The point is that it was done by bureaucratic power, not Congress. The bureaucracies have far more power than they have exercised. The EPA under Obama is afraid the Democrats from oil states will join Republicans to oppose moves to ban fossil fuels. In health care and banking, the bureaucracies are just inefficient in writing the tens of thousands of pages of new regulations they are empowered to enact. they also worry that if they go too far too fast, even Democrats will rebel at the loss of legislative power. The bureaucracies will catch up and rule. Japan is a model for how this works. Japan has elected a new prime minister every year for many years, but each has proved powerless to substantially move the bureaucracy to new policies. Rule is really in the hands of elite bureaucrats. [8. http://countrystudies.us...] The Japanese economy has been depressed for two decades. In California, Governor Jerry Brown banned discretionary travel, but large parts of the bureaucracy decided that obeying was not a good idea, so they didn't. [9. http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com...] That's a sign of things to come for the United States. Obama's vision is perpetual campaigning Politicians are known for making unrealistic campaign promises, so it wouldn't be unusual if Obama couldn't deliver on all his promises. But what Obama has done is to make lying a tool of his presidency. That's consistent with his vision of role of the president as an ideological leader and perpetual campaigner. Ideologues like Obama believe that the end of transforming government justifies lies as a means of accomplishing that goal. Here are a few examples. In speeches promoting Obamacare, Obama repeated hundreds of times, "If you like the health care you now have, you will get to keep it." He continues to repeated that. A central feature of Obamacare from the beginning was to impose requirements on what health insurance policies were required to cover, so here was little chance that a policy and price would remain the same. The earliest estimates by the Congressional Budget Office was that three million people would lose coverage by employers dropping the benefit. So far, 13 million people have been dropped, and “30% of employers will definitely or probably stop offering [employer-sponsored insurance] in the years after 2014” [10. http://www.forbes.com...]. Obama was and is lying. Obama's promised a new era of transparency and bipartisanship. He promised open debates on C-SPAN. He actually has operated with unprecedented opacity and partisanship. From May through October in 2009, Republicans asked every month for President Obama to meet with them to work out a compromise on health care, and Obama always refused. The President finally arranged exactly one press event meeting with Congressional Republicans. The Republicans handed the President a copy of the Republican proposals on health care. The President had repeatedly stated that there were no Republican proposals. The legislation was subsequently passed without a single Republican vote, and with an array of secret deals with drug manufacturers [11. http://washingtonexaminer.com...] and individual Democrat Senators [12. http://www.politico.com...]. Obama didn't change his mind about transparency and bipartisanship. He relied upon partisanship and secrecy virtually from the day he took office. He never tried transparency and bipartisanship. Obama said that the Benghazi attack was a result of protests over a video despite it being well-established by the CIA days before that there was no protest. [13. http://cnsnews.com...] It's not plausible Obama was unaware of the truth. Obama lied about the history of national security practices and drone strikes. [14. http://www.bloomberg.com...] Partisanship, secrecy, and lying are consistent with a vision of government in which the President is perpetually in campaign mode. Campaigns don't disclose their tactics, make secret deals for support, don't talk to opponents, and rationalize lying in the name of the greater good of winning. With the president preoccupied, governing is left to bureaucrats. That's Obama's legacy.