The Last Best Hope by Joe Scarborough

Author:Joe Scarborough [Scarborough, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-46371-5
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana famously said.

Barack Obama would have done well to keep Santayana’s warning close to his heart before trying to scare Americans into supporting his stimulus bill. After all, it was President Bush who had been accused by Democrats like Senator Barack Obama of using fear to sell American voters on the Iraq War.

But President Obama’s dire warnings were no less shrill.

The same Barack Obama who had used his inauguration speech as an opportunity to tell Americans that “we have chosen hope over fear,” two weeks later told the same country that unless Nancy Pelosi’s $800 billion spending bill was passed into law, the U.S. economy would go into a death spiral from which it might never recover.

“A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe,” the new president told Americans on February 4, 2009.

The only grim scenario that seemed to be missing from the Obama White House’s political version of the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows was an aide leaking a top-secret intelligence memo suggesting that failure to pass the stimulus bill would result in Saddam Hussein rising from the dead and finally getting his hands on that yellowcake uranium from Niger.

Throughout the stimulus debate, President Obama emulated his predecessor.

Like Mr. Bush, Barack Obama promised to run the White House as a uniter rather than a divider. But as soon as his Super Bowl party broke up, Mr. Obama began playing to his political bases’ fears rather than the hopes of Middle America.

The Associated Press reported on the new president’s partisan tactics the night of the vote, telling readers that Barack Obama was showing Republicans “a clenched fist on the stimulus bill.”

“He’s resorting to a sharper tone that is at odds with his vow to make Washington less partisan,” noted the AP.

Richard Nixon had always said that Americans vote their fears, and perhaps the disgraced president was right. Barack Obama pushed through the stimulus package using Nixon-style scare tactics while also engaging in harsh partisanship that reduced his political argument down to a crude political justification.

“I won.”

That he had. And even if it was troubling for the president of the United States to call political opponents to the White House only to cut off negotiations with such an arrogant declaration, Mr. Obama had in fact won a sweeping victory just a few months earlier.

Still, the same Republican strategists who feared that a centrist Obama administration would doom their party for years to come took delight in the new president’s sharp leftward shift. And for good reason. By April 2009, the Pew Poll called Barack Obama the most partisan president in modern U.S. history. No president, including Bush, Clinton, Carter, or Nixon, had divided Americans in their first year as had President Obama.

So much for change.

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