April 2009:
Obama's Game is Accumulation of Power
By Chilton Williamson, Jr.
“What responsibilities does a community organizer have?” Sarah Palin asked during last fall’s presidential campaign. More to the point a few months later, what experience does a community organizer have—what does he know? The country is already getting the answer to this question.
The World Bank has just announced that the international economy is in worse shape than at any time since the Great Depression. In this crisis, the United States has just inaugurated as president the least experienced and most unqualified candidate for the office in its 230-year-old history. Arguably, the new president is also the most ideologically-minded Chief Executive ever to be sent to the White House, and inarguably the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate during the several years he served in that body. The convergence of economic with political fact may be calamitous.
Even from a purely non-ideological standpoint, the Obama administration is off to a rocky start. One might have expected that the gang of old Clinton hands that manages its day-to-day operations would show more basic competence that Rahm Emmanuel and his staff are displaying—but that would be to forget how rough the ride in the Clinton White House often was. After three tries, the President seems at last to have a commerce secretary who can pass congressional muster, while as I write Governor Kathleen Sibelius of Kansas has been nominated, but not yet confirmed, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, following the embarassing withdrawal of Tom Daschle from consideration for the post on account of tax evasion. Meanwhile, financial crisis or no, the Secretary of the Treasury is operating almost without deputies and has yet to reveal the details of his bank rescue plan more than a month after he first announced it, with devastating results for the stock market. If time really is of the essence, as President Obama insisted when the congressional Republicans were dragging their feet on the $787 billion porculus bill, then the delays at Treasury are unforgiveable.
The President has received high marks for his “moderate” choices for state, security, and defense positions, most of which were filled in a timely manner. There is an explanation for this “moderation,” but it is not a comforting one. From Guantanamo to Afghanistan to Pakistan to national security and civil liberties issues to the rendition of terror suspects for torture in foreign prisons, the new administration is following the lead of its predecessor whose policies it reviled throughout the campaign. Here we can see the insights of Bertrand de Jouvenel (as recently discussed in this space) validated once again. Power, as it is handed on from one holder to the next, never diminishes but instead incorporates previous gains, as a step toward acquiring new ones. Under Obama, the unconstitutional security presidency of George W. Bush will be annealed with the unconstitutional socialist presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, suitably updated to the present time and circumstances to racialist socialism.
Winston Churchill once complained of a pudding served to him that it had no theme. The theme of the Obama administration is Power, but the use of that Power is intellectually incoherent. It is Power wielded by a man who, like any community organizer, has no responsibilities (never mind his august oath of office) to anyone or anything except troublemaking and confusion, and no ideas based on knowledge and experience for setting Power to work in a practical and creative way. Mass democracy has always placed a premium on prompt action--as close to instantaneous as possible—and it is on prompt action (except in routine matters like filling cabinet positions) that the new President insists. Unfortunately, this philosophy of immediate action is not a philosophy of prudence. It is the philosophy of a man who, feeling a tightrope beneath his feet and sensing the invisible abyss all round him, is determined to leap one way or the other in the darkness, in preference to remaining balanced on his rope. In such circumstances, the prudential rule of thumb is: “When in doubt, wait and see.” Instead, the administration proposes to spend money like water--at a time when water, like money, is at a premium around the world--in the attempt to revive businesses that have failed through their own recklessness, incompetence, and greed.
Where will these policies end? The federal government is poised to buy up the banking and finance industries, the mortgage industry, the automotive industry, the credit card industry, and the school loan industry. It proposes to establish mandatory health care for all, provided by a system owned, operated, and paid for by the government. It plans to legalize between twenty and thirty million illegal immigrants, and enroll them all as Social Security beneficiaries. It has no plans to scale back American adventures overseas, but instead to escalate the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while holding on indefinitely in Iraq, which is falling again further into chaos in the wake of the national elections last January. The government, remember, produces no wealth itself, and is neither trained nor equipped to produce wealth, whether that wealth is in automobiles, stocks and bonds, or real estate. True, it owns the mints and the printing presses. And that, of course, is what it is counting on to deliver the long-term deficit reduction it is predicting, basing its estimates on wildly unrealistic, even dishonest, assumptions regarding the present and future state of the economy.
In all activities other than governance, power is acquired by earning money and making a fortune. But in government, one acquires power by spending money and dissipating fortunes, all of them originally the property of somebody else. Government stands only to gain power by spending—indeed by wasting--money; it cannot possibly forfeit power in the process. Once governments feared hyperinflation, fearing its capability to bring down a regime through popular unrest. In many smaller and “less developed” countries, they still do.. In nations the size and complexity of the United States, however, government has become so diffused throughout every part of society and the economy that Power itself can never lose, whatever particular party happens to be turned out of office. The Obama administration is counting on this certainty to pull it through its first term. As for a second term, a predictable increase in its share of Power, gained largely by profligate spending and the nationalization of industry in its first four years, could give it the political capital needed to attempt the promised goal of “change” from which it has been deflected by the financial crisis. “Change,” of course, is a code word for remaking the United States in the image of Obama’s vision of a multicultural, socialist, post-modern nation, freed from the constraints of Western culture, tradition, and demography.
The American electorate is guilty of the greatest mistake in its history in electing this man to the presidency, and in such dire times as these. It is sobering to think that only the Republican Party and talk radio appear to stand between the Obama administration and its agenda. It is pretty to think that the GOP could rise to the occasion. If it cannot, perhaps the vacuum that politics, like nature, abhors will be filled by some other, as yet unsuspected, vehicle capable of doing so. ###
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Chilton Williamson, Jr.