The real Obama
A
centrist? No. A transformer
By
Charles Krauthammer Read Spanish Version
From
the Washington Post
Barack
Obama has garnered praise from center to right — and has highly
irritated the left — with the centrism of his major appointments.
Because Obama’s own beliefs remain largely opaque, his appointments
have led to the conclusion that he intends to govern from the center.
Obama
the centrist? I’m not so sure. Take the foreign policy team: Hillary
Clinton, James Jones and Bush holdover Robert Gates. As centrist as
you can get. But the choice was far less ideological than practical.
Obama has no intention of being a foreign policy president. Unlike,
say, Nixon or Reagan, he does not have aspirations abroad. He simply
wants quiet on his eastern and western fronts so that he can proceed
with what he really cares about — his domestic agenda.
Similarly
his senior economic team, the brilliant trio of Tim Geithner, Larry
Summers and Paul Volcker: centrist, experienced and mainstream. But
their principal task is to stabilize the financial system, a highly
pragmatic task in which Obama has no particular ideological stake.
A
functioning financial system is a necessary condition for a
successful Obama presidency. As in foreign policy, Obama wants
experts and veterans to manage and pacify universes in which he has
little experience and less personal commitment. Their job is to keep
credit flowing and the world at bay so that Obama can address his
real ambition: to effect a domestic transformation as grand and
ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt’s.
As
Obama revealingly said just last week, "This painful crisis also
provides us with an opportunity to transform our economy to improve
the lives of ordinary people." Transformation is his mission.
Crisis provides the opportunity. The election provides him the power.
The
deepening recession creates the opportunity for federal intervention
and government experimentation on a scale unseen since the New Deal.
A Republican administration has already done the ideological
groundwork with its unprecedented intervention, culminating in the
forced partial nationalization of nine of the largest banks, the kind
of stuff that happens in Peronist Argentina with a gun on the table.
Additionally, Henry Paulson’s invention of the number $700 billion
forever altered our perception of imaginable government expenditure.
Twenty billion more for Citigroup? Lunch money.
Moreover,
no one in Congress even pretends that spending should be pay as you
go (i.e., new expenditures balanced by higher taxes or lower
spending), as the Democrats disingenuously promised when they took
over Congress last year. Even some conservative economists are urging
stimulus (although structured far differently from Democratic
proposals). And public opinion, demanding action, will buy any
stimulus package of any size. The result: undreamed-of amounts of
money at Obama’s disposal.
To
meet the opportunity, Obama has the political power that comes from a
smashing electoral victory. It not only gave him a personal mandate.
It increased Democratic majorities in both houses, thereby
demonstrating coattails and giving him clout. And by running on
nothing much more than change and (often contradictory) hopes, he has
given himself enormous freedom of action.
Obama
was quite serious when he said he was going to change the world. And
now he has a national crisis, a personal mandate, a pliant Congress,
a desperate public — and, at his disposal, the greatest pot of money
in galactic history. (I include here the extrasolar planets.)
It
begins with a near $1 trillion stimulus package. This is where Obama
will show himself ideologically. It is his one great opportunity to
plant the seeds for everything he cares about: a new green economy,
universal health care, a labor resurgence, government as benevolent
private-sector "partner." The first hint came yesterday,
when Obama claimed, "If we want to overcome our economic
challenges, we must also finally address our health care challenge"
— the perfect non sequitur that gives carte blanche to whatever
health-care reform and spending the Obama team dreams up. It is the
community organizer’s ultimate dream.
Ironically,
when the economy tanked in mid-September, it was assumed that both
presidential candidates could simply forget about their domestic
agendas because with $700 billion drained by financial system
rescues, not a penny would be left to spend on anything else.
On
the contrary. With the country clamoring for action and with all
psychological barriers to government intervention obliterated (by the
conservative party, no less), the stage is set for a young,
ambitious, supremely confident president — who sees himself as a
world-historical figure before even having been sworn in — to begin
a restructuring of the American economy and the forging of a new
relationship between government and people.
Don’t
be fooled by Bob Gates staying on. Obama didn’t get elected to manage
Afghanistan. He intends to transform America. And he has the money,
the mandate and the moxie to go for it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/11/AR2008121102951.html?sub=new
