“I want to see what kind of language we can … work on this issue,” [Obama] added. “I think it would be a mistake, though, at a time when worldwide trade is declining for us to start sending a message that somehow we’re just looking after ourselves and not concerned with world trade.”
Do you disagree with your President? If so, why?
I’m actually quite interested to know why you—someone who has taken great pains to convince me that Third World corporate factories are wrong—would be in favor of protectionism.
And calling me “Chicagoan” or “Friedman” isn’t enough. I’m not trying to goad you into an argument; just trying to figure if you’ve written me off just because I sound like Friedman and von Mises. (Because we both know how unfair that would be.)
My uncle writes about the outcry over Obama’s centrist appointments: “If half those who voted for Obama had taken time to read Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky’s dreary little treatise on taking power from the establishment, and Obama’s primary handbook for political success, they might have been less surprised by the current turn of events.”
After a series of old-school inside-the-beltway cabinet picks, Obama finally delivers on his promise for “change we can believe in.”
There’s always a media pecking order at a presidential news conference, but on Monday, aides to President-elect Barack Obama introduced a new twist to the seating chart.
Reporters were assigned seats in one of two sections, one to Obama’s left, designated the “Cubs” section, and the other to his right, designated ” White Sox.” Team assignments appeared to be arbitrary.
Obama is a die-hard White Sox fan, but when it came time to take questions, he didn’t favor reporters on that side. Instead, his seemingly random selections were pre-determined by aides.
This has to be one of the neatest electoral maps I’ve ever seen. The dot density overlay shows cotton production in 1860, which has a remarkable correlation to the counties that went for Obama this election.
Although I’m no expert on either FDR or Clinton, you’re right—I did have particular events in mind when I suggested that Obama might fall in line with their kind of politics.
When FDR first campaigned against Herbert Hoover in 1932, his campaign pledges looked something like this:
“immediate and drastic reductions of all public expenditures,” “abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating bureaus and eliminating extravagances, reductions in bureaucracy,” and … a “sound currency to be maintained at all hazards.” (from Wikipedia)
Yet, as we all know, FDR ended up doing the exact opposite. He increased public expenditures (including $3.3 million spent through the Public Works Administration) and added more offices and bureaucracies to government (including the invention of Social Security). Obviously, I’m not a big fan of what he did, but that’s beside the point: his campaign simply didn’t match his actions.
Moving on to Clinton: I don’t know if you can leave aside his lying (particularly when you said you find him a “likable and reasonable guy” – can you really trust those impressions when you know they’re of a pathological liar?), but that wasn’t what I had in mind when I wrote my initial post.
That event (and unfortunately, I don’t have specific dates or footnotes) was mid-to-late during his second term, when Clinton shuffled some bombs into Iraq for a few days to give the press something to talk about other than his sexual misconduct.
Both presidents were primarily interested in keeping hold of their power (especially Clinton, since in America, popularity is power). They could say one thing, but what they did was something far different. And it strikes me that Obama has so far (according the voting record and conduct that Freddoso lays out) done much the same. Let’s talk about emotional things like hope and change, but God forbid that we should actually try and tackle the hard issues. Let’s leave things the way they are. Yeah, that’s hope and change alright. Give me four years of that.
I don’t know how many other people outside Chicago know these things, but I would be willing to bet that if all Obama voters knew his close ties to the Daley machine and his relationship with Tony Rezko they would not be very troubled. That may be more bothersome in its way than mass ignorance, but I think Mr. Hitchens here mistakes their lack of response to Obama’s cues for some cynical acknowledgement of the less glamorous details of the man’s career. It was, I suspect, silence kept out of deference to the President-elect combined with amazement that he had, in fact, won. Mr. Hitchens is falling into the trap of believing the hype about Obama, but interpreting it in a negative way. I suppose I might be inclined to the same interpretation, if I believed it, but I don’t. It is important to bear in mind that Obama’s election may be historic in certain respects, but it is not nearly as significant as his foes fear and his friends hope. As I have been stressing all year, the thing that disturbs me about Obama is not that he represents some dramatic change in American politics, but that he represents depressing, miserable continuity.
How many of my critics have actually read David Freddoso’s measured, forensic ‘The Case Against Barack Obama’? Or, come to that, how many of them have opened David Mendell’s earlier but still telling critical study ‘Obama – from Promise to Power’? Or how many have read the Chicago Tribune’s interesting and revealing pursuit of the vague and partial stories in Mr Obama’s own interesting and engaging but not wholly candid memoir, ‘Dreams from my Father’? Anyone can do this. I do, admittedly, have the slight advantage of having spent some fascinating days in Chicago and elsewhere in Illinois, speaking to individuals (some of whom wished to remain anonymous) who had encountered Mr Obama early in his political career. But I didn’t keep it to myself. The results of this were published in the Mail on Sunday in February and can still be found on the web.
So, for instance, my views have nothing to do with Sarah Palin, and her (deserved) evisceration by Katie Couric. It’s good to see that an inadequate and ill-prepared candidate can still get herself disembowelled by the US media, but shouldn’t people ask themselves if they’ve ever seen Mr Obama subjected to this sort of treatment? Most Americans don’t even known that Barack Obama smokes cigarettes, so how can they be expected to know what his grasp of foreign policy is like? How would he cope with foreign potentates in the hurly burly of real life? See Freddoso again, for some hints.
