After six months of Obama, writes Rex Murphy in the Globe & Mail,
What we can say with confidence . . . is that had he run on (a) transforming the U.S. economy by massive federal government intervention, (b) taking an owner’s stake in the automobile industry, (c) transforming the rules of America’s energy economy, (d) instituting a national health-care system – all of these simultaneously and in the centre of a financial meltdown – Barack Obama wouldn’t merely have lost the election, he wouldn’t have got as many votes as gnarly old Ross Perot did in an election long past.
He fooled us, in other words, hiding behind smooth talk and glowing rhetoric.
Mr. Obama has taken the real crisis of the U.S. (and world) economy and used it as the screen and lever for a massive agenda of transformation, a transformation that calls for expenditures on a scale never before seen in the history of government on this planet.
Bait and switch. His was an
agenda of massive government expansion, or attempted expansion, into everything from the auto industry to health care – all of them sold with cries of urgency and executed with reckless haste. Massive bills were passed before there were even copies of them to read. The U.S. government’s debt is being swollen beyond all previous records.
We cannot imagine that he did not know this agenda.
He knew what he wished to do when he was campaigning, but he was not going to whisper the scale and range of his designs while the campaign was on. It would have scared off people.
And now?
He’s flying high in dazzling hubris. The American economy is not yet fixed. It may get worse. And it is in this parlous and critical context that Mr. Obama has launched history-making expenditures and a reordering of American governance.
Daring if you believe in it, “reckless – to the point of real danger if you do not.” It’s a “trapeze act — the greatest . . . in the history of North American politics.”
Blithe Spirit 