"Right on, right on, right on..."
Posted on 07/17/2010 11:32:00 AM PDT by Brices Crossroads
While I read Charles Krauthammer from time to time, I am not a big fan of his. In reading his column entitled "Obama's Next Act" yesterday, he pronounces Reaganism as good as dead, a victim of the first eighteen months of the Obama Administration. I rather think Krauthammer lacks standing to comment on "Reaganism" (whatever he means by that term) since he worked in Jimmy Carter's White House and tried twice to defeat Ronald Reagan both in 1980 and 1984. He was a speechwriter for Walter Mondale and I often wondered if he penned the immortal line (or was it the mortal line), "President Reagan will raise your taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did."
I have heard Krauthammer on CSPAN and elsewhere opine that Obama is among the most intelligent men ever to be President. I suspect that he held Reagan's intelligence in somewhat less regard when the Gipper was running for President and while he was governing. Oh, Krauthammer did coin the term "Reagan Doctrine" and he came to favor the muscular foreign policy which Reagan pursued with remarkable (and virtually bloodless) success. This does not, however, entitle Krauthammer's views on domestic policy to any great weight, given his antagonism to "Reaganism" in the past.
Now, to his column. He begins by pronouncing ObamaCare both "historic" and "irrevocable", a definitive and everlasting change to one sixth of the American economy. Not only does he ignore the blatant unconstitutionality of the individual mandate requiring every citizen to purchase a private product (which is being challenged in the courts at this very moment), he completely ignores the mechanisms through which this program can be immediately defunded and neutered in 2011 when the GOP takes back the Congress. In 2013, the GOP will almost certainly have more than 60 senate seats and a filibuster will not be able to stop the outright repeal. This monstrosity has more than a few problems. But Krauthammer pronounces it final, res judicata, a fait accompli. It reminded me that Krauthammer was carrying water for ObamaCare in an August 21, 2009 column in the Washington Post when, in response to Sarah Palin's "Death Panel" torpedo aimed at the rationing schemes in the very heart of ObamaCare, Krauthammer told her to sit down and shut up:
"We might start by asking Sarah Palin to leave the room. I've got nothing against her. She's a remarkable political talent. But there are no "death panels" in the Democratic health-care bills, and to say that there are is to debase the debate."
Palin has subsequently been proven right (Does the recess appointment of Donald Berwick to the CMS leave any doubt?) and Krauthammer has been proven wrong, but I have heard no apology from him. He is just as wrong about the permanency of ObamaCare and the end of Reaganism.
Krauthammer goes on to pronounce the Financial Regulatory bill as a now permanent fixture that is unrepealable. Again, the "brilliant" Krauthammer ignores not only the constitutional problems with such a bill, but the political ones associated with them. For example, among other things, the Bill purports to delegate the authority to the Secretary of the Treasury to bail out any financial institutions at his discretion without the necessity to go back to Congress to appropriate the funds. This is a blatant unconstitutional delegation of Article I legislative authority to the Executive, which is certain to be challenged and likely to be stricken by the Courts. As the quid pro quo for the massive regulation of the financial industry will imperil not just the constitutionality of the rest of the bill but its political viability as well, that is: Since the financial industry will not be able to access bailout funds (the carrot) without going back to Congress, it will oppose the regulatory burdens (the stick) that go along with it. The Regulatory Bill thus has both constitutional and political infirmities which threaten its long term viability. It should be easy to repeal in 2013.
Finally, Krauthammer sees the $1 trillion dollar stimulus as a "structural alteration of the U.S. Budget", whatever that means. Congress can decline to appropriate the funds, and a new GOP President can impound (that is, refuse to spend) whatever cannot be repealed outright.
Krauthammer really demonstrates his ignorance (and his Mondale/Obama domestic ideology) with the following sentence:
"Just as President Ronald Reagan cut taxes to starve the federal government and prevent massive growth in spending, Obama's wild spending -- and quarantining health-care costs from providing possible relief -- will necessitate huge tax increases."
Wrong, Charles. Reagan's tax cuts INCREASED revenue to the federal government. A lot. The problem was not a paucity of revenue in the federal treasury but a Congress too willing and eager to spend it all, and then some. I am surprised you don't know such basic economics. But, then you did work for Walter Mondale who as the Gipper once observed "never met a tax he didn't like... or hike." I am not surprised that, as a devotee of "Coach Tax Hike" which is what we Reaganites (the real kind...not the ersatz, freshly minted versions) used to call your old boss, your first recourse has been, and will always be, tax increases.
The solution is not a tax increase. It is tax cuts, massive, permanent tax cuts. It is not a return to pre-Obama Care. It is a massive pushback of government involvement in the healthcare market. This involves a further privatization of the health care system, especially minimization and eventual elimination of government distortions in the marketplace which drive up health care costs, chiefly the third party payer problem. And it is massive spending cuts and defunding of all Obama's handiwork. It wasn't tax hikes in 1980. It is not tax hikes in 2012. Sorry, Charlie.
In a word, Krauthammer's gloomy column should demoralize no one. Amazingly, he sees the massive GOP gains in the House and the Senate as a silver lining for Obama that will help him in much the same way the GOP takeover in 1994 helped Clinton. The problem with that analogy is that Clinton's overreach with HillaryCare and overspending failed in 1993-4, so the economy recovered enough for him to win. Clinton did not win BECAUSE of the GOP Congress. He was aided by the worst GOP candidate in a long line of bad ones, the ancient Bob Dole and further aided by the Perot candidacy which siphoned off 10% of the vote. Obama will have to face Sarah Palin, the lady whom Krauthammer told to "leave the room" for "debasing" the health care debate. 2012 will not be analogous to 1996, but much closer to 1980. If Sarah Palin looks like Bob Dole to you, Charles, you really need to have your contacts cleaned.
Krauthammer closes his column with another obtuse and insulting comparison of Obama to Reagan:
"Obama is down, but it's very early in the play. Like Reagan, he came here to do things. And he's done much in his first 500 days. What he has left to do he knows must await his next 500 days -- those that come after reelection.
The real prize is 2012. Obama sees far, farther than even his own partisans. Republicans underestimate him at their peril."
Krauthammer, a statist at heart, sees Obama's "accomplishments" as a political positive, even though they are toxic and wildly unpopular: "He got something done", even though it is the consensus of the American people that what he did was bad for the country and all its citizens. Reagan too accomplished things in his first term, notably the tax cuts of 1981 which were very popular and which had reinvigorated the severely ailing economy, which Reagan inherited, by late 1983.
Don't underestimate Obama. (Seriously, is this possible?) And don't overestimate Krauthammer. He was wrong about the death panels, wrong about Reagan, wrong about tax cuts, wrong about Palin and he is dead wrong about Obama. With a record like that, maybe he is the one who should leave the room.
Ping!
Who writes this crap?
Krauthammer voted for, and supported, Obama and now
is back-pedaling for his endless past affection for the sociopathic narcissist Marxist imposter.
Unchanged, Krauthammer now “votes” for Death Panels
and more sociopathy.
The irony is that functioning ObamaCARE would have ended
Krauthammer’s career - if not his life.
Here's the reason Krauthammer is wrong about this.
Clinton had a massive MSM to help him lie his way through and help "spinning" (a term which means "lying" and was invented during Clinton's tenure) to come to its ascendancy.
Of course we still have the MSM, BUT now the NEW MEDIA has caught everyone's attention and they are LISTENING. They are not buying every word the MSM says about the "evil Republicans" anymore and they are not buying the lies about the Tea Party. The more they hear about the Tea Party the more they are liking it!
Obama's doomed.
"Right on, right on, right on..."
Krauhammer is not a conservative. He is an elitist, first and foremost. He is repelled by Palin becasue she is not an elitist but a populist. He is attracted to Obama because Obama IS an elitist.
The fact that he appraises Obama as “highly intelligent” makes me question either his honesty or his perceptiveness. In either case, it means I take every Krauthammer column with a large grain of salt. I don’t care how many Harvard degrees he has.
Your grasp of Krauthammer is spot on.
Excellent analysis all the way around.
“”Obama is down, but it’s very early in the play. Like Reagan, he came here to do things. And he’s done much in his first 500 days. What he has left to do he knows must await his next 500 days — those that come after reelection.”
Holy moly. The difference is that Reagan improved the country. Obama is making it worse. That bit is barf inducing.
Link beats non-link every time. Wrote Krauthammer on Friday, October 24, 2008:
Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over before it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years.I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe -- neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) -- yelling "Stop!" I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I'd rather lose an election than lose my bearings.
What's to disagree with in the above?
i don’t know if you’re entirely nuts, but your post is entirely nutty. if you do not follow krauthammer regularly, you cannot know what he thinks or says. and you are just about entirely mistaken.
your logic is 16 ounces shy of a pint, too — by your reasoning, reagan’s having been a democrat and a union official would confirm that he was not a conservative.
thanks for playing.
A stinging analysis. I like Krauthammer. But I cannot find any flaw in your piece. It hurts... as truth always does.
Thanks. Today is the 30th anniversary of Reagan accepting the GOP nomination in Detroit. When I see an old Mondale hand like Krauthammer presuming to define “Reaganism” and pronouncing it dead based upon a series of fallacies, it just makes me mad.
Krauthammer told Sarah to leave the room, then proceeded to attack the very death panels she pointed out. The man is nothing more than a beltway hack with globalist tendencies.
I held a hanky to my nose.
I wish I could share your optimism. The GOP hasn't had anything close to 60 senators in something like 90 years. I'd have to look it up. I'll even go back to the days of 48 states to see if the GOP ever had even 58. I rather doubt it.
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