Obama’s flailing attempt to deliver a bill of massive pork and payouts to democratic interest groups under the guise of “stimulus” has exposed his entire election campaign as a massive fraud.  This is not unusual, as most campaigns are, but never before has such a widely believed fairy tale come unraveled so quickly.

Charles Krauthammer takes on the false promise of hope over fear:

And yet more damaging to Obama’s image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama’s name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

It’s not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It’s not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It’s the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus — and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress’ own budget office says won’t be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Peter Robinson describes this as Obama’s “naked moment:”

President Bush’s moment of nakedness took place more than four years and eight months into his administration. In office less than three weeks, President Obama has already provided a naked moment of his own.

The episode, of course, concerns the legislation now referred to only laughingly as an “economic stimulus.” Drafted by the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives, the bill represents a sham and an outrage. Of the more than $800 billion in spending that the legislation authorizes, less than $100 billion would go to highways, the electricity grid or destinations that might–might–produce genuine economic growth. The rest? Transfer payments to interest groups. More than half the “emergency” spending would not even take place until fiscal year 2010.

Making its way through the House last week, the legislation proved so bad that it galvanized the most woe-begotten and demoralized group in the capital, the Republicans. Every last Republican in the House voted against it.

…As Washington observers recognize, this entire debacle became predictable the moment the then president-elect decided to permit the House leadership to draft his stimulus legislation. While Obama was behaving like a professor, holding seminars with economists Lawrence Summers, Paul Volcker and Christina Romer, Democrats in the House were behaving like politicians, using Obama’s call for a stimulus as cover for forking over tens of billions of dollars to Democratic interest groups.

You didn’t even have to be a practicing politician to see what would happen. Even an intellectual like Obama himself ought to have been able to figure it out–any intellectual, that is, who had bothered to read the work of Nobel laureate James Buchanan. As Buchanan long ago noticed, economists who support Keynesian spending programs in theory tend to overlook the self-interested behavior of the politicians who must spend all the money in practice.

Permit House Democrats to draft his stimulus legislation? What could Obama have been thinking? Only one answer fits: Obama wasn’t thinking.

 Print This Post