The Democratic Party is suffering from a case of terminal smugness. Democrats ignored the warning back in 2006, when the South Park television series ran the episode, “Smug Alert”.
I recently came across a dangerous manifestation of “The Smug” in a recent article written by Ed Kilgore for The New Republic, in which Mr. Kilgore complacently explained “why Obama won’t face a primary challenge”. We are supposed to forget about the “shellacking” taken by Democrats in the mid-term elections. We are to ignore the fact that “mischief-making pundits have seized on a couple of polls to burnish their narrative”. In an act exemplifying what my late father described as “tempting fate”, Mr. Kilgore proceeded to belittle the most serious criticisms of the President, while daring lightening to strike:
Above all, primary challenges to incumbent presidents require a galvanizing issue. It’s very doubtful that the grab-bag of complaints floated by the Democratic electorate — Obama’s legislative strategy during the health care fight; his relative friendliness to Wall Street; gay rights; human rights; his refusal to prosecute Bush administration figures for war crimes or privacy violations — would be enough to spur a serious challenge. And while Afghanistan is an increasing source of Democratic discontent, it’s hardly Vietnam, and Obama has promised to reduce troop levels sharply by 2012.
The timing of Kilgore’s supercilious disregard of a challenge to Obama’s presence atop the 2012 ticket could not have been worse. Thanks to the efforts of the late Mark Pittman, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Bloomberg News has forced the Federal Reserve to disclose the details of its bailouts to those business entities benefiting from the Fed’s eleven emergency lending programs initiated as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. The Fed’s massive document dump on December 1 (occurring right on the heels of the WikiLeaks publication of indiscretions by Obama’s Secretary of State — Hillary Clinton) has refocused criticism of what Kilgore described as the President’s “relative friendliness to Wall Street”. Although Mr. Obama had not yet assumed office in the fall of 2008, after moving into the White House, the new President re-empowered the same cast of characters responsible for the financial crisis and the worst of the bailouts. The architect of Maiden Lane III (which included a $13 billion gift to Goldman Sachs) “Turbo” Tim Geithner, was elevated from president of the New York Fed to Treasury Secretary. Ben Bernanke was re-nominated by Obama (over strenuous bipartisan objection) to serve another term as Federal Reserve Chairman.
In the 2008 Democratic Primary elections, voters chose “change” rather than another Clinton administration. Nevertheless, what the voters got was another Clinton administration. After establishing an economic advisory team consisting of retreads from the Clinton White House, President Obama has persisted in approaching the 2010 economy as though it were the 1996 economy. Obama’s creation of a bipartisan deficit commission has been widely criticized as an inept fallback to the obsolete Bill Clinton playbook. Robert Reich, Labor Secretary for the original Clinton administration recently upbraided President Obama for this wrongheaded approach:
Bill Clinton had a rapidly expanding economy to fall back on, so his appeasement of Republicans didn’t legitimize the Republican world view. Obama doesn’t have that luxury. The American public is still hurting and they want to know why.
The Pragmatic Capitalist criticized President Obama’s habitual reliance on members of the Clinton administration as futile attempts to bring about the same results obtained fifteen years ago. Obama’s appointment of Erskine Bowles (Clinton’s former Chief of Staff) as co-chair of the deficit commission was denounced as a recent example. Bowles’ platitudinous insistence that it’s time for an “adult conversation about the dangers of this debt” drew this blistering retort:
Yes. America has a debt problem. We have a very serious household, municipality and state debt crisis that is in many ways similar to what is going on in Europe. What we absolutely don’t have is a federal government debt problem. After all, a nation with monopoly supply of currency in a floating exchange rate system never really has “debt” unless that debt is denominated in a foreign currency. He says this conversation is the:
“exact same conversation every family, every single business, every single state and every single municipality has been having these last few years.”
There is only one problem with this remark. The federal government is NOTHING like a household, state or municipality. These entities are all revenue constrained. The Federal government has no such constraint. We don’t need China to lend us money. We don’t need to raise taxes to spend money. When the US government wants to spend money it sends men and women into a room where they mark up accounts in a computer system. They don’t call China first or check their tax revenues. They just spend the money.
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Mr. Bowles finished his press conference by saying that the American people get it:“There is one thing I am absolutely sure of. If nothing else, I know deep down the American people get it. They know this is the moment of truth”
The American people most certainly don’t get it. And how can you blame them? When a supposed financial expert like Mr. Bowles can’t grasp these concepts how could we ever expect the average American to understand it? It’s time for an adult conversation to begin before this misguided conversation regarding the future bankruptcy of America sends us towards our own “moment of truth” – a 1937 moment.
I hope it doesn’t take “a 1937 moment” for the Democrats to appreciate the very serious risk that the Palin family could be living in the White House in 2013.