Barack Obama: Desperate and Demagogic

(Commentary Magazine) Obama called the GOP budget “a Trojan horse. Disguised as a deficit reduction plan, it’s really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It’s nothing but thinly veiled social Darwinism.”

“It’s antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who’s willing to work for it– a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class.”

It’s also antithetical to a president who portrayed himself as the antidote to “worn-out dogmas,” “worn-out ideas” and “stale political arguments” – who doesn’t subscribe to an “old, discredited philosophy” and would do away with “childish things”– to employ stale, worn-out, discredited, dogmatic, and uncreative arguments in order to advance his re-election chances.

It turns out it is Obama, not Republicans, whose policies are a “Trojan horse”– in this case, by using the uninsured as an excuse to promote an unconstitutional health care plan that confers upon the federal government unlimited powers. (See this post by Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Gordon Gray.)

It is Obama’s policies that are crushing opportunity and upward mobility in America. And what’s really radical is a president who submits multiple budgets with trillion-dollar deficits and doesn’t appear to give a damn about it.

As for “thinly veiled social Darwinism”: Only a politician who is (a) deeply dishonest; (b) deeply cynical; and/or (c) a product of the hard left could make such a preposterous claim. The most vulnerable members of society will sustain the greatest damage when the fiscal crisis that Obama has done so much to contribute to — and nothing to mitigate — arrives on our shores. For a preview of coming attractions, see Greece and other European nations.

The GOP, to its credit, is presenting a budget that is equal to this moment. It is bold, reasonable, and courageous — everything Obama is not. Unable to defend his record and seemingly unable to articulate a governing vision, the president has become desperate and demagogic, an unusually small man in an unusually small party. And it’s only just begun.