Barack Obama's election raised hopes high that a historic change in political leadership would mark a fresh start and leave the awful Aughts definitively behind. But instead of delivering change we could believe in, Obama rushed to act on the same foul maxim that made the first 10 years of the millennium so dreadful. "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," is how Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, put it.
The Aughts began in crisis when the second plane hit the second tower on Sept. 11, 2001. The Bush administration, loath to let a serious crisis go to waste, managed to parlay the nation's alarm and credulity into an ill-conceived invasion of an entirely unrelated country, wasting over a trillion dollars and many tens of thousands of lives, all while losing control of the fight in Afghanistan and failing utterly to bring down Osama bin Laden....Rather than acting as a prudent guardian of the public good in a time of economic turbulence and hardship, Obama and the Democratic Congress have hurried to check the boxes on their partisan wish list precisely when the nation most needed a restorative break from transformative ambition.
It’s not as though the administration doesn’t understand the vital importance of stability. Consider a recent comment from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. "[B]usinesses want certainty," Geithner said. "They need certainty so they can make long-term plans today. And that’s why it’s so important that Congress gets health care behind us, that we bring financial reform in place so people know what the rules of the game are."
Geithner is right that business needs certainty about the rules of the game in order to make long-term plans. And the government probably did need to step in to the financial sector once it started to implode. But every other marquee initiative introduced by the Obama administration has hampered economic recovery by casting the future of the economy even further into doubt. To have waited for the economy to stabilize would have been to let a serious crisis go to waste.
Now, I have to take issue with Wilkinson's claim that GW Bush "took advantage" of 9/11. That was a unique and shocking event, with Lower Mannhatten laid waste, and thousands dead. An extraordinary event demanded extraordinary measures and many Bush-era initiatives - the Patriot Act, the toppling of the Taliban government, the toppling of Saddam - were worthy ones.
Still the crass Leftist real-politik summed up in Rahm Emmanuel's "don't let a crisis go to waste" could be the coda for an era in which the government has simply lost the plot and is wildly grasping for power to no obvious good effect. And, the modern media environment has created a public discourse where crisis mongering and promises of "transformative change" are encouraged. Who was the last person who successfully ran for president on a platform of being a steward of the public trust? Was it Eisenhower? Coolidge? The fact is; it is very difficult to survive as a national political candidate without some sort of grandiose platform. The media demands it; the base of each party demands it; and so do the voters.
The ideal of an activist central government "solving" society's problems is a powerful force in the human heart. We want out freedom, but we also want to be able to say "there otta be a law!" What we never catch on to is that eventually, there is a law - often forever, as laws develop constituencies of their own. And, so it goes until the next crisis comes along.
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