The Timeliness of Barack Obama: Part Two

  Domestic Policy: Barack Obama has, as Shelby Steele has recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, pushed us forward somewhat culturally by refusing to play the race card. Obama has made new rules for black politicians who wish to be viable to the entire American electorate: you may not use America’s racial past as a means to stigmatize whites with the taint of moral turpitude. But the contradiction that Obama represents in another regard is troubling, as Steele also notes elsewhere. That is to say,  Barack Obama employed self-reliance, the supreme American virtue, to become a successful man; the problem, though, is that he seems ready, as president, to pursue a muted form of identity politics by proposing a plethora of social welfare programs.

  If one visits the “Issues” page from the homepage toolbar of Obama’s campaign website, one will be dazzled by the blizzard of programs he intends to create, all of them redolent with such terms as “outreach,” “protection,” “access,” and “care.” The details are overwhelming, and extremely vague. There are more programs proposed than anyone could possibly oversee competently or even have time to implement. There seems to be not a little disingenuousness in it all, as if we are being manipulated into feeling inferior for not having thought up all these programs ourselves. There’s a program for almost any conceivable thing that could happen to you. Ultimately, though, the “Issues” page is unreadable: too many details couched in vagueness. After awhile you just can’t go on.

  Now, there are a couple of motifs that run throughout: more money needs to be spent, and (this one is only implied, not explicitly stated by the site), there should be more solutions from government, from the outside, so to speak. That is, Obama seldom touches upon counter-productive subcultures and attitudes that are causing considerable difficulties (his recent speech to the NAACP on personal responsibility notwithstanding). It’s always up to an external agent to solve the problem: more money, more accountability from government, more access, more outreach, more “care.” It’s never one’s own fault, it’s the government’s. He says he’s asking you to believe in the power of us all to change Washington: that means, between the lines, that it’s not your fault, that it was the government that messed up your life (and it’s supposed to get you out of the consequences of your own behavior).

  We’ve had four decades plus of Great Society programs, and they have proven to be a collective failure: they undermine self-reliance; they’re primarily designed to relieve whites of guilt stigma; they lower standards and competitiveness by catering to the unprepared; and they keep blacks vulnerable in perpetuity to white largesse. Obama disagrees, however: his “Issues” page is chock-full with a vengeance of more social engineering. These Obama programs are so omnipresent that as individual programs they necessarily get watered-down to meaninglessness: they’re just vehicles for simplistic, “soaring” rhetoric. It’s hard to believe he pays more than lip-service to them. The sad fact about Obama is that he purposely appeals to what is most unhealthy in us– that will to nothingness, as Nietzsche put it, that will to the end, that desire for everything difficult in life to just go away.  Sometimes he presents himself as Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, but mostly he presents himself as a father figure,  theatrically teaching his children self-sufficiency.

  Some selections: “…by holding schools accountable for making sure these students complete school…” (you probably won’t have to study very hard here, if the school has to make sure you graduate). “We must promote economic development in Mexico to decrease illegal immigration.” (Then we’ll promote it in Central America, so as to reduce that other illegal immigration into Mexico itself.) “We can only compete if our government makes the investments that give us a fighting chance.” (That is, we can only compete for the freebies if they’re out there available.) The point here is that, for Barack, the government always has to do something first before you are obligated to subject yourself to free competition.

  There is nothing substantive behind the fashionable oratory. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out again and again, dogma and agendas blind one to the real and destructive consequences of mistaken policies. These policies are short-term at best but are insisted upon for decades. This is the tragedy of the combination of vanity and altruism.

T.D.

Thank you for visiting.

Next due: Friday, August 1: The Timeliness of Barack Obama: Part Three