Facts prove troublesome for Obama
Last Updated: October 21. 2010 1:00AM .
Jay Ambrose
Lots of pundits are trying to figure out why President Obama is facing disaster this midterm election, but few have said it better than Michael Oakeshott despite his disadvantage of having been dead for 20 years.
Oakeshott was an English philosopher whose specialty was politics and disposition was to prefer "fact to mystery," and "present laughter to Utopian bliss." He said all this in an essay titled, "On Being Conservative," in which he also trenchantly described politicians of the opposite sort, what I would call the Obama sort.
Such people, he said, see government "as a vast reservoir of power," and that power "inspires them to dream," to come up with "favorite projects" that "they sincerely believe are for the benefit of mankind." So they grab for the power, maybe increase it, and then use it to impose these projects on everyone else. To them, government is "an instrument of passion" and "the art of politics is to inflame and direct desire."
That's not Obama? Of course it is. He spent 2008 stirring up as much emotion as he could, telling voters how awful things were and how he would make it all better.
His favorite project has been the health care remake that leaves no stethoscope untouched, or nearly none as government intrudes massively when it more productively could have addressed certain particulars with nonabrasive, inexpensive prudence.
Oakeshott tells us something else is also at work, namely that some "prefer the promise of a provided abundance to the opportunity of choice and activity on their own account.," which is to say, some will shrug at liberty losses as they cheer pledges of income redistribution and extension of the welfare state.
As so it is with Obama's self-declared triumphs. Even though it won't fully kick in for some years, the health plan is already stymieing business expansion and raising premiums. And the $862 billion stimulus that was supposed to create millions of jobs? Facts caught up with this mystery.
When things like this go amiss, says Oakeshott, "we become aware of what the camel thinks of the camel driver," and that is what's happening.
A public plagued with Obama's version of plenty is turning on him and his abettors.
It's not because voters have been rendered idiots by economic circumstances, as Obama put it somewhat more circumspectly in one of his talks, but because we see a truth he seems incapable of accepting.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers, is a columnist living in Colorado. E-mail comments to letters@detnews.com.
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