Inauguration Thoughts
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I thought the speech was filled with the same soaring but gaseous rhetoric that is quickly becoming Mr. Obama’s stock-in-trade, and sprinkled with what I thought were some unnecessary jabs at his predecessor. Prediction: the professional bloviators will be tripping all over themselves to praise it on the cable-news gabfests over the next couple of days, but in two weeks nobody will be able to recall a single line except lefty bloggers endlessly tittering over the “greed and irresponsibility on the part of some” and “restore science to its rightful place” bits.
I thought one paragraph was illustrative of the basic disconnect between Mr. Obama and myself:
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.
I would respond to the words of our 44th president with the words of our first: “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” I’m not altogether certain Mr. Obama truly believes what he’s saying, but assuming he does, it boils down to the notion that the sine qua non of government is making the proverbial trains run on time. This is a popular view. But what its adherents either fail to appreciate or don’t credit is that some of us don’t really give a damn if the trains run on time if it’s achieved at the cost of a government that controls more of our lives and confiscates more of our wealth. I seek a government that is efficient at protecting my rights (my real rights, and not New Deal-esque “positive rights” that are nothing more than gussied-up collectivist entitlements) and leaving me alone, not one that is efficient at delivering bread and circuses. Good jobs, affordable healthcare, and dignified retirements are incidents of prosperity, not incidents of freedom, and, well, malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium.
There’s also a whiff of disingenuousness, here. Jonah Goldberg is frequently a clown, but he had a good point a while back when he noted that politicians are frequently hiding their ideological biases in words like “pragmatism” while mocking their political opponents as un-empirical ideologues. The world loves a pragmatist — somebody who’s not unduly hidebound and wedded to cant or dogma. And Mr. Obama strikes the pose of a pragmatist as well as anybody; we’ll assure jobs, healthcare, and retirements by keeping government programs that work, and throwing over the gunwhals any that don’t. But the ideological bias is hiding in plain sight: that government can, should, and will solve these problems. Even assuming, generously, that Mr. Obama does as promised and endeavors to assure jobs, healthcare, and retirements through the most empirically-sound government programs, he’s left off the table, as Daniel Griswold says, “the very real possibility that government intervention has made each of those problems more difficult for Americans to solve, and that the answer really is a smaller role for government”. It’s all a bit like the King of Swamp Castle, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, exhorting his guests, “Please! This is supposed to be a happpy occasion. Let’s not bicker and argue over who killed who.”
History teaches us that when politicians say things like, “What’s important isn’t big government or small government, but good government,” we’d all better hang onto our wallets because we’re about to get big government good and hard (albeit possibly in good government drag). Cynicism? Maybe — but does anybody want to hold their breath waiting for Mr. Obama to prove me wrong?
I’ll have more to say about Mr. Obama’s pragmatism and empiricism in the coming days.
One Wonders If They Get Whiplash
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Tonight is the final night of the Bush term; tomorrow dawns the Age of Obama. And at the risk of being declared a churlish misanthrope, I have to say that all the inauguration hoopla has grown rather nauseating. One would think that having lived through eight years of what has frequently been criticized as an “imperial presidency”, the electorate would look upon politicians and political theater with a much more jaundiced eye. Yet such are the days that merely uttering the phrase, “Hope and change,” induces grotesque, self-parodying displays of cultish fawning. (I would like to associate myself with Andrew Breitbart’s take on the celebrity vid, by the way.)
I am not a fan of Mr. Obama, but he’s always struck me as an intelligent man. One is tempted to wonder if, privately, he’s not a little creeped out by all this. And if not, please permit me to suggest that we have an aide whispering, “Respica te, hominem te memento,” to him amid this latter-day Roman triumph.
Reason magazine’s Hit & Run blog has debuted a Hackwatch feature to track the pirouetting of pundits based on the party identification of the Current Occupant. This is undoubtedly going to be a target-rich environment in the coming weeks and months; E.J. Dionne and Joe Conason alone will probably keep the Hit & Runners amply busy. Appropos of the inauguration, we have Slate’s Eric Boehlert, whinging about the cost of Bush’s second inauguration in 2005, but excoriating critics of the as-expensive-or-moreso Obama inaugural festivities in 2009 on the grounds that the cost comparisons being thrown around in the media aren’t apples-to-apples. Let’s say that’s true, Mr. Boehlert, and Bush’s 2005 inauguration and Obama’s 2009 inauguration will end up costing roughly the same. Since you were complaining in 2005 that Bush’s inaugural was a garish extravagance, surely Mr. Obama’s deserves about the same condemnation. Right?