Patterico's Pontifications

11/30/2008

Now You Tell Us™ (Part 3)

Filed under: Dog Trainer,Obama — Patterico @ 10:43 am



(Note: “Now You Tell Us”™ is a semi-regular feature of this site, documenting examples of the Los Angeles Times’s disclosure of negative information about Barack Obama that didn’t come out during the election.)

The L.A. Times reveals a truth many of us already knew, but that the electorate at large evidently did not — namely, that Obama’s course is not likely to be centrist:

Labor unions, environmentalists and other liberal groups are eagerly preparing for new confrontations with business and conservative interests. They feel secure in having allies in Washington’s power centers, 14 years after Democrats last controlled Congress and the White House. (And some consider the exile even longer, dating from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election, because President Clinton’s course was largely centrist and he had only two years with a Democratic majority in Congress.)

It’s OK to say . . . now that he’s safely elected.

(Previous entries here and here.)

9 Responses to “Now You Tell Us™ (Part 3)”

  1. Who ever said The Obama was a centrist? With birds like Bill Ayres, Tony Rezko, Reverend Wright, and Louis Farakhan flocking around, and seen in context with BO’s exceedingly leftist voting record, and then capped off with his work as a Community Organizer as a Saul Alinsky disciple, it would require the journalistic skills of Walter Duranty to portray The Obama as anything but a collectivist of the first order.

    Ropelight (5b609a) — 11/30/2008 @ 11:22 am

  2. Does that mean I can keep my Obama ‘heart’ Marxism bumper sticker on my car?

    SeniorD (420a98) — 11/30/2008 @ 11:30 am

  3. _____________________________________

    that the electorate at large evidently did not

    I can’t totally blame their naivete and foolishness, because the following is another truth that I myself haven’t been very aware of or clear about. That’s because over the years I too have fallen for the myth that the do-gooder, “big mommy” philosophy and policymaking of Franklin Roosevelt (ie, his pro-labor liberalism, among other things) helped lessen the effects of the Great Depression.

    Moreover, I also have been under the impression that FDR’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had been too much of a laissez-faire capitalist/conservative, resistant to ruffling the feathers of the “greedy” corporate fat cats, long stereotyped as the key pillar of the Republican Party. And that he had been too apathetic and hesitant about pursuing a nanny-state approach to offsetting the effects of the great stock market crash of 1929 and ensuing depression.

    So I do admit that even I’ve been affected by decades of propaganda, encouraged by the left (and a lot of American voters in the 1930s/40s, with their adoration of FDR), that a quasi-socialist, do-gooder policy to stem economic problems was a Godsend over 60 years ago, and consequently will make sense all over again — based on the simpleminded sentiments of far too many voters a few weeks ago.

    So with both Bush and Hoover having allowed government spending to rocket during their time in office, and with both Obama and FDR riding to fame because of their smooth-talking (oratorical) skills — in which Roosevelt ultimately was more “charisma” than results — I sure hope history isn’t repeating itself.

    George F Will: The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America’s biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal.

    In 1939, after a decade of frantic federal spending — President Herbert Hoover increased it more than 50 percent between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt — unemployment was 17.2 percent.

    “I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started,” lamented Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s Treasury secretary. Unemployment declined when America began selling materials to nations engaged in a war America would soon join.

    In “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” Amity Shlaes of the Council on Foreign Relations and Bloomberg News argues that government policies, beyond the Federal Reserve’s tight money, deepened and prolonged the Depression. The policies included encouraging strong unions and higher wages than lagging productivity justified, on the theory that workers’ spending would be stimulative. Instead, corporate profits — prerequisites for job-creating investments — were excessively drained into labor expenses that left many workers priced out of the market.

    In a 2004 paper, Harold L. Cole of the University of California at Los Angeles and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis argued that the Depression would have ended in 1936, rather than in 1943, were it not for policies that magnified the power of labor and encouraged the cartelization of industries…..Ohanian argues that “much of the depth of the Depression” is explained by Hoover’s policy — a precursor of the New Deal mentality — of pressuring businesses to keep nominal wages fixed. Furthermore, Hoover’s 1932 increase in the top income tax rate, from 25 percent to 63 percent, was unhelpful.


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    Mark (411533) — 11/30/2008 @ 11:48 am

  4. I wonder if the fact Obama had one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate would have been an indication he was not a centrist.

    But I guess the followers of the Peoples Temple of Obama would have to actually have researched and looked beyond chanting “hope and change” to come up with an objective profile of their failed community organizer.

    Obama’s voting record,policies,friends,and associates show him to be nothing more than a Socialist.

    Obama’s base showed time and again that they thought he was lying on the campaign trail to get the “bitter people hanging on to their religion and guns” to vote for him.They are counting on him
    to follow the move-on/code pink route.

    In less than a year,there will be a lot of people staring up at the sky wondering where all that “hope and change” went to.

    Because raising taxes,bankrupting the energy industries,bowing down to the unions,and appeasement to our enemies is a recipe for disaster.

    Baxter Greene (8035ae) — 11/30/2008 @ 12:19 pm

  5. It also helps that the people gave the dems big congressional and senate majorities. I think they’re even larger than the GOP ones in recent memory. That wasn’t guaranteed before the election.

    imdw (de9ac8) — 11/30/2008 @ 12:35 pm

  6. In less than a year, there will be a lot of people staring up at the sky wondering where all that “hope and change” went to.

    Because raising taxes, bankrupting the energy industries, bowing down to the unions, and appeasement to our enemies is a recipe for disaster.

    Can’t there be a class action lawsuit from subscribers for misinformation and fraud ?

    Vermont Neighbor (5ea336) — 11/30/2008 @ 12:47 pm

  7. OMG — IT’S GOING TO BE A COMPLETE COMMUNIST TAKE-OVER!!!!

    David Ehrenstein (15795c) — 11/30/2008 @ 1:55 pm

  8. FWIW, I don’t think this one qualifies for the “Now You Tell Us”™ series — it’s really about liberal groups’ expectations and doesn’t have any different info about Obama himself.

    Personally I suspect he’s just as much a triangulator as Clinton was — liberals are apt to be disappointed if they’re expecting anything more than a few gestures towards their causes.

    kenB (88b394) — 11/30/2008 @ 2:49 pm

  9. I think he is going to concentrate on changing the country from within. The external issues will be controlled by centrists like Hillary and Gates; the nuts and bolts will be driven by people like (shudder) La Raza’s Cecilia Munoz. Who will the Acorn rep be?

    Patricia (ee5c9d) — 11/30/2008 @ 6:19 pm


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