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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Dr. Hanson：美国总统已经变成了一个虚拟职位，半数美国人和大部分媒体不管怎么样
都维护，剩下的人靠自己奋斗
Is Obama Still President?
His cadences soar on, through scandal after fiasco after disaster.
By Victor Davis Hanson
We are currently learning whether the United States really needs a president
. Barack Obama has become a mere figurehead, who gives speeches few listen
to any more, issues threats that scare fewer, and makes promises that almost
no one believes he will keep. Yet America continues on, despite the fact
that the foreign and domestic policies of Barack Obama are unraveling, in a
manner unusual even for star-crossed presidential second terms.
Abroad, American policy in the Middle East is leaderless and in shambles
after the Arab Spring — we’ve had the Syrian fiasco and bloodbath, leading
from behind in Libya all the way to Benghazi, and the non-coup, non-junta
in Egypt. This administration has managed to unite existential Shiite and
Sunni enemies in a shared dislike of the United States. While Iran follows
the Putin script from Syria, Israel seems ready to preempt its nuclear
program, and Obama still mumbles empty “game changers” and “red line”
threats of years past.
We have gone from reset with Russia to Putin as the playmaker of the Middle
East. The Persian Gulf sheikhdoms are now mostly anti-American. The leaders
of Germany and the people of France resent having their private
communications tapped by Barack Obama — the constitutional lawyer and
champion of universal human rights. Angela Merkel long ago grasped that
President Obama would rather fly across the Atlantic to lobby for a Chicago
Olympic Games — or tap her phone — than sit through a 20th-anniversary
commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are beginning to see that the U.S. is more a
neutral than a friend, as Obama negotiates with Putin about reducing the
nuclear umbrella that protects America’s key non-nuclear allies. Perhaps
they will soon make the necessary adjustments. China, Brazil, and India care
little that Barack Obama still insists he is not George W. Bush, or that he
seems to be trying to do to America what they seek to undo in their own
countries.
The world’s leaders do not any longer seem much impressed by the president
’s cat-like walk down the steps of Air Force One, or the soaring cadences
that rechannel hope-and=change themes onto the world scene. They acknowledge
that their own publics may like the American president, and especially his
equivocation about the traditional role of American power in the world. But
otherwise, for the next three years, the world is in a holding pattern,
wondering whether there is a president of the United States to reckon with
or a mere teleprompted functionary. Certainly, the Obama Nobel Peace Prize
is now the stuff of comedy.
At home, the signature Affordable Care Act is proving its sternest critics
prescient. The mess can best be summed up by Republicans’ being demonized
for trying to delay or defund Obamacare — after the president himself chose
not to implement elements of his own law — followed immediately by
congressional Democrats’ seeking to parrot the Republicans. So are the
Democrats followers of Ted Cruz or Barack Obama? Is Obama himself following
Ted Cruz?
The problem is not just that all the president’s serial assurances about
Obamacare proved untrue — premiums and deductibles will go up, many will
lose their coverage and their doctors, new taxes will be needed, care will
be curtailed, signups are nearly impossible, and businesses will be less,
not more, competitive — but that no one should ever have believed they
could possibly be true unless in our daily lives we usually get more and
better stuff at lower cost.
More gun control is dead. Comprehensive immigration legislation depends on
Republicans’ trusting a president who for two weeks smeared his House
opponents as hostage-takers and house-breakers. Moreover, just as no one
really read the complete text of the Obamacare legislation, so too no one
quite knows what is in the immigration bill. There are few assurances that
the border will be first secured under an administration with a record of
nullifying “settled law” — or that those who have been convicted of
crimes or have been long-time recipients of state or federal assistance will
not be eligible for eventual citizenship. If the employer mandate was
jettisoned, why would not border security be dropped once a comprehensive
immigration bill passed? Or for that matter, if it is not passed, will the
president just issue a blanket amnesty anyway?
In the age of Obama, we just ran up a $700 billion annual deficit and called
it restraint, as if success were to be defined as not adding another $1
trillion each year to the national debt. The strange thing is that after the
end of the Iraq War and the winding down in Afghanistan, forced
sequestration, new taxes on high earners, and a supposedly recovering and
revenue-producing economy, we are still running up near-record deficits.
Stranger still, Obama is bragging that the deficit has been cut by billions
— as if the 400-pound heart patient can be content that he lost 50 pounds
in record time and so trimmed down to a manageable 350 pounds.
The Federal Reserve is pretty well stuck with near-zero interest rates. Even
a slight rise would make servicing the huge debt nearly unmanageable. Yet
continued record low interest, along with Obamacare, is strangling the
economy. Millions of older Americans are learning that a mid-level
government employee draws more in pension compensation than a private
retiree receives in interest on 40 years’ worth of life savings.
“Millions of green jobs,” “cash for clunkers,” and “stimulus” are all
now recognized as cruel jokes. Oddly, the more scandals come to light, the
more immune the virtual president becomes. After the politicization of the
IRS, the snooping on AP reporters, the Benghazi mess, the NSA eavesdropping,
Fast and Furious, the multibillion-dollar overpayment in income-tax credits
by the IRS, the Lisa Jackson fake e-mail identities, and the Pigford
payments, the public has become numb — as if it to say, “Of course the
Obama administration is not truthful. So what else is new?”
Three considerations are keeping the U.S. afloat without an active president
. First, many working Americans have tuned the president out and simply go
on about their business despite rather than because of this administration.
If gas and oil leases have been curtailed on federal lands, there is record
production on private land. Farmers are producing huge harvests and
receiving historically high prices. Wall Street welcomes in capital that can
find no return elsewhere. American universities’ science departments and
professional schools still rate among the world’s best. There is as yet no
French or Chinese Silicon Valley. In other words, after five years of
stagnation, half the public more or less ignores the Obama administration
and plods on.
Second, the other half of Americans gladly accept that Obama is an iconic
rather than a serious president. Given his emblematic status as the nation’
s first African-American president and his efforts to craft a vast coalition
of those with supposed grievances against the majority, he will always have
a strong base of supporters. With huge increases in federal redistributive
support programs, and about half the population not paying federal income
taxes, Obama is seen as the protector of the noble deserving, who should
receive more from a government to which the ignoble undeserving must give
far more. And if it is a question of adding another million or so people to
the food-stamp or disability rolls, or ensuring that Iran does not obtain a
nuclear weapon or that China does not bully Japan, the former wins every
time.
Finally, the media accept that Obama represents a rare confluence of forces
that promotes a progressive agenda. His youth, his charisma, his background,
his exotic nomenclature, and his “cool” all have allowed a traditionally
unpopular leftist ideology to enter the mainstream. Why endanger all that
with a focus on Benghazi or the disaster of Obamacare? We have had, in the
course of our history, plenty of Grants, McKinleys, Hardings, Nixons, and
Clintons, but never quite an administration of scandal so exempt from media
scrutiny.
As far as his image goes, it does not really matter to what degree Obama
actually “fundamentally transforms America.” For the media, that he seeks
to do so, and that he drives conservatives crazy trying, is seen as enough
reason to surrender their autonomy and become ancillary to the effort. The
media believe that once he is out of office, they can regain their
credibility by going after the next president with renewed vigor as
recompense.
In other words, the presidency has become a virtual office. Almost half the
people and most of the media do not mind, and those who do just plod onward.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring
by Bloomsbury Books. |
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