Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) gave a speech on Tuesday obviously intended to be a curtain-raiser on the general election campaign. What did he say, and what does it mean?
In his peroration, Obama declared that we would look back on this moment generations from now.
[W]e will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.
This did not go down well with conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. And you can see his point. What do you mean, care for the sick and jobs for the jobless? Aren’t we already spending trillions on all that? What kind of talk is that?
Well, it sums up the content part of his speech, in which Obama established the basic problem America faces after eight years of the Bush administration:
Bush economic policies that have failed to create well-paying jobs, or insure our workers, or help Americans afford the skyrocketing cost of college - policies that have lowered the real incomes of the average American family, widened the gap between Wall Street and Main Street, and left our children with a mountain of debt.
Hmm. What could he be talking about? But he has plenty of solutions.
On health care, he proposes to
pass health care plan that guarantees insurance to every American who wants it and brings down premiums for every family who needs it.
On Iraq he is starting to sheer away from the simple promise to bring our troops home.
We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in - but start leaving we must. It’s time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future.
On the economy:
Change is building an economy that rewards not just wealth, but the work and workers who created it. It’s understanding that the struggles facing working families can’t be solved by spending billions of dollars on more tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs, but by giving a the middle-class a tax break, and investing in our crumbling infrastructure, and transforming how we use energy, and improving our schools, and renewing our commitment to science and innovation.
I know. It doesn’t sound much like change, but more of what Democrats have been doing ever since who knows when: spending money on Democratic voters.
And we know what Obama means by change. He means more power and more money to the educated liberal elite, more money going through the political system.
It means pumping more and more money into more and more rigid privileges and subsidies, and putting off, for another ten years, or maybe for a generation, the hard and thankless work of unwinding the vast, wasteful, and unjust welfare state. Over at usgovernmentspending.com you can see the numbers for government spending at all levels of government this year, 2008 in the United States.
Pensions: $911.6 billion
Health Care: $925.0 billion
Education: $848.2 billion
Defense: $730.8 billion
Welfare: $445.2 billion
If you were going to promise “change” you would be wanting to do something about that. But that’s not the kind of change that Sen. Obama is offering. His kind of change will merely trowel on another layer on the hardened and encrusted spending already not doing very much to help working Americans. In another ten years, all his new spending will be just as encrusted and just as ineffectual as all the moneys were are already spending.
Some day Americans will vote, not just for “change,” but for genuine conservative reform.
But that day is not yet.
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