Obama out front
Last week's threatened government shut down ended after midnight Friday with an extension of federal funding. It had something for everyone, with NPR and Planned Parenthood continuing to receive tax loot (even though NPR says it doesn't need it and the supporters of Planned Parenthood may spend more donating to candidates and campaigns who advocate tax funding for Planned Parenthood than the amount of the actual tax funding Planned Parenthood receives). But it trimmed $38 billion, though this deceptively includes a $12 billion cut from the earlier continuing resolution. This is a miniscule sum, compared to the $14 trillion federal debt, which is currently increasing several billion dollars a day. But President Obama adopted alien themes, disavowing his own budget proposal of 2 months ago, attempting to co-opt tea party language. and trying to appear to be leading the charge for deficit reduction. Though no one in the tea party believes in the sincerity of his semi-conversion, his language this week is anti-thetical to the Keynesian nostrums of Democratic guru, Nobel Laureate, and ENRON economic advisor Paul Krugman. Tea partiers were not fooled, and are now singing the Johnny Mathis standard "Too much, too little, too late" to both Obama and the Democrats and Boehner and the GOP incumbotacracy.
President Obama tried to claim victory by photo-op by doing a Rocky Balboa sprint up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (the Memorial was scheduled to be auctioned off to the Left's new boogeymen, the demonic Koch brothers, who were going to reassemble it on their private estate in Wichita, Kansas, had the government actually shut down).
The problem for Obama is that there are still budgets to be passed and budget debates acoming as well as a debate over raising the debt ceiling. How much will the Tea Party caucus cut in the next budget session? Obama's polls continue to slide (only 27% approve of his handling of the deficit), and aside from inflating asset prices (stocks, oil and other commodity futures), the economy remains moribund (with the exception of rents and real estate prices in the DC metropolitan area, a disparity not missed by voters and tax payers in fly over country).
Last week a columnist at the Blade excoriated gay voters in Maryland (a state with pro-gay lobby, "liberal" Democratic politicians like Senator Barbara Mikulski and Governor Martin O'Malley) for being too lazy to get gay marriage passed in the legislature. But perhaps gay (and other socially liberal) voters are simply more concerned with other issues: rising taxes, exploding debt, stagnant (un)employment, failing educrat-ran schools, accelerating inflation.
To date Obama's project has been to sell the public on the ideas, as Keynes said, "of some long-dead economist." But these ideas and policies have been questioned by a growing part of the electorate, who want to know: when you tax, borrow, or inflate (via the Federal Reserve) a dollar of purchasing power out of the economy to pay for "stimulus" projects, what happened to the job that dollar previously supported?
It's easy to see why gay voters who work in DC for government, lobbyists, and Beltway bandits have an interest in debt and "stimulus." But given that the party of debt may be losing the Senate and more gubernatorial and Congressional seats in 2012, why should voters in the rest of the country lash themselves to the mast of a sinking ship?
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