President Barack Obama intended to capture the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt with what was previewed as a “class warfare” speech earlier this week, but Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer thinks he fell short of that. Instead, he said Obama’s particular brand of populism channeled “not Teddy Roosevelt so much as [Venezuelan President] Hugo Chavez.” In his column Thursday , Krauthammer said when Obama spoke about the millions who “are now forced to take their children to food banks,” he said so implying he himself bears no responsibility for the current economic climate. “It’s the rich” Obama blames, Krauthammer wrote. “And, like Horatius at the bridge, Obama stands with the American masses against the soulless plutocrats. This is populism so crude that it channels not Teddy Roosevelt so much as Hugo Chavez. Speaking Friday on “Inside Washington,” Krauthammer discussed the point further: “He talked about how we got here. He gave a nice historical rundown except that he left out a critical three years – his presidency. It’s as if it didn’t exist. It’s as if we jumped from ’08 to today….This is a classic example of how little it takes to stir the erogenous zones of liberals. You give them a speech with social justice, a little bit of class war, you wrap it up in the patina of intellectualism in what is essentially a speech that exonerates anything he’s done and obviously not done and says all of our problems today are the result of the plutocrats.” Watch below, via Newsbusters :
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Charles Krauthammer on Obama: ‘More a Hugo Chavez Than He is a Teddy Roosevelt’
Douthat draws on political science research at New York Times , ” Waiting For a Landslide .” And for a second I thought he’d blow it, because “realignment theory,” which he discusses, hasn’t accurately explained, much less predicted, partisan trends for decades. But Douthat adds this, which is just right: In reality, the next election may be no more transformative than 2008 turned out to be. The next Republican president may find himself as hemmed in and frustrated as President Obama has become. Meanwhile, America will still have a credit rating to fix, and a deficit to close. More at that link at top, and Douthat had a great piece a few days ago on the debt deal, ” The Liberals’ Dilemma .” Note especially: … American liberalism risks becoming a victim of its own longstanding strategy’s success. Because yesterday’s liberals insisted on making universal programs the costly core of the modern welfare state, on the famous theory that “programs for the poor become poor programs,” today’s liberals find themselves defending those universal (and therefore universally-popular) programs at the expense of every other kind of government spending — including, yes, programs for the poor. It’s a classic example of putting liberal political interests ahead of liberal policy priorities. In the short term, the insistence on ring-fencing Medicare and Social Security has left Democrats defending a system that often just ends up redistributing money from the younger middle class to the older middle class while accepting caps on programs that might do more (both directly and indirectly) to help downscale Americans get ahead. In the long term, by postponing any reckoning with the cost of entitlements, it’s making it more likely that the inevitable crunch will hit the poorest recipients of Medicare and Social Security harder than it should. Read that whole thing. Basically, progressives will never cut entitlements because gargantuan socialist welfare states form the core of socialist existentialism. Douthat’s coming of his own as a New York Times columnist, by the way. He had cold feet or something after leaving The Atlantic , but he’s been more consistent in posting some excellent commentary of late.
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Ross Douthat, Political Scientist
