President Obama’s Hindenburg Moment

President Barack Obama tried mightily to pull a Bill Clinton and move to the political center last night in his State of the Union address. But Obama is no Clinton. His roots are too deeply planted in the soil of progressivism to permit a true conversion. Clinton, on the other hand, had come out of the Democratic Party’s centrist wing and was more of an opportunistic politician than an ideologue.

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Thus, Obama’s attempt to reach the stars with his oratory about America reaching its “sputnik moment” failed to take off and ended more like his own Hindenburg moment. Sure, Obama proposed a bipartisan effort to “win the future.” But it was largely a future made up of repackaged progressive big government solutions, with some modest gestures to the verdict of last November’s mid-term elections such as Obama’s welcome promise to veto any bills coming to his desk containing earmarks. The speech focused mainly on government spending on education, innovation and infrastructure (which Obama called investments). Government would still be empowered to select industry winners (green industries). We will still be saddled with Obamacare (with some minor tinkering around the edges). Obama’s bogus claim that his health care program will cut the deficit by $250 billion stems from the phony numbers and assumptions that the Democrats had fed to the Congressional Budget Office for the purpose of estimating the cost of Obamacare. When Obama finally got around to truly dealing with the nation’s deficit problem, he proposed a very modest discretionary five year spending freeze that would purportedly save $400 billion over the next decade. First of all, there is a bit of smoke and mirrors behind this proposal. As Obama’s top economic adviser Gene Sperling admitted: More...