“the EPA would be become a Green Gestapo with the power to order factories, businesses, apartment buildings, farms, lawnmowers and of course cars, to limit their emissions of CO2” 

“Like a frightened referee at Old Trafford, Obama is governing by ear. At the moment, the left is in the ascendance so he is placating them”

Barack Obama truly is Jimmy Carter II.

Jimmy Carter was also a light-weight, ridden by a mildly-leftie guilt complex. Like Carter, Obama is too eager to please, if you are on the left. You can take a jump if you are a conservative, even if you have good ideas which will benefit everyone.  

Like Obama, Carter had a range of paymasters to placate, crucially the unions. I christened Jimmy Carter “Mr Yes, but” because of his propensity to always avoid taking a position on anything that was mildly controversial. I’ve been holding off making any judgments about the Barack Obama administration because any early nastiness might be put down to my well recorded antipathy to the man and his Michelle.

Well, you’ve had about 100 days of it now and I think it is pretty clear what a disaster this Democratic administration is going to be. Obama was too weak to stop the Democrat controlled Congress from turning his stimulus package into a runaway boondoggle that will harm the economy, spending money they don’t have that will mortgage, if not crucify, the future.

For starters it is clear that Obama was a great candidate, but he is a lousy administrator. He has moved from being smooth, relaxed, cocky, and never at a loss for words, to looking like a scared rabbit in the headlights, often stumbling or grasping for the appropriate answer. This is possibly because without the teleprompter he has no clue what to say about his biggest problem, the economy. He is just a candidate. That’s what he does. He wins elections.

Nasty zealots
Unfortunately, he might do more damage than Carter because of the big majorities the Democrats have in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Thankfully, the popular vote didn’t stretch to making the Senate filibuster-proof. But it has unleashed a torrent of people into the corridors of power, of the kind you wouldn’t want near anything that matters. Like the Labour Party in Britain, the Democrats attract people who couldn’t get or hold down a proper job in the real world. They are often nasty zealots who think they’ve got the key to heaven. Think Ed Balls on steroids.

If you look at who is cheering the loudest, you get a better idea of just where Obama is headed, not to mention what it means to have the Democrats in control.

“Labour unions, trial lawyers, alternative energy entrepreneurs, gay activists, teachers, environmentalists, community organizers, university faculties, ethnic advocates, multiculturalists, feminist militants, welfare rights agitators and other liberal constituencies came together in enthusiastic support of the Obama-Biden ticket, with the virtual certainty that they’d receive their payoffs from the new administration,” was the way columnist Michael Medved put it after Obama’s election.

If you want conclusive evidence that the inmates have taken over the asylum, consider the announcement last week about carbon dioxide (CO2).

Green Gestapo
First of all you have to bear in mind that CO2 is a gas which occurs in nature, and without which there would be no life on earth. The more of it there is in the atmosphere, the quicker plants grow. We all exhale it all the time. Global warmists, led by Al Gore, have been allowed to hijack the arguments about science to such a degree that the U.S. government (in other words Obama) has now set in motion a move to declare CO2 a dangerous gas which harms human health. Apart from the fact that this is nonsensical and illogical, the implications are horrendous for families and businesses in the U.S. If this goes ahead, the Environmental Protection Agency would be transformed overnight into a kind of Green Gestapo, with the power to order factories, businesses, apartment buildings, farms, lawnmowers and of course cars, to limit their emissions of CO2.

This would be bad enough in healthy economic times, but the U.S. economy is tottering under the weight of the Obama rescue plan, which is in fact a collection of all the pet schemes Democrats have been keeping up their sleeves for years. Much of this is just pork. The amount of money you might have needed to kick-start the economy has been dwarfed by all this spending, mainly of borrowed money.

Berlin speech
The EPA scheme to regulate CO2 is not yet law, and there is a chance that along the way – there is a 60-day period for comments which will be followed by an avalanche of lawsuits – the plan might founder. But don’t forget what Obama said in his Berlin speech last year.

“As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking the coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya”.

Obama really does seem to believe this stuff, so if the EPA fails to get the power to regulate CO2, maybe a Cap and Trade scheme will be the alternative way of raising household and small business energy costs, if it can get through Congress.

There was no secret about what you were going to get if you voted for Obama. His books showed that he is a traditional tax and spend Democrat. All his mantra about change added up to nothing more than seeking a return to the old big state socialism in disguise.

There were some who thought Obama might govern from the centre. Fat chance. Like a frightened referee at Old Trafford, Obama is governing by ear. At the moment, the left is in the ascendance so he is placating them. After a mid-term reverse for the Democrats, he is likely to change course a bit. Obama doesn’t have the stomach for a fight for socialism. He seems much more interested in posing for the cameras and making warm speeches. I suspect that already he is measuring the chances of re-election every time he utters any words. He is above all, just a candidate.

Health care the next big fight
Another little beauty up Obama’s sleeve was his expressed desire to end secret ballots in elections to allow union representation. If the EPA doesn’t kill the economy outright, this will help keep it pinned down. But it looks as though this union measure has been killed in the Senate, along with the Cap and Trade plan. The next big fight will be over health care, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, would mean getting on for 17 per cent of GDP would come under government control.

His campaign for “change” without saying what the change would be, and the vacuous chants of “Yes we can!” have now been replaced by policies. The more you look at his ideas, the more it is obvious they are not new at all, just reversions to the failed big government and high taxes of the 1970s.

Welcome to Jimmy Carter’s second term.

Neil Winton – April 25, 2009

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