Knowing the Unknowable and the Ubiquitous PR

It’s impossible to really know what anyone truly believes because there is no way to actually get into someone else’s mind. The best way to guess when it comes to a politician is to take what they have ever written or said in addition to the policies and priorities taken in office. Before running for Commander in Chief, President Obama’s associations, two autobiographies, history in community organizing, record in the Illinois and United States Senate pointed to a left wing politician. This is part of the reason why the hope and change campaign the president ran in 2008 was so jarring, because it could be construed to mean absolutely anything and in the context of that election it was used to convey rainbows an lollipops. It was a charade masking the policies favored by the President.

Nearly two years in to the Obama Presidency it seems as though his policies, once demonstrated, have led to a rebuke illustrated in this month’s elections. The basic point to me is that many agree that government is too big and does not do many things well when it attempts to shape decisions for everyone. It has been opined that when the President uses a bitter clingers or distribution line, it’s some kind of slip but it is more in line with his actual record that the nonsense from his campaign.

Speaking of that campaign it is still meaningful to many, from an article on Salon by Sasha Abramsky titled “Obama’s toughest task: Make us believe again”:

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama fashioned an appeal to independent voters and young adults based in large part not on specific policy pledges but on his promise to end the culture of hyper-partisan hyper-bickering that was poisoning the country's political well…Obama believes in good government, in moderation, in a smart, worldly, calm approach to politics. He believes that government can, and should, act on behalf of ordinary people to protect them from the vagaries of an unregulated market and also to smooth out the rough edges created by boom-bust cycles, inequality, and the twists and turns of history…Unfortunately for him, and for his broader progressive political agenda, conservatives have spent the last 30-plus years demolishing any notion that government can ever be a force for good in the social and economic arena.

That’s a ton of inference from hope and change. It seems that the Author’s belief in government and of conservatives is the actual view put forth in this piece.

On the first assertion, the ending of partisanship in politics. The only political system that has no partisanship is a dictatorship in which all of the people living under it agree to live under said dictatorship. Those clamoring for bi-partisanship aren’t looking for any actual agreement; they are looking for people to capitulate to their view of government.

On to the good big government tripe. Boom-bust cycles happen in any economy that promotes freedom and the only kind that sidesteps this are those in which everyone is miserable, all bust. Government has tried many times to help ordinary people and in some very limited ways has helped albeit at enormous costs. The reason why many people view big government as bad government is because many of these programs have failed to deliver at an inflated cost.

The last notion, that conservatives have spent the last 30 plus years demolishing the idea that government can ever be a force for good in the social and economic arena. This rubbish assumes that conservatives have ever been a force in forming public opinion, which just isn’t true. Conservatives don’t promise to solve everyone’s problems, don’t promise to stop the rise of the oceans and don’t believe that government should make every decision for every citizen. Because progressives always promise the impossible and can never deliver on the impossible they always get elected on inflated hope and then are shown the door when it all falls apart.