All Yours, Now

I have written ["W. Doesn’t Care. He Doesn’t Have To."] that Obama’s predecessor didn’t understand enough to care about his legacy. I was somewhat wrong, to a degree; a closer examination of a number of his policy moves after the 2006 midterms indicate that he came to a belated realization that history wasn’t on the RNC payroll. This administration seems to have learned from W.’s mistake and decided to starts chasing its historical legacy right at the outset; apparently the election wasn’t enough, or it’s undisputed historicity convinced anyone in the administration—especially the President—that his legacy was already assured enough that anything he did would be automatically as historic. This kind of self-delusion has finally come full circle, as his policy centerpieces all coalesced into a perfect storm.

It started with Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech and his insistence—in the face of a “constituency” that professes a strict, if disingenuous, pacifism—that there are such things as “good wars” and that someone has to decide when and where to fight them. Obvious to us, the sentiments expressed might have served to reverse the may have served as the final salvo in Obama’s battle with the further-out left wing of his party who were disgruntled by his stance on Afghanistan. In one fell swoop, he now attached his Administration to an unpopular war, almost in the way Vietnam’s crown of thorns passed to Nixon once he bombed Cambodia. So now he acknowledges owning the war.

Soon after, Obama was in Copenhagen in an attempt to give the US a leading role in regulating carbon footprints—this after the East Anglia emails began to reveal the “science” behind global warming to be a hoax on the level of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s no accident that Obama’s “science czar”, John Holdren, made his reputation as an evangelist for extreme measures in world population control, as a follower of now-discredited theories in line with Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb”. In truth, any conservative criticism of liberal politicization of science is, right now, disingenuous, as long as they continue to insist on science in the service of corporate ends [as in the think tanks promoting oil and coal as non-pollutants and smoking as non-addictive] or religious ones [as in any support for “intelligent design” theory in science curricula]. However, when the time arrives that the discrediting of so-called “science” of climate change becomes the consensus position in the scientific community, the liberal progressives will be saddled with this in perpetuity.

Finally, there’s health care legislation. This is certainly going to be historic, but like what will eventually happen with climatology, it might be for the wrong reasons. Now, despite all available evidence, I am still not convinced that there are better alternatives to Keynesian economics and the existence of a welfare state, to a reasonable degree. Additionally, if no one in Congress has gotten around to reading any of the 2,000-plus pages of the bill, none of them can really comment with any accuracy about the bill, so I’ll take the high road and demur. However, despite the appearance of party unity on both sides of the divide—as evidenced by the strict party-line votes in the Senate at every stage—the infighting among Democrats surrounding the elements of the bill, including the reluctant dropping of the public option by Socialist Bernie Sanders, is probably more telling: that is, if the Republicans have become the party of “No”, the Democrats are living up to their reputation as the party of ”Anything”.

It might be that someone in the administration realized that, despite the failure of Great Society legislation and the fiasco of Vitenam [from either political vantage point], the legacy of LBJ and his administration was assured forever with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act [which also, to be sure, split the Democratic party]. In their rush to secure the historical legacy that had almost been handed to them just by virtue of the election, they have invested way too much political capital insuring that this health care legislation will simply pass and be counted as an equivalent, maybe even for doing nothing and worse. Instead, its passage—as an exclusively Democratic bill—will secure the moment that the automatic legacy unraveled, and when [hopefully] the partisan criticisms leveled at the administration finally began to gain credibility.