Bloomberg.com: Worldwide: "President-elect Barack Obama said he’ll make the “single largest new investment” in roads, bridges and public buildings since the Eisenhower Administration to lift the sagging economy and create jobs.
Obama, in his weekly radio speech today, said his plan to create or preserve 2.5 million jobs will also include making public buildings more energy efficient, repairing schools and modernizing health care with electronic medical records."
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Obama is trying to be the Lincoln/Roosevelt/LBJ sort of president who sees a problem and decides that the only answer is a massive federal government initiative of unprecedented proportions. If you have a superficial understanding of history that makes sense, but if you look closely at all three of these presidents you see that the myth doesn't live up to the reality. You see great accomplishments and...some things that were either not so great or deeply disturbing. Lincoln ended slavery and saved the union, but his record on civil liberties is terrifying. Roosevelt's New Deal was modeled directly on Mussolini's Fascism, and it seems clear now that it was WWII, not the New Deal, that lifted the US economy out of the Great Depression. He also gave away Eastern Europe to Stalin. LBJ's Great Society programs included some monumentally wasteful and destructive efforts, along with great progress in civil rights.
But what did they all have in common? Good intentions backed by the power of the federal government. And Obama has both. What he lacks is what his three role models may also have lacked to some degree: a sense that he and the government he will soon be running have limits to what they can accomplish.
update: I added this photo. The poor guy looks older already, and he hasn't even been elected yet (the electoral college vote is 12/15). He was supposedly giving up his Blackberry for security reasons, but look at his hands: he has TWO of them, along with a huge pile of paper. I'm saying a prayer for him tonight because I don't see how anybody can live up to the expectations he and the voters have placed on his office.
1 comment:
Yes, even his detractors seem to credit him with way too much power. I see comments in my local paper that complain that jobs are leaving the area because of Obama. There's no way he can be as big a force for good OR ill as people seem to think. And there are powerful enough bad forces out there to be worried.
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