Obama the Avoider

The editors of The Wall Street Journal recently wrote, “The towering ambitions of Mr. Obama’s first two years have suddenly gone into abeyance in his third, apparently to be deferred until years five through eight. The White House is more or less conceding that it doesn’t have a chance of winning a second term unless his major policies go on hiatus.” It would appear that the president plans to avoid the issues until after the election.

The president avoided making the tough decisions throughout his first two years in office, allowing the economy to falter. At Human Events, Jim Hoff calls Mr. Obama the “Worst. President. Ever.” Mr. Hoff continues, “Team Obama promised that US GDP growth would be 4.0% in 2011. The Fed announced last week that they see GDP at 2.7% to 2.9% this year.” That’s a sad record. The Obama administration has logged two years of economic disruption followed by two that look to be a total avoidance of responsibility.

Pat Buchanan picks up on the theme of avoidance in foreign policy. He writes, “In deciding to pull all of the 30,000 troops from the surge out of Afghanistan, six weeks before Election Day 2012, but only 10,000 by year’s end, President Obama has satisfied neither the generals nor the doves…He has, however, well served his political interests… A smaller drawdown would have enraged the left, whose support is indispensable to Obama’s winning a second term… So, our president did what comes naturally: cut the baby in half… Obama’s strategic goal now is the avoidance of defeat, until the election of 2012 is behind him.”

A drawdown in Afghanistan was one of the president’s key campaign platforms in 2008. Now it appears he will try to avoid the issue through the 2012 campaign. Pat Buchanan suggests that he should have stuck to the promise: “The people who should be indicted by history are not those who, after half a trillion dollars and a decade of bleeding, decided to cut America’s losses, but those who stampeded this country into two of the longest and least necessary wars in the history of the republic.”

When it comes to the president’s avoidance, the elephant in the room is the towering national debt and the deficits that he has inflated so much. Douglass Kellogg states at Human Events that the group of legislators attacking the deficit and debt most aggressively is the Tea Party Caucus of the House. As Kellogg writes, “This band of lawmakers proposed more spending reductions, on average, than any other group in Congress: a net of $99.1 billion.”

Even the self-styled “conservative” Republicans of the Republican Study Committee didn’t do as well as the Tea Party caucus in cut proposals. Kellogg continues, “The conservative Republican Study Committee was behind the Tea Party in savings proposals, offering $74.5 billion in net cuts. The Republican Main Street Partnership, a self-identified “pragmatic” group, offered only $31.1 billion in cuts.”

Michele Bachmann, founder of the Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives, has been soaring in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire. Bachmann nearly tied Mitt Romney in a recent Des Moines Register poll. Bachmann recently appeared on Fox News Sunday in an interview with Chris Wallace. Although Wallace’s impolite question “Are you a flake?” (for which he has since apologized) has gotten most of the attention, Bachmann’s nuanced position on gay marriage should hearten States’ Rights enthusiasts everywhere. Bachmann lays out a position that states, barring constitutional amendment, should have complete control over those items not enumerated as congressional areas of operation in Article II, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. See the video below.

Obama the Avoider

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