The only thing he knows

After just two months in office, President Obama is back on the campaign trail.  It's a little early, but it's what he knows how to do. 

'Obama's Campaign Army on Road Again
Volunteers Rally Support for Budget Plan

 By Peter Slevin and Michael Laris
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 22, 2009; Page A01

EVANSTON, Ill., March 21 -- As she headed into the morning sunshine to talk up President Obama's $3.6 trillion budget proposal, Althea Thomas counted herself a citizen and a partisan picking up where she left off Nov. 4, backing the president she helped elect.

"It's the change we all voted on," said Thomas, one of about 40 volunteers who fanned out from the Democratic Party headquarters here with clipboards, pledge cards and a sense of mission that flowed from their support of Obama when he was a candidate.

The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee opened a new chapter Saturday in their ambitious project to convert the energy from last year's campaign into a force for legislative reform on health care, climate change, education and taxes.

More than 1,200 groups from Maine to Hawaii spent the day gathering signatures in support of Obama's economic plan, the first step in building what the White House hopes will be a standing political army ready to do battle.'

It's a revolutionary tactic, the one that Obama is using to bring on the hope and change.  He is re-deploying his grass-roots army in support of administration policy, almost exactly the same way he sent them into the streets in support of his candidacy.  It's a step beyond Ronald Reagan's strategy of appealing directly to the American people from his bully pulpit.  Reagan's appeals were his own.  Obama, on the other hand, seems to be outsourcing his to campaign volunteers.  To be sure, he's tapping a well of enthusiasm, but how it works out remains to be seen.

'In Reston, one voter paused to tell public school teacher Pat Hynes that Obama is "way out of his league" and that the canvassing project was "a waste of our time and our attention spans."

Obama is presiding over "the largest con game I have ever seen or heard of in my life," said the man, a retired federal agent who declined to give his name. "There's a difference between campaigning and governing. . . . We're looking for leadership. That's not leadership."'

But that voter may not be representative of the majority of those being asked to sign pledge cards.  And voters who volunteer to sign pledge cards will likely be willing to contact their representatives.  What Senator or Congressman will resist constituents' requests to spend buckets and buckets of money?  A plurality of voters have an unfavorable view of the Obama budget, but will they take the time to tell their congressmen? 

To those of us not in the throes of infatuation, Obama has been worse than merely unimpressive.  He is downright scary.  We really don't want to go where Obama says he wants to take us, but we may get there anyway.  He doesn't know where his policies will take us, but he does know what will get us there.  It's the only thing he really does know -- campaigning.

Update:  On the bright side(?) maybe he is even more oblivious to the unintended consequences than anybody ever imagined.

'The tax plan approved by the House as revenge against a handful of obscenely greedy AIG executives would slam tens of thousands in the financial industry, many of them New Yorkers, who have nothing to do with AIG or any other wrongdoing.

And that would be just start of the collateral damage.

The levies are so draconian that major banks that took bailout money are threatening to give it back - defeating the purpose of jump-starting the economy with an influx of cash.

Businesses with so-called TARP money in their accounts would also be put at a great competitive disadvantage to firms that have none. Those include foreign banks that will poach top Americans with higher pay.

As the financial capital of the world, New York would take the hardest hit. The city and state stand to lose millions in needed tax revenues.'

While Obama vents his phony outrage at the AIG bonuses, there is real outrage growing over the idiotic House tax bill.  But the chances for this ex post facto Bill of Attainder making it through the Senate look pretty slim at the moment.  Of course, by blocking that bill Senate would be saving Obama from the absurdity of his sanctimonious indignation.