The more things change, the more they stay the same. It sounds so much more sophisticated in French, though, doesn't it? And cynical, too. Pessimists often thought to be quite sophisticated. One makes claim to a certain sense of superiority by being pessimistic. There is a better way, if only "they" were as smart as "me." But no. Nothing changes. The country remains broken. It's all quite hopeless. If only we could find somebody smart enough to run things.
Ah, but we did! We found Barack Obama! The brilliant Barack is running things now, and he has been for the past five years. So things are so much better now, right? Well, not so much. In fact they're much worse, but how can that be?
Barack Obama was supposed fix the economy, end all wars, and spread Social Justice throughout the world. He was going to slow the oceans' rise, too, and that may help to explain why things aren't going as well as they ought to be.
Peggy Noonan's column entitled How Obama Wooed the Middle Class talks about the extensive and intensive research that went into shaping Barack Obama's successful 2012 campaign message. The goal was to find out what was important to the middle class. What were middle class Americans thinking? (I wonder that myself now. What were we thinking!)
An Obama adviser summed up the man's stated grievances: "I can't send my kid to college next year. . . . I haven't had a raise in five years. . . . I am sick and tired of giving bailouts to the folks at the top and handouts to the folks at the bottom. I'm going to fire people [politicians] until my life gets better."That is as succinct a summation as I've seen of how the American middle class has been thinking the past few years: The guys at the top and the bottom are taken care of while I get squeezed.
The Obama people took his comments seriously. It would be nice to say they were primarily looking for policies to help him, but their job was politics: They sought ways to reach him, to make him an Obama voter.
A bit of irony. If Obama really had any idea what middle class Americans were thinking maybe his campaign wouldn't have had to do so much research. But he didn't, so his campaign did the polling. The result? A plan to show how Mitt Romney had no idea what middle class Americans were thinking.
The Obama campaign decided not to make the campaign about the state of the economy but about who could look after the interests of the middle class in a time of historic transition. At the same time they decided to go after Mitt Romney hard, and remove him as a reasonable alternative. His selling point was that he understood the economy and made it work for him: He was rich. They turned that into a tale of downsizing, layoffs and rapacious capitalism. An Obama adviser: "He may get the economy, he may know how to make money . . . but every time he did, folks like you lost your pensions, lost your jobs."
It would be one thing if there was some truth to that accusation, but Obama was not interested in truth, only in winning. Focusing on the plight of GST Steel the Obama campaign painted a portrait of Romney as a corporate raider, plundering the company, throwing people out of work, and even causing the death of one worker's wife. The real story?
At the time, GST's union blamed the company's bankruptcy on the political class, for failing to hamstring imports. "We can't compete against the steel imports that are being sold under cost," said the president of GST's union in 2001. "Our pleas fell on deaf ears in the political arena." The Bush administration would ultimately slap on giant tariffs.
The bankruptcies were led by unionized companies that, like airlines and textiles and Detroit, had negotiated pay and benefits that helped drive their employers under. GST's pension benefits would get passed on to the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which in 2002 received $7.5 billion in claims from the steel industry alone. The PBGC covered GST's basic pension payouts.
The Obama ad doesn't note that the broader company, GS Industries, employed 3,500 and that the Kansas City plant (with 750 workers) was the only one shuttered. Other plants were bought and operate today. Nor does it mention Bain's other steel investment in the early 1990s, in an Indiana start-up called Steel Dynamics. The firm touts innovative technology and a nonunion workforce. It today reports $6.3 billion in revenue—25 times what it claimed in its 1996 IPO—and employs 6,000.
A private-equity firm looking to quickly strip value from a company—to "suck" the life out of it—does not do so by investing $100 million in modernization and holding on for eight years, through bankruptcy.
Things just never seem to change. After five years of Barack Obama we have people losing their jobs, their pensions, or both. It's the Obama economy and it's the effect of Obama's regulatory and tax policies. He knows it, too. Didn't he just admit as much by granting ObamaCare waivers to our largest corporations. He's delaying the ObamaCare employer mandate until after the election. Campanies will not have to choose among 1) spending what Obama says they should on employee health insurance, 2) laying off workers, 3) shifting some full-time workers to part-time, or 4) paying a hefty fine. Can't have people thrown out of work this close to the vote now, can we?
As it has always been, progressive policy is not aimed at promoting economic growth, but on syphoning more of it into their own hands by way of the government. That stifles growth. Build the Keystone Pipeline? Not if he can prevent it. His friends oppose it. They're into electric cars and solar panels.
Now, just as in the campaign, Obama's every effort will be focused not on how to make things better for Americans, but how to blame the somebody else when they aren't. It's who he is, and because of it Americans will continue to struggle, unemployment will remain high, and the gap between the haves and have-nots will widen. Things just never seem to change.
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