Obama, according to Wall Street people who regularly deal with his economic and budget officials, is acting as if he has a blank check to do what he wants, while ignoring the longterm costs of his policies.
When I was working on my book Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift, I read a work that Walter Lippmann, the co-founder of The New Republic, published in 1937. In it, with an eye to the New Deal, he observed that, while
the partisans who are now fighting for the mastery of the modern world wear shirts of different colors, their weapons are drawn from the same armory, their doctrines are variations of the same theme, and they go forth to battle singing the same tune with slightly different words. . . .
What worried Lippmann the most was the failure of those who considered themselves progressives to “remember how much of what they cherish as progressive has come by emancipation from political dominion, by the limitation of power, by the release of personal energy from authority and collective coercion.” He cited “the whole long struggle to extricate conscience, intellect, labor, and personality from the bondage of prerogative, privilege, monopoly, authority.”
Phi Beta Iota: We persist in believing that President Barack Obama is a good man trapped in a bad system that include partisan henchman Rahm Emanuel, the Newt Gingrich of the left. In our view, President Obama lacks a competent national intelligence community able to deliver all that he “needs to know” in order to eradicate the ten high-level threats to humanity by harmonizing the twelve core policies. He also needs the kind of strategy center that both David Abshire and General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret) have individually recommended, the first inPreventing World War III: A Realistic Grand Strategy and the second in The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America’s Power and Purpose. Walter Lipmann had it right–the two-party tyranny has to go. The question is simple: can President Barack Obama reach out to the Independents that got him elected, now 43% of the electorate and rising; to the total of 70% of the electorate that did not vote for him, and “flip the system?” We think he can. Strategic integrity, anyone?
