I’m trying to figure President Obama out. He says he has an open administration and that he is willing to work with everyone to see “what works.” Yet in his inaugural address he said the debate about large versus small government is over. In a speech Tuesday he said “just say no” is not a valid response to an economic crisis. He’s trying to shut off the vigorous debate about the economy that’s raging outside the confines of the White House. It’s as if we squabbling children should shut up and let the “adults” (i. e., Obama and his advisers) get to work to solve the problems we face.
I for one really resent his professorial demeanor that belittles his opponents. He believes he has a mandate from the electorate. He needs to face up to the fact that people voted against President George W. Bush far more than they voted for him. No offense, but he doesn’t have any better clue of how to solve our problems than do at least 10 million of your very smart fellow Americans who have gone to college and grad school and have serious opinions about the issues in our lives. Yet he claims to have the answers.
So who is he? A Chicago hardball politician? A dedicated liberal with a liberal/socialist agenda? A centrist trying to find the middle way? A reformer who wants to find “solutions” that work?
Here’s the rub: I think he is all of those things. That makes him a pragmatist, which is a dangerous thing.
He’s a Chicago politician who ran over the opposition to get the bailout bill passed. He let his Democratic supporters in Congress run wild with home district pork, yet he claimed there were no earmarks in the bill. He cared less about the opposition. All he had to do is meet Republicans halfway, knock out the most egregious pork, and he would have had their support. Instead he catered to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and let them run with it. It’s fairly obvious he just didn’t come out of nowhere to win the presidency.
He’s a liberal because he believes in government solutions to most problems, especially health care. He is a Keynesian with regard to the economy and will use every trick in the book to impose the will of the state on us to achieve his economic “solutions.” He’s not sure what the solutions are, but he knows that government has them. This is why he wants to shut down debate on this issue. In his mind, there is only one approach to economic issues.
He’s a bit of a centrist in that he says he wants to find solutions to nagging political problems that have been difficult to change. His opposition to farm subsidies, albeit only to large recipients of subsidies, is a major break from farm state Democrats and Republicans who favor them. It’s a big chip in the dike that could lead to an end of this absurd and wasteful New Deal program.
He’s a bit of a reformer in that he sees a role for charter schools in the public education system. This is major because the teachers unions are one of the most powerful political entities in America and heavily supported him. Requiring results from teachers is a very big deal for any Democrat and we can only wish him well. I’m sure he feels a bit hypocritical when he’s sending his children to Sidwell Friends School, the most prestigious private school in D.C. I’ll give him credit for being sincere on this issue because it is a huge leap for a Democrat.
How can he be all things to all people?
Obama the pragmatic politician is able to advocate his position by using language he thinks you want to hear. When he says with a straight face that he believes fervently in the free market, he doesn’t really mean that. What he really means is that he doesn’t believe in the free market, that it’s too dangerous, and, while it’s maybe better than total government control of the economy, capitalism needs to be heavily regulated to protect the citizenry. But he says that he’s for free markets. Pretty clever. Because he is articulate and professorial you come away from him with the feeling that he is really smart, pragmatic, and he will do the “right thing.”
This is exactly what I am afraid of.
Today’s pragmatists are people who are defined by what they are against, not what they are for. They are suspicious of ideology and abstract ideas because they don’t understand them. “Show me what works” is their credo. Finding our “what works” is one of the most difficult things to achieve until you do it. The problem is that when you tinker with a vast, complex, and decentralized organic system such as the economy, the “solutions” not only may not work, but they may be harmful. In the economic realm this is called the Law of Unintended Consequences. FDR and Hoover are the poster boys for this by turning a garden variety recession into a major depression.
Give me an ideologue any day because I know where they stand and how they will solve a problem. Reagan, Carter, Coolidge were people who acted from a philosophy. The Nixons, Roosevelts, Hoovers and Bushes do damage because, being the good, sensible people that they are, they seize on the pragmatic thing first without understanding the consequences. Because you don’t know where they are headed they create uncertainty and that’s bad in an economic crisis.
Obama as a modern pragmatist has surrounded himself his whole life with people who believe in the power of government to solve problems. He is against corporations, against capitalism, and against the power of people to solve their own problems.
One reason why the markets are not responding to government stimulus is that they don’t know what Obama the pragmatist will do from one day to the next. And that creates uncertainty. Markets abhor uncertainty.
— Jeff Harding is a principal of Montecito Realty Investors LLC. A student of economics, he has a strong affinity for free-market economics. This commentary originally appeared on his blog, The Daily Capitalist.