Concern For Next Three Years

Professor Victor Davis Hanson raises concerns for the next three and a half years if the President stumbles badly on a couple of key issues.

Professor Hanson's issue is that the future is likely to be rocky and we are better off having a strong and successful President rather than one badly wounded.

Health care reform is stalled. Our Afghan generals are exasperated with the administration’s politicking of the war.  Cap-and-trade as written is unworkable and will implode.  Most think we wasted the stimulus, not need more of it. Higher taxes haven’t hit, but they are going to sting his elite supporters.  Promises will be broken as all sorts of additional taxes will fall on the middle class to stop the $2 trillion deficits before the Big Inflation comes, and it is coming.  Immigration reform will be a disaster since it will be framed as quasi-open borders in political concessions to La Raza identity groups.  Yet these are all unpopular issues that would require a President with 60% approval ratings to push them through.  But when health care reform crashes, and it will as envisioned, then the rest of the agenda will line up as falling dominoes.

Having looked out over the terrain, Professor Hanson then looks at the options:

Obama needs a Morris to mentor him in the arts of triangulating: distancing himself from Reid and Pelosi (rather than outsourcing to them the 1000 page health care bill); talking tough about deficits; balancing budgets; pro-American themes abroad; symbolic personal responsibility issues; the whole nine yards of Clinton reinvention.  But I assume he will go instead the Carter cardigan sweater, pound the table in “you are not up to my moral standards” sanctimonious mode.

Then Professor Hanson wraps it up here:

I am not a fan of the Obama agenda.  But I am don’t want an impotent Commander in Chief abroad for three very dangerous years to come.  So I am worried that the U.S. will be crippled with a weak, unpopular executive, as happened to Bush (35% approvals) in 2007-8. Our currency is tanking. Our debts are climbing. Our energy needs are breaking us.  Our borrowing is out of control.  The country is divided in a 1859/1968 mode. And the world is smiling as Obama, now hesitant and without the old messianic confidence, presides over our accepted inevitable decline.  The country needs to buck up and meet these challenges head on, since the world smells blood, whether in Iran, Russia, the Mideast, North Korea, or South America, and in a mere 9 months of the reset button.

What do you think?

Regards  —  Cliff

PS:  Hat tip to Instapundit