Where is Obama Leading Us?

Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has an insightful column on the direction President Obama is leading the nation. (Hint: towards fiscal ruin.)

Here’s the top of his article:

Obama’s clever budget proposal has won him the advantage in the coming political showdown. Democratic grousing over limited cuts to discretionary spending will be used to paint the president as a fiscally responsible moderate. The Republican plan will be demonized as a heartless assault on the poor and elderly. Obama will do everything short of sending out an engraved invitation to provoke a GOP-led government shutdown. Whether or not the confrontation goes nuclear, Obama will enjoy the sort of upper hand Clinton had over Gingrich fifteen years ago.

Granted, the coming entitlement meltdown is a far greater threat than anything America faced in 1995. And despite Gingrich’s 1994 victory, there was nothing comparable to the Tea Party in those days. Even so, as the battle is shaping up, Obama is slated to win. The country as a whole fails to grasp the magnitude of the coming fiscal crisis. Advantage, Obama. What to do?

The answer, I think, is to tell a (true) story about Obama’s long-term aims and intentions. If the word socialism makes you uncomfortable, try “unaffordable Euro-style welfare state.” Obama is not Bill Clinton, and highlighting that fact is the best way to prevent Obama from assuming the mantle of triangulation. Obama wants to win a shut-down battle, but without “ending welfare as we know it.” In fact, Obama has already gone a far piece down the road of resuscitating and expanding the pre-Clinton welfare state. His budget largely preserves (“freezes”) that achievement. Without filling in the ideological commitments and long-term plans Obama so prudently declines to avow, the GOP will lose this battle.

Tea Party moxie and the shellacking notwithstanding, the GOP establishment remains reluctant to highlight Obama’s radicalism. I understand the reasons for this, and they are by no means trivial. While Obama’s policies are opposed by many, he remains personally popular. It seems disrespectful to attribute an ideology to the president that he himself won’t own up to. Words like “radical,” much less “socialist,” sound impolite. Yet, without defining the president in a way that happens to be not only politically advantageous, but true, I doubt Obama can be stopped. Telling the truth about this president is how we shellacked him to begin with. […]

Kurtz is also author of Radical-in-Chief, an authoritative compilation of evidence of Obama’s socialist beliefs and activities.