Ted Bromund: Obama has shown his leadership, but now we must see his common sense

AFTER his election in 2008, President Barack Obama was occasionally lauded as the Reagan of the Left, an orator of genius who would reshape the landscape of American politics for a generation.

Two years later, the landscape was indeed reshaped – by the conservative landslide of 2010. The very scale of that loss evoked enough pity to give Obama a brief post-election bounce. The wonderful success of the strike against Osama bin Laden has given him another one. But will it endure?

One of the virtues that distinguished Ronald Reagan was his willingness to make hard choices and to stand by them. He burst on to the national political scene in 1964 with a brilliant address titled “A Time For Choosing”. With Reagan, you knew where you stood, and he was content to be judged by that.

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What has distinguished Obama over the past three years is his wish to be all things to all men. Before the election, this approach worked brilliantly. He was rarely challenged with hard questions, and he had the privilege of being the critic, not the man in the ring. He appealed to liberals because he was one of them, to moderates because he sounded like one of them, and even to a few gullible conservatives who hoped he might be another John F Kennedy, one of the now-extinct breed of tough-minded American liberals.

The magic of this approach could not survive contact with reality. Being in opposition means saying you can do it better. Being in government means doing it better, and that means making choices. More than that, though, it means sticking up for the choices you make. All too often, Obama has failed to do either.

Nothing is more emblematic of Obama’s failings than the Libya mess. The US is nominally at war in an Arab state, failing to protect the Libyan people, tied up in the United Nations, committed to Gaddafi’s removal, and letting Britain and France do the fighting. Obama’s desire to be a man of peace, a friend of international institutions, a good ally, and an armed defender of human rights has only made him look incoherent.

At home, the words are different, but the tune is the same. Obama has blamed high gasoline prices for his unpopularity. But his Transportation Secretary stated that his goal was to “coerce people out of their cars”.  High gas prices are a means to that end.

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Meanwhile, Obama encourages Brazil to drill for oil offshore and refuses to license offshore drilling in America, while condemning US oil imports and attacking the price-raising “conspiracy” that economists call supply and demand.

Obama’s rhetoric used to inspire many. But now it barely moves the needle: it takes the death of bin Laden to produce a bounce. That’s because all of Obama’s speeches are the same: the 30,000 foot elevation truth that America has common values, the rejection of “false choices”, and then a raft of new government programmes. His intention is to imply that what he wants to do is so in tune with America’s values that it is inevitable, and thus not really a choice at all.

But it is a choice. When Obama threw out his entire defence plan, announced only a year ago, and demanded more cuts in defence spending, that was a choice. When he delivered a budget, paused, and then demanded a do-over, that was a choice. And when he unbelievably defended his health care as a way to both expand coverage and save money, that was a choice.

After the 2010 election, there was speculation that Obama would pull a Bill Clinton and move to the centre. That worked for Clinton, but it will be harder for Obama because he is genuinely a man of the Left. While the President deserves great credit for ordering the strike on bin Laden’s compound, the timing of that success was fortuitous: it came along at just the right moment to give moderate voters a hope that Obama might be a tough-minded liberal after all.

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But you can’t kill bin Laden every day. Obama’s winning coalition relied on the Left’s energy. His efforts to blame gas prices on speculators, his economic populism, and his refusal to be serious about entitlement reform imply he’s decided that, above all, he needs to secure his base.

If Obama is going to run as a moderate, he needs to change his tune. It’s impossible to imagine a moderate saying, as Obama did in mid-April, that the US “would not be a great country” without its entitlement programmes. The greatness of the United States doesn’t rest on who gets to cash a government cheque. It rests on the idea of self-government under law. The President owes the powers of his office to that American system. If he cannot stand up for it, he condemns only himself.

A White House aide recently described Obama’s foreign policy as “leading from behind”. Given his beliefs, that’s understandable. But the American people don’t expect to find their leaders by looking over their shoulders. They expect to see them in the front lines, at home and abroad. Reagan had a time for choosing. Obama has spent too much of his time rejecting false choices.

That is because the President is a liberal. If he spoke candidly about the choices he prefers, he would do far worse. His leadership in Abottabad commended him to the common sense of the America people, but if the rest of his policies do not embody that common sense, his bounce will not endure.

Ted Bromund is a senior research fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, based at The Heritage Foundation in Washington.

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