Mark Steyn doesn’t like the way things are going:

It requires a perverse kind of genius for the 44th president not to have waited for a single “event” to throw him off course. Instead, he threw himself off: “Is Obama tanking already?“…”Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed?“. Whether or not it’s “already” failed or tanked, the monthly magazines still gazing out from their newsstands with their glossy inaugural covers of a smiling Barack and Michelle waltzing on the audacity of hope seem like musty historical artifacts from a lost age.

The ship didn’t need to hit an iceberg; it stalled halfway down the slipway. This is still the phase before “events” come into play, when an incoming president has nothing to get in the way of his judgment and executive competence. President Obama choseto nominate Tim “Indispensable” Geithner and Tom “Home, James!” Daschle, men whose enthusiasm for the size of the federal budget is in inverse proportion to their own urge to contribute to it. He choseto nominate as commerce secretary first the scandal-afflicted Bill Richardson and then the freakishly scandal-free Judd Gregg, and wound up losing both of them.

To be sure, the present state of the economy is an “event,” and has blown many governments around the world off course. But again: The hideous drooling blob of toxic pustules dignified as the “stimulus” bill is something the incoming Obama had months to prepare for and oodles of bipartisan goodwill and fawning press coverage to waft him along on. Instead, he choseto outsource it to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank and the rest of the congressional pork barons. So that, too, is not an “event” but merely, like his Cabinet picks, a matter of judgment and executive competence…

The “Buy American” provisions in the “stimulus” will invite certain retaliation around the world, wrote Jagdish Bhagwati, the Columbia economics professor, in The New York Times. This is presumably the same Jagdish Bhagwati who reassured a Toronto audience last year that he was endorsing Obama despite the senator’s anti-NAFTA anti-free-trade rhetoric because he didn’t think Obama really believed it. Today it’s even less clear what, if anything, Obama believes – and, even more critically, whether he has the wit or authority to impose those beliefs on a Congress whose operating procedure for the new era seems to be business as usual with three extra zeros on the end.

One of the pieces that Steyn refers to above is excerpted here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, Republicans, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.