President Barack Obama is living in an “alternative universe” where crisis looms but all he does is give speeches rather than tackle the problem, The
Wall Street Journal said Thursday.
With $85 billion in automatic spending cuts due to hit on Friday, Obama has made no effort to speak to Congressional leaders to avert the so-called sequester, writes the paper’s Daniel Henninger.
“Barack Obama gives his State of the Union speech, the sequester looms, and the president flies around the country giving speeches. He’s had virtually no contact on the sequester with the legislative branch. Now he’s going to meet with them after the sequester happens. This is unusual. We need to look outside normal politics for explanations,” Henninger, the Journal’s deputy editorial page editor, writes in his weekly “Wonderland” column.
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“We are in the fifth year of the Obama presidency, and Washington is still dead in the water. Four straight years in which the government of the United States of America fails to enact a budget is, well, amazing,” he says.
Henninger posits that Obama is “creating an alternative universe, the Obamaian Universe.”
“In the Obamaian universe, the units of the private economy — companies large or small — are satellites orbiting the great fixed planet of public spending. All material and economic life in the Obama presidency radiates outward from a central source of public spending.”
Obama believes higher spending — made possible by higher taxes — is the only way to get the economy growing, says Henninger.
“This is why House Speaker John Boehner and so many others have never been able to get on the same page with the president about the upward slope of federal spending,” he writes. “He doesn’t want to cut spending. He wants more of it. Forever. Public spending is beyond ideology for Barack Obama. It’s the oxygen in his universe.”
The president would rather galvanize public opinion against the Republicans and blame the GOP for any fallout from the spending cuts than try to avoid them, claims Henninger.
“Maybe it’s time to come to grips with the fact that he sees the public economy of federal spending as the life force of the nation as no president ever has, not even Franklin Roosevelt.”
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