Voters will recall excesses of a push to not waste crisis

Aug. 27, 2012
Energy represents a large piece of a gaudy policy mosaic likely to influence the US presidential election in November more than might be apparent at this stage of the race.

Energy represents a large piece of a gaudy policy mosaic likely to influence the US presidential election in November more than might be apparent at this stage of the race.

The reelection campaign of President Barack Obama insists that if economic conditions remain distressful, reasons are the enormity of problems left behind by the administration of George W. Bush and the intransigence of congressional Republicans. That view assumes American have short memories.

Yes, the economy roiled in crisis when Obama and his team took office. But they responded not by trying to fix what was broken but by trying to replace it.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, former White House chief of staff, famously remarked in 2008. Capitalizing on crisis, the Obama administration pushed into being a remake of health care so unpopular that many congressional Democrats paid for their support of it with their jobs.

The administration also set about to reengineer energy-use patterns, favoring expensive alternatives over cheaper oil, gas, and coal.

It imposed a regulatory approach, especially regarding the environment, that is nothing less than fanatic. And it pursued economic growth with rampant spending of public money in a Keynesian splurge that has produced barely any growth but massive government debt.

These are not isolated developments. They represent the systematic steps of a government determined to control and to grow, a government that welcomes crisis as opportunity, a government that thinks blaming predecessors for anything that goes wrong camouflages its own excesses.

This can’t be what most American voters want. The low-carbon fantasy the Obama government’s energy policies seek certainly isn’t what most Americans want to pay for. Results of the 2010 general election indicated a country recoiling from an effort to turn it into something it didn’t want to become. If voters remember the regulatory and legislative frenzy of Obama’s first 2 years in office, that period will prove to have been the first half of a one-term presidency.