Barack Obama’s job’s deficit currently stands at 8.3 million. After losing 4 million jobs in his first year in office Barack Obama vowed in his 2010 State of the Union Address he would not rest until U.S. businesses were hiring again.
That lasted for about a week.
Once again President Obama has pushed job creation to the background as he continues to focus on nationalizing health care.
The AP reported:
President Barack Obama’s furious, final push to get a health care bill passed threatens to shove aside the message he promised would top his list this year: creating jobs.
Even as the White House juggles several enormous issues at once, the public takes its cues about the president’s chief concern from how he spends his time, energy and capital. As Obama himself put it on Wednesday, from now until Congress takes a final vote on a health care overhaul, “I will do everything in my power to make the case for reform.”
That kind of now-or-never campaign means America can expect a debate consumed by health care, again, for weeks.
The White House is trying mightily to focus it on real people and the human cost of inaction. But there will be no escaping the same slog that turned off so many people in 2009 — congressional process, arm-twisting and doomsday rhetoric.
So what unfolds over the next few weeks will affect millions of Americans and alter the course of Obama’s presidency. He has a shrinking window in which to find enough votes within his party to pass health care legislation so he can free himself to spend more bully pulpit time on the single issue that has stoked the public ire since he became president — disappearing jobs.
Polling shows the economy remains a bigger personal worry to people than the cost, access and coverage problems endemic to the health care system.
Mark Steyn explained Obama’s insistence on passing his unpopular nationalized health care bill:
Why is he doing this? Why let “health” “care” “reform” stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?
Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”).
If health care passes Obama may lose some representatives and senators in 2010 and America may lose a couple more million jobs, but the left gains control of another one-sixth of the economy and guarantees the existence of a permanent big government nanny state. It would be a huge win for the radical left.
Related… Glenn Reynolds wrote today in The Washington Examiner about the dangers of a rogue government pushing radical changes without the consent of the people.
A nation whose government does not rest on the consent of the governed is a nation whose government holds sway only by inertia, or by force.
It is a nation vulnerable to political shocks, usurpation, or perhaps even political collapse or civil war. It is a body politic suffering from a serious illness. Those who care about America should be very worried.
Indeed.
