All Presidents shade the truth. Presidents lead governments, which as a subset of bureaucracies, depend upon euphemisms and spin to depict the reality they prefer for their audience, the electorate. Part of the beauty of a government bureaucracy is the ability to spread around responsibility in such a way that no one can ever be held personally responsible for decisions that produce poor results. This has been the "Way of the Bureaucracy" from time immemorial. It is likely that the first tax collector termed his collections "mutual protection services" so as to avoid acknowledging that he was using coercion to take what belonged to another for the use of himself and his fellow bureaucrats. It is never surprising when a government, which after all is the largest bureaucracy extant, calls things by names which do more to obfuscate than illuminate and it is only when a particular government takes euphemism to such an extreme degrees as to invite parody that the citizenry takes notice. When the President declaims in ways which invite questions about his veracity, he is treading a slippery and dangerous slope.
During the Vietnam War, as the conflict became less and less popular, the Johnson administration adopted more and more jarring ways to avoid accidentally telling the truth; their efforts eventually led to the "credibility gap." Ricard Nixon went so far as to commit and cover up felonies in his efforts to keep his activities hidden from the American people. Bill Clinton is rightly infamous for his parsing of language in ways meant to deceive. Clinton, Nixon, and LBJ, however, did not start their presidencies intending to deceive (at least no more than to the usual degree a new President intends to deceive.) Barack Obama, emerging as he does from a background deeply infused with modern academic thinking, is already at risk of developing his own "credibility gap" but the genesis of his credibility gap is quite different from his predecessors.
Lyndon Johnson's lies were more the result of wishful thinking than of overt and conscious fabrication. He believed in the prosecution of the Vietnam War, could not accept that our tactics needed to be changed, and believed those who told him that we were winning, even when our tactics precluded actually winning the war. His greatest lies were lies he told to himself and they cost him his Presidency.
Richard Nixon lied with full awareness of his lies; he was determined, like most liars, to avoid the consequences of his behavior. When caught, he was impeached and forced to resign in disgrace.
Bill Clinton had the most flexible definition of the truth and took full advantage of that flexibility. Yet, at bottom, his lies were the most tawdry. He lied to avoid admitting sexual transgressions and there is good reason to believe that he lied about so many other things in order to preserve an image of himself as he would wish to be seen; ie, Clinton lied to avoid shame and humiliation. His Presidency failed because of his lies.
Barack Obama's lies are of a different nature. Consider two such examples in which Obama and his administration are choosing to lie to the American people, both courtesy of Glenn Reynolds.
First, in re: President Obama's announcement that there are no earmarks in his budget:
POLITICAL WIRE: Top Obama Officials Have Earmarks In Bill.
UPDATE: CQ Politics:
Funny how items show up in spending bills without any notice — like an earmark for a president who promised not to seek any.
President Obama, who took a no-earmark pledge on the campaign trail, is listed as one of dozens of cosponsors of a $7.7 million set-aside in the fiscal 2009 omnibus spending bill (HR 1105) passed by the House on Wednesday.
And second, there is Obama's pledge that only the top two percent of us will pay more in taxes and it will not only pay for his spending but will cut the deficit in half in the 4 years of his first term:
THE TWO-PERCENT ILLUSION. “Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can’t possibly raise enough revenue to fund Mr. Obama’s new spending ambitions.”
As Daniel Henninger points out that Obama's promises are even more removed form reality than the typical promises we are used to from politicians, who always minimize the costs and maximize the benefits of their plans:
Mr. Obama acknowledged that this spending -- which in the public sector's new vocabulary is always "investment" -- will be costly. His read-my-lips moment was that no family with an income under $250,000 will pay a "single dime" in new taxes to support the construction of this new federal skyscraper. If that's still true in 2015, Mr. Obama will be walking back and forth across the Potomac River.
I suspect that when Barack Obama promises to extend medical insurance coverage to everyone while decreasing costs and assuring quality, he actually believes what he is saying. In a Post-Modern world, reality is what you believe it is; if you believe that raising taxes on the rich will raise unlimited amounts of money, it will be so. After all, according to this world view, the rich apparently are wealthy because money really does grow on tress, with no apparent effort required of the lucky or unfair wealthy; further since they are simply rich, stated as a fact of life rather than as an outcome of a process, any changes they may make in their behavior to minimize their tax liabilities (ie, change their investment strategies, work less so as to avoid triggering onerous marginal tax rates, etc) are simply ignored as inconvenient, therefore, nonexistent, truths.
On Wednesday, I linked to Maxed_Out_Mama, who noted that Barack Obama had never in his life had to balance the books. In the Post-Modern world, money is no longer real; it is an abstract magical talisman, invoked at will. In the Post-Modern world (of which the new "self esteem" math is an exemplar), 1 + 1 equals whatever you want it to equal.
The consequences for our economy of a President who refuses to recognize the limits of reality will be painful and difficult for all of us. Unfortunately, he refusal or inability to differentiate the world he wishes for from the world that exists, is likely to have even more serious consequences; that will be the topic for Part II.
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