Twenty years of listening, each Sunday, to the demented ravings of Father Jeremiah; the relationship with unrepentant former terrorist Bill Ayers, as they squandered $100-million of the late Walter Annenberg’s money teaching Marxism but not raising test scores in Chicago; Obama’s relations with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn), now being investigated for extensive voter-registration fraud in 14 states; and Obama’s provenance from the roughest, crudest, political machine in the country, the Democratic Party that has ruled Chicago and its suburbs for 80 years; all have been ignored or glossed over, and have received less investigative attention than Joe the Plumber’s tax returns or Sarah Palin’s wardrobe.
In policy terms, McCain would lower taxes and spending and retain individual choice in medical care. Obama would “cut the taxes of 95% of Americans,” by which he means that the 40% of Americans who do not pay income taxes would receive “refundable tax credits” from the 60% who do, most of whom would receive tax increases. He has tried to sugar the pill of simply taking money from people who have earned it and giving it to people who haven’t by clothing it in the jolly and progressive phrase: “spreading the wealth around.” A tax increase at the start of a recession is playing Russian roulette with all chambers loaded.
Obama will also promote unionization of the work force, thus advancing that retrograde and declining cause of the departure of much of U.S. manufacturing to cheap-labour countries in the first place. If Obama takes his economic advice from Warren Buffett and Paul Volcker, catastrophe will be avoided. If he actually carries out his program, he will be the worst president since Warren Harding, and the most (inadvertently) destructive since James Buchanan brought on the Civil War.
It has been such a complicated election: A centre-right country is running some risk of a quirky and ill-starred lurch to the left under its first non-white president. Whatever else it may have become, the United States is a land of surprises.
