Your turn at the Soapbox

Obama Backtracking on Wide Range of Policy
--Ed Morrisey
(article provides direct quotes from Obama)

"...........Less than 48 hours after telling CNBC that his health-insurance plan was fully funded and would not get affected by a massive government bailout of the credit markets, Obama has reversed himself and put his expensive federal programs on hold.

"...........Now Obama wants us to forget the massive spending that he proposed because the Treasury bailout will pre-empt it. Okay, fair enough. But even before the credit market meltdown, we faced (and still face) an entitlement program meltdown of even larger dimensions. Neither candidate has adequately addressed that, but at least John McCain acknowledges its existence and its size. Obama has campaigned on adding to that burden without the least thought of reform, at least until he belatedly realized that the money simply doesn’t exist now, and it never really did.

"............The most amazing part of this is that he reached this conclusion not at the start of the current meltdown, but more than a week later. The general parameters of the bailout were widely known on Friday afternoon. Sunday morning, Obama tells John Harwood that it won’t affect his big-spending policies, since they’re “paid for”, in his words. By Tuesday morning, Obama’s hitting reverse. What happened to all that funding? Obama realized that the meltdown will rock the economy, and all of those soak-the-rich tax increases will produce little or no revenue — and imposing them will worsen an economy threatening to go into shock.

"Obama appears to be seriously adrift. Circumstances have forced him out of the entire range of his domestic policies, including a middle-class tax cut, while the two Democrats seem more at war with each other than with Republicans. What argument does he have left for the Presidency — his deep executive and foreign-policy experience?"