After the Man Crush: O Stands for Oh No

Pity the poor ObamaCon...

Were these moderates and self-described conservatives for Obama really so naive to believe he'd still love them come morning?

Stuart Taylor, a spurned centrist, laments President Obama's hard left turn.

Having praised President Obama's job performance in two recent columns, it is with regret that I now worry that he may be deepening what looks more and more like a depression and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free.

With little in the way of offsetting savings likely to materialize, the Obama agenda would probably generate trillion-dollar deficits with no end in sight, or send middle-class taxes soaring to record levels, or both.

All this from a man who told the nation last week that he doesn't "believe in bigger government" and who promised tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans.

The numbers don't add up -- and still won't if and when, as seems almost certain, Obama ratchets up his so-far-fairly-modest new taxes on the top 2 percent. "A tax policy that confiscated 100 percent of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue," according to a February 27 editorial in The Wall Street Journal. "That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable 'dime' of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion."

Veteran politician watchers have forgotten the #1 rule: Ignore what they say and look at their record. There was nothing in Illinois State Senator or US Senator Obama's record that even hinted at either moderation or bipartisanship.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/or_20090307_2566.php