Obama’s presidency began a year ago next week, more than two months before his inauguration
October 27th, 2009 at 08:12am Pat Cunningham
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 Jonathan Alter ARGUES that Barack Obama’s presidency already is a year old, or will be on November 4.
 A few excerpts:
 Election night 2008 went late in Chicago. Many campaign staffers who had spent two years helping Barack Obama get elected celebrated in Grant Park until the wee hours. But if senior aides were under the impression they might get the following day off, they were mistaken. Obama’s transition director, John Podesta, scheduled a senior staff meeting for the next morning, Wednesday, Nov. 5, at 10:30 a.m. Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, figured it would take a half hour, 45 minutes tops, to bat around some scheduling options and maybe even tell a few war stories from the campaign. But the soon-to-be commander in chief had other plans. To him, Wednesday was another workday—or, more precisely, the first day of his presidency…
 Normally a new presidency begins with the inauguration in January. But Barack Obama’s tenure really started in November, a full year ago, when he became the de facto co-president of the United States. Obama couldn’t yet sign bills or issue executive orders. He and his family couldn’t sleep in the White House. Having resigned from the Senate, he was technically a private citizen— a man with no constitutional authority. But these were formalities. For the first time in modern American history, an incoming president made some of the most important decisions of his term—about the economy, mainly, but also about energy, education, and health care—before taking office. If “to govern is to choose,” as John F. Kennedy said, then Obama was already governing.
 ”We only have one president at a time,” Obama insisted repeatedly before he was inaugurated. While this was the right thing to say, it wasn’t really true.
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4 Comments Add your own
1. richard | October 27th, 2009 at 9:56 am
I dare say that there is a consensus over one issue in this country: federal government spending is out of control. This is not exclusive to Barack Obama and the Democrats. We have been spending wildly for decades. President Bush doubled spending during his tenure. The difference is that now the people of this country are starting to understand the ramifications of this runaway spending. They get it. The other difference is that politicians (like Obama) were elected based on their campaign promises to rein in spending, and they haven’t followed through. The people of this country are starting to realize that all political promises to reduce spending - or to slow down spending increases — were nothing but a bunch of horsesqueeze. Politicians don’t increase their power by cutting spending. They can get elected by promising .. but they won’t stay in office by delivering. Once you’re enthroned in Washington you quickly learn that you buy votes to stay there.
So here is what I want you to remember. You elected Barack Obama to the White House. You put the Democrats in charge of Congress with supermajorities. Under their watch .. under complete Democrat leadership … domestic discretionary spending for the fiscal year 2010 will increase by 12.1%.
Got that? That is a 12.1% increase in domestic federal spending from years prior. THAT is apparently what Democrats call change you can believe in.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204518504574416631441797424.html
2. expdoc | October 27th, 2009 at 10:52 am
That’s good, because then we can extend to one year the time period it took for BO to play more golf than George Bush did while in office. Our high quality MSM (ABC) actually did a serious news story analyzing this fact and the fact that until last week, he had only played golf with men. LOL.
3. richard | October 27th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Thomas Sowell kind of hits this point into a 1 year perspective…….
Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many “czars” appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?
Did you think that another “czar” would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers– that is, to create a situation where some newspapers’ survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?
Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called “experts” deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?
Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?
Does any of this sound like America?
How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough.
How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.
We already have local police forces all across the country and military forces for national defense, as well as the FBI for federal crimes and the National Guard for local emergencies. What would be the role of a national police force created by Barack Obama, with all its leaders appointed by him? It would seem more like the brown shirts of dictators than like anything American.
How far the President will go depends of course on how much resistance he meets. But the direction in which he is trying to go tells us more than all his rhetoric or media spin.
Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to “change the United States of America,” the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.
Jeremiah Wright said it with words: “God damn America!” Bill Ayers said it with bombs that he planted. Community activist goons have said it with their contempt for the rights of other people.
Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children.
Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn’t know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?
Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government– people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America’s influence in the world.
Any miscalculation on his part would be in not thinking that others would discover what these stealth appointees were like. Had it not been for the Fox News Channel, these stealth appointees might have remained unexposed for what they are. Fox News is now high on the administration’s enemies list.
Nothing so epitomizes President Obama’s own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year– each bill more than a thousand pages long– too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question– and the biggest question for this generation.
4. Juice | October 28th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
The Obama scared the hell out of Baby-boomers with the threat of socialism, big spending, etc. and they all pulled out their money and are now sitting at 50% worth. Smart people went “all in” at Dow 6700 and are walking tall at 40% new profit. Thanks Obama, it was a no-brainer. “Ain’t he something’”
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