THE TELEGRAPH: The President's recent display of liberalism – and confusion – can only help the opposition, says Janet Daley.
The Republicans now believe they have a grip on what Barack Obama is about. At least for this week. The grip is subject to reappraisal because Mr Obama has developed a gift for reinventing himself with remarkable alacrity. One very senior commentator on the Right said to me, "First we had Candidate Obama, who was a liberal [ie Left wing]. Then we had President-Elect Obama, who was post-partisan and centrist. Now we have President Obama, who has reverted to being ultraliberal."
The question of who Mr Obama really is, and what he truly believes, underlies the growing list of Very Odd Things that seem to be happening under his administration. Among the most perplexing of these mysteries is why, when he went to such pains to assemble a huge and widely experienced team of White House economic advisers (even going to the lengths of parading them at a press conference before he took office) he then handed over the actual drafting of his economic policy to the old Democratic fixers in Congress. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, are now, for all intents and purposes, running the Obama recovery plan.
Even if you do not regard the former as a monster and the latter as pretty hopeless, one thing is for sure: bipartisan they are not. So there is nothing very centrist about the budget which they are hoping to push through under the banner of Obama's "change we can believe in". The result: this is a $3.6 trillion Pelosi budget, embodying most of the wish-list of liberal projects that the Left of the Democratic Party has been dreaming of for more than 20 years. Should we assume, then, that this is what Mr Obama always wanted? Or that he is simply out of his depth and being steamrollered by the formidable Democratic machine in Congress? >>> Janet Daley | Monday, March 16, 2009
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