Obama Disappoints the Left – by Rich

Obama is now backing away from his plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts.  His campaign promise to pay for $4 trillion in new spending by squeezing the filthy rich (aka those making more than $250k a year) and repealing Bush’s modest tax cuts to the rest of us seemed sound.  Astonishingly though, It turns out that raising taxes on anyone in the middle of a recession is not such a hot idea.  Reality intrudes and the tax cuts stay.

This actually seems to be part of a larger pattern as Obama transitions into office and, as a conservative, I couldn’t be more pleased.  As he fills out his cabinet and makes other appointments, I get the distinct feeling that we could possibly have done worse in some ways if McCain had won.  Don’t get me wrong: I fully expect my conservative sensibilities to be deeply offended before long.  But it’s interesting that the guy who ran around the world talking about bankrupting the coal industry, raising a civilian army (?), closing Gauntanamo, and causing the oceans to recede appears to be preparing to govern from the center.  Funny how things change when you actually have to make the decisions that effect 300 million people’s lives.

Which brings me to President Bush.  Liberals love to pronounce him the “Worst President In The History Of Our Country.”  And possibly in the history of the universe!  Of course history will be the judge of that.   And history’s judgment will be based in part on the fact that our country hasn’t been attacked in more than seven years.  I was thinking of this as I was reading Mark Steyn’s excellent column on the intricately planned terrorist attack in India this week. 

As Steyn points out, there is a reason why this hasn’t happened in America recently.  And it’s because when he’s not shredding copies of the constitution and listening in on my phone calls, President Bush is making the hard decisions that are necessary to protect our country.  Obama will have to decide if he is going to honor every promise he’s made to those on his far-left flank, or if he’s going to make the same difficult decisions that President Bush has made in order to keep us safe. 

It’s probably too much to expect Obama to keep Guantanamo open, but I look forward to the reaction from his multitudes of liberal fans when they discover that his foreign policy is not the ”change” they were hoping for.  Faced with out current reality, liberal dreams of “hope” and “change” will likely be dashed.  And many of President Bush’s decisions will be validated as Obama decides he has no choice but to continue with the status quo.