If There Was No Obama There Would Be No Trump!

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More thoughts on why our politics in 2016 are so fucked up...


The Obama Referendum

Instead of repairing the engine of American growth, he chose redistribution.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

March 15, 2016 6:52 p.m. ET


President Obama this week washed his hands of the tone of our politics, as if somebody else had been president the past seven years. “The nasty tone ... I have certainly not contributed to,” he told a Rose Garden assembly.

He is out of his mind, of course. What is Bernie Sanders if not a repudiation of Obama 2008, a left-liberal Democrat who does not hide his sympathies or try to fool the American people into voting for him?

What is Ted Cruz if not antidote for voters who see Mr. Obama as a kind of American Salvador Allende, who gamed our system and imposed policies the American people never sought? (Yes, such voters exist.)

What is Donald Trump if not the candidate of a country that, after Mr. Obama, believes Washington is so besotted with its own myopic ambitions that it has forgotten the American people?

Remember “Republicans for Obama”? His GOP supporters in 2008 may have intuited best the opportunity Mr. Obama blew. On Election Day, 9% of self-described Republicans told exit pollsters they voted for Obama, half again as many who had voted for John Kerry in 2004.

One of them, Robert Lucas, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, later said, “I thought he was going to be more Clinton-like in his economics and politics. I was caught by surprise by how far left the guy is.”

Mr. Obama chose expanding government—redistribution and regulation—over repairing the broken engine of American confidence and growth, as if the urgent matter was to re-enact the priorities of Western Europe circa 1975. Alas, our transformational president couldn’t transform himself. He couldn’t see beyond his campus-lefty shibboleths to what the country needed of him.

For whom exactly was Mr. Obama acting? It wasn’t his party. As Dana Milbank enumerated in the Washington Post the other day: “Since Obama’s election in 2008, Democratic losses at all other levels have been staggering: 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats, 910 state legislative seats, 30 state legislative chambers and 11 governorships.”

His bait and switch paid no benefits for the workers and middle class he claims to champion. Today, a smaller percentage of U.S. working-age men have jobs than do their counterparts in Germany, Britain, Japan, Canada...

By 2012, Mr. Obama’s share of the Republican vote was identical to John Kerry’s.

Larry Summers, his first-term adviser, may have inadvertently provided the best epitaph for the Obama era in a speech this month in Chicago. Whether your concern is America’s growing debt, its declining international prestige or stagnant middle-class incomes, Mr. Summers said, “there is no more important question for the American prospect than accelerating the rate of economic growth.”

Even another 0.5% annual GDP growth would have gone a long way in soothing the anxieties of today’s electorate.

Mr. Obama himself, in his final State of the Union address, was reduced to arguing that America isn’t a failing state, and it isn’t. But when a president gets his times so wrong; when he so botches the opportunity to get them right; when he so pigheadedly substitutes his agenda for the country’s, it amounts to a kind of failing of the state anyway.

The occasion for Mr. Obama’s Rose Garden hand-washing, naturally, was the rise of Donald Trump. Maybe this is the moment to plumb a mystery and ask whether Mr. Trump can be the president the country needs.

His policy talk so far is not encouraging, but his talk of deal making, of flexibility, is. A trade war with China would solve no real problem. He and his fans don’t seem to appreciate that, in our fracturing world, our economic integration with Mexico (and Canada) is a blessing and strength.

But Mr. Trump is a business guy. His contacts are business people. He wants results, and results don’t come from melting down the global trading order.

We have yet to see, of course, whether he can dig up the money for a national race where the swing voter is watching “Dancing with the Stars,” not Fox News—i.e., can’t be reached with free media.

We haven’t seen the ads the Democrats will run against him. There will be horror-movie music: They will accuse him of discriminating against minority tenants in his buildings, stiffing middle-class contractors in his bankruptcies, doing business with the mob, insulting the 51% of potential voters who are women.

As with any presidential candidate, you don’t know what you’re going to get when he’s in office. You pay to find out. Our gut is that divisive candidates don’t make pro-growth presidents, no matter how good their tax plans. Republicans can still hope for deliverance at their Cleveland convention, but Mr. Trump might make it easier for more Americans to vote for him by emphasizing that all his actions in office would be geared toward delivering faster growth for the U.S. economy.