'We Can't Wait'

 

 

The Republicans have a new campaign slogan. Wait, make that the Democrats.

By JAMES TARANTO

Barack Obama's 2008 campaign for president was masterful at generating vapid slogans: "Yes, we can," "Hope," "Change you can believe in" and so on. At a time when the nation was in a grumpy mood and inclined to take it out on the incumbent party, such sweet nothings were appealing, or at least not revolting, to a majority of voters.

So what is Obama to do now, when the nation is in a grumpy mood and inclined to take it out on the incumbent party, and that's his party? This column has had some fun in recent months formulating absurd Obama campaign slogans. According to Jonathan Chait, a peevish prose stylist for New York magazine, so has the Obama campaign.

Chait aims to correct the impression that Obama lacks "a campaign theme":

The fact that high-information voters like [British journalist] Edward Luce and [former Enron adviser] Paul Krugman seem unaware of it suggests that Obama might need to hit the theme a little harder. But the theme is "We Can't Wait." Charlie Savage [of the New York Times] reports that Obama actually came up with the slogan himself in a staff meeting. The idea is that Republicans are blocking any action to help bolster the economy, and so Obama is going ahead himself, either taking whatever unilateral actions are available, or demanding that Congress act (and thereby exposing them to blame when they inevitably refuse).

As an aside, if Chait is correct that Edward Luce is voting in American elections, this may be quite an exposé. As far as we know, Luce is not a U.S. Citizen.

Associated Press

Hurry, hurry!

Anyway, we actually knew Obama had been using "We can't wait" as a slogan; we noted it six months ago. But we didn't realize it was a campaign slogan. If Chait is right and that's what it is, it's a terrible one. It sounds like it ought to be the slogan for the challenger, not the incumbent: We can't wait to get this guy outta here! Mitt Romney could even come up with slogans for himself that are hybrids of the Obama '08 slogan: Change you can believe in: We can't wait!

As far as we understood it back in October--and this is what the Savage piece says too--"We can't wait" is not a campaign slogan per se but a slogan to justify various executive actions, some of dubious legality, that Obama is taking to avoid having to deal with Congress, now that Republicans have a House majority.

The left, of course was apoplectic at George W. Bush's assertions of wartime executive authority. Michael Barone has observed that all procedural arguments are insincere (including this one), but some of the left's defenses of Obama's domestic power grabs are priceless. "I was appalled, and so was the Times editorial board (and so, in fact was Senator Barack Obama) [at] Mr. Bush's use of presidential signing statements and executive orders," admits Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of the New York Times. "But I am not appalled by the way Mr. Obama is relying on those instruments."

Hey Andy, would you like an order of fries with that double standard?

The Washington Post's Greg Sargent is as clueless as Rosenthal is hypocritical:

For a long time now, I've thought that merely blaming Republicans for obstructing all of Obama's recent policy proposals to create jobs would not be enough of a message. The danger all along has been that swing voters have already accepted that Republicans are trying to scuttle Obama's efforts to fix the economy for purely political reasons, and that they chalk this up to politics as usual. Swing voters could end up wondering why Obama couldn't ram his agenda through in spite of determined political opposition, and conclude that his failure to do so just proves he's weak and ineffective.

Those whose objection to Obama is that he is "weak and ineffective" are not swing voters but hard-core leftists. A few of them may be angry enough to vote Green, but most of them will cast ballots for Obama. Sargent seems to have forgotten the period from January 2009 through November 2010, when Obama, with the help of overwhelming Democratic congressional majorities, did "ram his agenda through," and swing voters responded by swinging toward the not-so-long-ago-discredited GOP.

Best of the Web columnist James Taranto on President Obama's new slogan "We Can't Wait." Photo: Getty Images

Which is another reason "We can't wait" is a dumb slogan. It reinforces what may be Obama's worst quality: his impatience with America and with its constitutional system of checks and balances. Again, hard-core lefties share the urgency for, as Obama put it in 2008, "fundamentally transforming the United States of America." But if that constituency were big enough to win him re-election, we'd have been fundamentally transformed ages ago.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune reports that "Social Security and Medicare . . . Are sliding closer to insolvency, the federal government warned Monday in a new report underscoring the fiscal challenges facing the two mammoth retirement programs as baby boomers begin to retire":

Medicare, which is expected to provide health insurance to more than 50 million elderly and disabled Americans this year, is expected to start operating in the red in its largest fund in 2024, according to the annual assessment by the trustees charged with overseeing the programs.

And the Social Security trust fund, which will provide assistance to more than 45 million people in 2012, will be unable to fulfill its obligations in 2033, three years earlier than projected last year.

Can we wait to deal with these impending disasters? To judge by Obama's actions in his first term, yes, we can