Who Does Barack Obama Remind Me Of? BUSH. The indignant protestations from the Republicans notwithstanding, the two parties and potentates are interchangeable.
Dec 11, 2009: “… leaders say they will try to raise the ceiling to nearly $14 trillion as part of a $626 billion bill next week to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other military programs in 2010.”
September 11, 2003: Bush increases the ceiling on a whopping $6.8 trillion national debt.
Pleasing neoconservatives: Bush’s preemptive war doctrine never failed to bring a smile to Bill Kristol’s face. Pursuant to last week’s Nobel War Speech address, Obama too is making Bill warm all over.
Read the “Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize” to see why Bill is glowing.
Update (Dec. 15): The two converge on war and on chasing “fat cats” (bar the likes of Barney Frank):
Bush: “The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, courtesy of the Republican Party, cost American companies upwards of $1.2 trillion. The capital flight it initiated caused the London Stock Exchange to become the new hub for capital markets. Given America’s habit of forcing its habits on others, SOX struck fear into quite a few Liberal Democratic hearts in the House of Lords. Lord Teverson worried about the ‘increasing danger of regulatory creep from American regulators that threatens [Britain’s] own light-touch approach to financial regulation.'”
Barack: “A regulatory tsunami is on its way. ever-increasing regulation, stricter corporate-governance standards and the threat of higher taxes in response to the ballooning deficit. This week the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it considered carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant, raising the spectre of clumsy administrative measures to reduce emissions—a prospect even more terrifying to business than the cap-and-trade scheme currently under consideration in Congress. Meanwhile, hopes of business-friendly reforms to America’s convoluted corporate-tax regime, among other things, have fallen by the wayside. …
‘The concern is pervasive but rather amorphous in the sense that different executives have very different worries,’ says Joe Grundfest, a former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) who now runs a ‘boot camp’ at Stanford University for corporate directors. ‘Some fret over tax policy. Others agonise over cap-and-trade, or health-care reform. Many worry about additional corporate-governance regulations. It’s a smorgasbord of corporate neuroses out there.'”
Update II (Dec. 15): Peter Schiff, of course, is hip to the Bush/Barack overlap: “Through aggressive monetary and fiscal stimuli, we are trying to re-inflate a balloon that is full of holes. This was the Bush Administration’s exact response to the 2002 recession. It’s shocking how few observers note the repeating pattern, especially the fact that each crash is worse than the last.”
