Chicken Little Politics

Via Powerline:

Earlier this evening, my wife had the Hannity show on television as she was working on dinner, and Sean showed clips of Barack Obama talking about his mortgage plan in which he used the word "crisis" probably twenty or thirty times to describe the current economic climate. This is one of the weird aspects of today's news: rather than trying to reassure businessmen and consumers, the Obama administration seems determined to provoke the maximum possible amount of panic, presumably because this will make it easier to rush sweeping pro-government legislation through Congress. One down-side, perhaps, is that the Dow has declined more than 2,000 points since Obama was elected president. While other factors no doubt predominate, it's hard to escape the conclusion that some part of that drastic decline is attributable to the near-hysteria emanating from the Executive Branch.

Everything's a crisis with the Democrats, and only they can fix it. The frustrating, maddening, spit-inducing fact is that so many people swallow it. I had a customer just a little while ago tell me that she thinks the president is trying to "help everyone." My tongue is nearly shredded from biting it, and we're only a month into his presidency.

The Fed also predicts that the unemployment rate will climb to somewhere between 8.5% and 8.8% this year. Again, not good. But the unemployment rate averaged 8.3% for the five-year period from 1980-1984. And at that time, it was combined with a devastating inflation that peaked at 13.6% in 1980, the last year of the Carter administration.

Yet I don't recall Ronald Reagan or others in his Administration trying to stoke panic when they came to power in 1981. Their attitude was one of quiet confidence, and they did everything possible to restore trust in America's economy, even as they justified that confidence by reducing inefficient regulations and cutting wealth-destroying taxes. No doubt the success of the Reagan Administration was due far more to the sound policies it followed than to any psychological impact of the confidence it inspired. Still, there is something to be said for reassurance.

Just one of the myriad of differences between Democrats and Republicans (in general...of course there are exceptions, like Specter, Collins, and Snowe). Ronald Reagan was a man, Bush is a man. Obama is a brat who believes the hype about him. He has never DONE anything except run for office. He is a media made monster, a committed leftist determined to steer this country into socialism. I only hope Jim is right about Sarah Palin kicking his spoiled butt in 2012. That should make Jesse and Al happy, they would be able to go back to their AMERICA IS RACIST chant.

JASmius adds: Democrats cannot govern without a "crisis" to "fix".  That was the purpose of the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb (aka the regulatory buttinsky-ism that gave as the infamous subprime mortgage market).  It served its purpose in creating a financial panic and recession right in time to get Red Barry elected.  But it's also human nature that panics don't last all that long, as evidenced by the number of "experts" who think that the economy could start rebounding before the end of this year.

Hence, King Hussein's apocalyptic squawking that failure to jam down Hogzilla would "turn an economic crisis into an economic catastrophe," a propaganda line that was belied by his minions' immediate expectation-lowering after its passage and the fact that B.O. couldn't be bothered to interrupt his cuckholding Valentine's getaway with Scheherezade to sign this "emergency measure".  And now that it's on to the next huge gusher of debt and communization, we're right back to the "crisis"-mongering.

Yeah, there are people who are easily stampeded by this kind of emotional manipulation.  But poured on this thick, I think it can't help but have a rapidly diminishing return.  I can't believe that the overriding priority of "fiscal responsibility" and "deficit reduction" that was the political coin of the realm since the early 1970s (as evinced by That '70s Guy himself paying lip service to it during the campaign) has simply up and disappeared.  Hogzilla was opposed by a majority of Americans, after all.  Congressional switchboards were melted by demands that it be defeated or at least slowed down.  I can't imagine that counter-dynamic abating as long as the Little President's hysterical hectoring continues (to say nothing of continuing to erode the DJIA).

That's proof, actually, that this is not the "worst economic crisis since the Great Depression".  FDR didn't have to actively attack public confidence in the economy because it really was completely in the waste extractor.  To the contrary, he did everything he could to bolster public confidence in general and in the New Deal in particular.  That's why he was re-elected three times running despite the spectacular failure of his statist interventionism to even make a dent in the Depression.  Indeed, in that sense Ronald Reagan was far more like FDR than Red Barry could ever be.

Barack Obama is Jimmy Carter on steroids, a little man trying to stampede the American people into giving up their civil and economic freedoms and any chance of restored economic growth and prosperity in exchange for "security" from a "catastrophe" that can only come from heeding his warnings.  Sooner or later - probably sooner - a majority of the public is going to tire of this Chicken Little act and demand a better justification for this debt orgy than "the sky is falling, the sky is falling".

UPDATE: As you might have anticipated, this load of "savior-based economics" is more of the same disease that is killing the patient.