Ambrose: Rocky first 100 days

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In the midst of emitting oohs and ahs over Barack Obama's first 100 days or so as president, Joe Klein of Time magazine quotes with glowing approval some words his hero spoke in a speech at Georgetown University.
"It is simply not sustainable," Obama said, "to have an economy where, in one year, 40 percent of our corporate profits came from a financial sector that was based on inflated home prices, maxed-out credit cards, overleveraged banks and overvalued assets."
True enough, and if there is something economically sensible and consonant with basic liberties that can be done to reduce our current dependence on this country's runaway consumerism, fine and good.
But here's what Klein and other like-minded Obama enthusiasts fail to grasp -- that Obama's policies amount to a governmental equivalent of this excess. What he has in mind is an unaffordable shopping spree giving us inflated prices for everything, maxed-out loans from China, overleveraged budgets and overvalued programs that could well be all cost and no benefit.
Look, I understand the left's infatuation with some kind of Platonic remove from everyday realities. But there are hard facts bearing down on us, such as the $800 billion in a stimulus package that begins to look dwarfish next to budgetary ambitions that could double the national debt over the next decade.
That's not partisan Republicans talking. That's an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, which tells us that we're headed for annual deficits of $1 trillion. The figure comes on tops of tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities for our entitlement programs, and what this spells down the road is economic mayhem. Add all the new safety nets you want. They won't be enough to prevent hard falls from coast to coast. They may in fact make them more likely.
On top of that overindulgence come any number of out-of-the-gate policies and actions that, it seems to me, put Obama to date more in a presidential camp with, say, Millard Filmore, than with Abraham Lincoln:
-- His energy policies are worse than neglectful of our best chance -- nuclear power -- and rely on California to dictate auto emission policies. That decision could wreck Detroit if it ever recovers from its own stupidities and those now being imposed on it by the Obama autocrats. The president's cap-and-trade carbon tax idea could be economically catastrophic while achieving next to nothing.
-- In recently giving a nod of the head for possible prosecutions of officials in the Bush administration and the establishment of a "truth commission" investigating suspected Republican evil, Obama just may have turned American transitions of power into viciously punitive gotcha games.
-- In foreign dealings, he has insulted our British allies, bowed to a Saudi Arabian king, glad-handed a Latin American dictator, offered a mea culpa to the same Europe we have saved several times this past century, reacted timidly to a North Korean provocation and engaged in a PR gimmick to win over a still-threatening, very dangerous Iran. His policies in Afghanistan make sense to me, but he has failed to win more help in that desperate, difficult conflict from Europe.
-- Despite pledges, he has already hiked taxes on low-income groups (more money for cigarettes) while doling out gifts to the well-off (through health insurance).
Those enthralled with the Obama record point to how much he has done in so short a time, which, of course, is part of the problem unless you assume, as they apparently do, that he has absolute wisdom and there is no need for deliberation, debate, caution, prudence.
It is clear that he is trying to take advantage of his high approval ratings and the klutziness of a much-diminished opposition party, knowing full well some opportunities could dwindle in years to come, but so could opportunities for the whole nation if he does not slow down.

(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)

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