Will 2012 be a good year for Barack Obama? His job approval ratings reached a six-month
high this week on the back of news that had he had secured a payroll tax cut for American workers. He’s also benefitting from the conclusion of the Iraq war and the fact that, with next week’s Iowa
caucuses fast approaching, his Republican opponents look hopeless.
Obama’s populist re-election message, in which he says, in effect, that he is the good guy and it is only the filthy Republicans and the corrupt Washington system holding him back, seems to be working. But should it? In this week’s Spectator, I ask whether the Obama administration can really get away portraying the President as the ‘fair shake’ candidate. His record is much dirtier than his admirers like to admit. Here’s a snippet for CoffeeHousers:
‘The Obama administration has repeatedly, at times scandalously, failed to practise what it preaches. Obama came to power saying that lobbyists “won’t find a job in my White House”, then he appointed dozens of them to his administration. On 21 January 2009, he introduced by executive order a new “ethics pledge” to bar what Washingtonians call “the revolving door” — the system whereby highly paid bureaucrats rotate between senior government posts and private-sector jobs in companies with an interest in talking to the government. “The pledge,” said Obama, “represents a clean break from business as usual’ and ‘will help restore faith in government”. It didn’t. Senior White House staff have carried on swapping posts in his administration for fat salaries in the private sphere. In December last year, for instance, Peter Orszag, who served almost two years as Obama’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, became vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup, a role which, according to the Financial Times, would involve “dealing with clients and top government officials rather than running a business”. Another example is Cathy Zoi, who left her job as assistant secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) at the US Department of Energy to work for a George Soros fund that invests in green energy. Soros is a major Democratic donor, as it happens. At the start of his presidency, Obama — channelling the other Roosevelt, Franklin Delano — excited liberals with talk of a “Green New Deal”. The idea was that America could save the planet and make loads of money by becoming the world’s leader in environmentally friendly technology. To this end, the government diverted $16.8 billion towards EERE to fuel eco-innovation. Questions soon emerged about the integrity of EERE and Ms Zoi, however. Her husband was an executive at Serious Materials, a small window manufacturer which was reportedly the first green company to receive a stimulus cheque. The Obama administration also backed a dysfunctional green business called Solyndra to the tune of $535 million. It later emerged that several of Solyndra’s shareholders and executives had made generous donations to Obama’s presidential campaign. Liberals find it easy to forgive sins committed in the name of protecting mother earth. It’s harder for them to excuse the fact that what was meant to be Obama’s great legislative achievement — healthcare reform — was undermined by his administration’s collusion with lobbyists. Obama’s initial bill contained amendments to stop the government over-paying for drugs through the federal health scheme, Medicare. Yet the White House soon dropped those clauses after it struck a deal with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the leading lobby group for US drug companies. In exchange, PhRMA companies supported the bill, not least with lots of TV advertising. Another much-trumpeted Obama reform was to introduce “net neutrality” laws. Far from being neutral, the rules hugely benefited web giants such as Google and Amazon. All of which should make the idea of Obama as the “fair shake” President seem silly. Yet he is comfortable playing the folksy populist, and, remarkably, many Americans still buy into the act. His admirers — the vast majority of the US press corps among them — invested so much faith in Obama in 2008 that they cannot easily come to terms with his failings.’
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