The Summer of Recovery Draws To a Close

Greetings from the Left Coast!

As the "Summer of Recovery" draws to a close, we have the chance to reflect on what an amazing summer it was. The Democrat juggernaught that looked unstoppable only a few months ago is coming apart at the seams, as the American public begins to realize that, in a brief spasm of credulity, they have managed to put the fox in charge of the chicken-house. President Obama's approval ratings have fallen through the floor: as of today, according to Rasmussen's Daily Presidential Tracking Poll, 44% of the nation's voters "strongly disapprove" of his performance, with only 27% strongly approving - an "approval index" of -17. In fact, President Obama has more people in the "Strongly Disapprove" column than George W. Bush did in his last full month in office - President Bush was only at 43%!

Why? Because the American people have discovered that nearly everything he claimed to be, he is not:

• He was supposed to be the post-racial candidate, yet he and his supporters are the ones who pull out the "race card" regularly and predictably. Apparently it is not possible for anyone to be opposed to President Obama's policies, any opposition to his agenda must be racism.
• He was supposed to be the great uniter - the one who would reach across the aisle and bring us all back together. Put an end to the partisan bickering. But his actual approach to bipartisanship, once his party actually controlled both houses of Congress, amounted to, "I won, you lost. So either fall in line, or sit down and shut up."
• His adminstration was to have been a paragon of openness. Yet we have seen multi-thousand-page bills crafted entirely by Democrats behind closed doors, and rammed through with not only no opportunity for Republicans to participate in the process, but without even the opportunity for the rest of the country to know what the bills actually said.
• His health care bill is now being exposed as the debacle that it is. Health insurance premiums are going up substantially across the board as insurance companies are being forced to comply with all of the new requirements. And that's just the beginning - there's not enough room in this post to do justice to the subject.

And, in the minds of many voters, it has become obvious that his administration has absolutely no clue how to actually make the economy better. All they've done is to spend money like proverbial drunken sailors, and distort every market they touch:

• State and local governments across the country have been spending beyond their means for years. Obama's stimulus package allowed them to dodge taking responsibility for their irresponsibility by pouring billions of tax dollars into preserving public sector jobs...for a while. Now the money is spent, and those state and local government budgets are still upside down, because it's the private sector economy that has to pay for those public sector jobs, and the private sector is still on its lips.
• The "Cash for Clunkers" program did indeed boost new automobile purchases...until the money ran out. Then automobile sales dropped through the floor again. Moreover, the used car market was hurt, and the auto repair business was hurt, because of regulations that required that cars traded in had to be junked. And the engines had to be deliberately ruined by replacing its engine oil with a sodium silicate solution and running it for a while - which meant that engine blocks and parts like pistons couldn't be sold by automobile recyclers. (The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.)
• Subsidies for new home purchases boosted home sales for a while...until the program ended. New home sales in May dropped off 32.7% compared to April, and were 18.3% below the May 2009 figure.

In fact, the main effects of the automobile and home purchase experiments were to prove - if it needed proving - that if you offered free money, a lot of people would take it (gee, who would have guessed that?), and to distort the markets by artificially boosting demand for a short period of time, followed by a drop off in demand to a lower level than it was in the beginning.

The one thing that apparently has never occurred to them is that letting people actually keep more of the money they earned might be a good thing. If they got to keep more of it, they just might spend more of it. And if the people who had money to invest - you know, those evil "rich people" - got to keep more of their money, they might invest more of it in ways that created private sector jobs. But, as John Kerry famously said last year, there's no guarantee that, left to our own devices, we would invest in the right things - which is why government has to do it for us.

And that's proven to be the last straw. The American people are just plain tired of having things rammed down their throats by the federal government that they don't want, and being told in the process that it's for their own good and they're just too stupid to realize it. We're tired of being called names like "racist," "hater," "islamophobe," or all of the above, ever time we disagree with something.

This whole American experiment in self government got started nearly 250 years ago over the issue of taxation without representation. And the Democrats are about to discover that there is no better way to feel the wrath of the American voter than to ignore the fact that they work for the people, not the other way around. Many of them are already trying to run from the tsunami of voter disapproval that's coming. In the next couple of months, you're going to hear more and more Democrats start sounding like Republicans. They're going to continue to try to distance themselves from Obama's policies. They're going to start talking about how unwise it would be to raise taxes on anybody while we're still mired in recession. Don't you believe it. If they somehow manage to hold onto power, they'll be right back to their old ways in a heartbeat.

If you want to change the direction the country is headed in, you must change who is in control of Congress this November. It's just that simple.

Thanks for listening.