William Broyles, Newsweek: Oval Office Appeaser

When Barack Obama was inaugurated, a Republican president had taken the peace, prosperity, and budget surpluses of the Clinton years and given us two wars, a devastated economy, and an almost trillion-dollar deficit. Obama was going to be our Franklin Roosevelt, our Winston Churchill—a visionary leader who would give America hope again. Instead, he has turned out to be the Neville Chamberlain of American politics, drifting toward national catastrophe, one compromise at a time.

-snip-

Chamberlain had a weak hand and played it poorly. Obama had a strong hand and threw in his chips. Immediately after his inauguration, he could have announced a bold effort to put America back to work—not a stimulus, but a recovery. When the Republicans threatened to filibuster, he could have taken his case to the American people and demanded an up-or-down vote to save the country.

Instead, Obama meekly allowed the 60-vote super-majority needed to shut off a Senate filibuster to become, for the first time in our nation’s history, an automatic veto. No fools, the Republican minority used that power to block everything. If a vital new program didn’t automatically have 60 votes, Obama wouldn’t even bring it up. It was unilateral disarmament. And so we drifted toward disaster with half-measures forged in back rooms, from the timid stimulus that was a meager Band-Aid, to the timid health-care bill that no one likes, to the timid sellout deals on the deficit.

-snip-

Emboldened by Obama’s appeasement, the GOP has set its sights on dismantling government itself. Its long-range goal isn’t to bring down the deficit. It’s to “starve the beast,” to gut the social programs that both parties have forged over the past century. And Obama has compromised so far in their direction that it’s hard to tell where he might stop.

-snip-