Hubris is excessive pride or self-confidence; or, in one word, arrogance. Like art, you know it when you see it. The President’s speech of the 13th contained enough to go around, but one comment merits special attention. In his speech, he called Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal un-American.
Now, reasonable people will correctly infer that what the President meant was that a budget plan that cut certain programs was inconsistent with our values as Americans, somehow, and thus deserving of the “un-American” label. We could quibble at the fringes of this topic by discussing what he meant; what values we’re betraying, in his mind, by making an attempt at fiscal sanity. Let’s not do that. Let’s take another approach. Namely, there’s two gigantic pitfalls here that a politician of average intelligence should have seen, and avoided stepping in. The President didn’t, and instead has picked a strange fight. Now, most people will admit he is an intelligent man, so we can only look to the President’s ideology as his Achilles heel in this case.
Ryan’s plan, briefly, as the Weekly Standard notes “would cut 46 percent and $4.4 trillion from proposed deficit spending under President Obama’s budget, reform Medicare and Medicaid to put these programs on solid financial footing, and repeal Obamacare.” There are two problems with attacking Ryan’s plan as he did, and here I mean specifically calling it un-American.
Do you know what this document intends?
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
Got that? Anything deviating from the intended design (that design created and ratified by Americans in 1787), then, is more accurately deserving of the un-American label. Forget all of the touchy-feely intentions of nice people for a minute, Mr. President: it’s outcomes that count in the real world.
Secondly, and more damaging, this may very well be Mr. Obama’s “Mission Accomplished” moment: calling spending cuts un-American is a slap in the face of every American who can’t print money or borrow from the Chinese. Every individual, family or business has to be focused like a laser on 1. how much they make and 2. how much they spend. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had since the beginning of the recession with friends, family, and business owners, and they all have to be painfully aware of where every dollar comes from and where every dollar goes.
(Naturally if you work for the government, this all sounds like a foreign language to you.)
Rep. Ryan gets it. His budget proposal might not be perfect, but we have an extraordinary, existence-of-the-Republic-threatening problem on our hands. We’re $14 trillion in debt. Remember how President Bush was mocked endlessly for the “Mission Accomplished” banner? Calling the hard spending discipline that every American family has to do “un-American” further suggests that the President is out of touch and blinded by his ideology, two persistent knocks against him.
Not a good combination in your Commander-in-Chief.
