Cap & Trade

JewishWorldReview.com published an article written by Obama supporter Ruth Marcus entitled “Change We Can’t Believe In?”. In it she expresses concern about “the dangerously wide gap between Obama’s idealistic campaign-trail promises and the gritty realities of governing”.

Candidate Barack Obama offered a lofty vision of how his White House would operate. When the details of health reform were being hammered out, he vowed, “We’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.”

The campaign even aired an ad singling out Billy Tauzin, the drug industry’s chief lobbyist. “The pharmaceutical industry wrote into the prescription drug plan that Medicare could not negotiate with drug companies,” Obama said in the ad. “And you know what? The chairman of the committee, who pushed the law through, went to work for the pharmaceutical industry making $2 million a year. Imagine that.”

Now, it turns out, the Obama White House has cut a backroom — actually, Roosevelt Room — deal with Tauzin: Drugmakers would ante up $80 billion in savings in return for a promise that Medicare wouldn’t be allowed to negotiate drug prices.

“We were assured: ‘We need somebody to come in first. If you come in first, you will have a rock-solid deal,’ ” Tauzin told the New York Times.

Imagine that………

In reality, Obama’s campaign did not always live up to Obama’s rhetoric: He summoned voters to “a politics that calls on our better angels” but stooped to scare tactics when political need required them. As I wrote last October, “Better angels, it seems, do not make the best campaign strategists.” Or, I’d add, the best White House advisers………..

Clear positions yield to political realities… The campaign climate-change plan to auction off all emissions permits morphs, without a presidential peep, into a House-passed measure that would hand out 85 percent of the permits as political candy to mollify lawmakers in districts that would be hit hard by strict emissions limits………..

It is easy to proclaim the need “to restore our Constitution and the rule of law,” harder to resist a continuation of Bush policies on issues such as the invocation of the “state secrets” privilege and the use of presidential signing statements.

It is easy to talk about a new era of engagement with Iran and North Korea, harder to figure out what to do when those regimes — murdering protesting citizens or conducting provocative missile launches — prove intransigent.

But the greatest peril for Obama, I think, lies in the question of whether he can produce the new, post-partisan, surmounting-special-interests politics that he envisioned during the campaign. In a month of raucous town hall meetings and stalled legislation, that hardly seems likely. The secret deal with Tauzin can only deepen the skepticism.

Which leads to the core question facing the still-young administration: What happens when people start to wonder whether they can really believe in this change?

It is difficult for me to imagine Mr. Obama proclaiming the need “to restore our Constitution and the rule of law,”  The campaign seems like it was eons ago.  So much has happened since then to make mockery of those words and demote them from their lofty pedestal of cliched but idealistic promises to the gutter of shameless demagoguery.  Honest liberals such as the author who bought into the eloquently idealistic rhetoric of the campaign, must soon awaken to the betrayal.

Please read this article in its entirety at
Change We Can’t Believe In?

You can track H.R.2454 American Clean Energy And Security Act of 2009 here: H.R.2454 American Clean Energy And Security Act of 2009

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