Where will Obama go from here?
 

Where will Obama go from here?
President should back off from hard tactics and try for real bipartisan answers
After the bloodletting over the health care bill, President Obama is now at a crossroads.
Not one opposition member voted for his health care reform. That, along with tawdry buyoffs for fence-sitting members of the Senate and a reconciliation process that avoids another Senate vote have made a mockery of Obama's former healing campaign rhetoric.
In reaction, will the president now pick his next fights more carefully — avoiding the sort of shady legislative dealings and us-vs.-them rhetoric that helped ram this bill through?
Or will the methods used to pass "Obamacare," which many polls deemed unpopular leading up to this weekend's vote, become the model formula for a new damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead progressive agenda?
We will learn soon on a variety of issues.
Obama may well try again for a comprehensive cap-and-trade bill to reduce carbon inputs. The increased taxes resulting from such legislation would trickle down into added fees on power bills for households and businesses. Such European-style state regulation would delight his liberal base and cement his credentials as our first activist green president.
Yet, given the shaky economy and controversies over the very science of global warming, forcing cap-and-trade through would ensure more months-long acrimony — identical, in other words, to the health care fury.
Far easier world be a bipartisan effort aimed at more reliance on nuclear power, and radical expansion of drilling for vast deposits of domestic natural gas.
Pro-industry supporters would welcome the boost for employment and greater independence from costly foreign energy. Liberals could applaud fewer greenhouse gases than currently produced from existing coal-fired plants.
President Obama apparently also wants to do comprehensive immigration — and spoke of his plans in a taped video at this past weekend's immigration march in Washington.
But Obama's version of comprehensively solving illegal immigration through earned citizenship/ amnesty can likely only be pushed through by legislative gymnastics, demonizing the opposition as nativists and energizing partisan activists by paying them back for their blanket support in the 2008 campaign.
Far better for the country would be a bipartisan effort to take less-dramatic steps at ending the influx of illegal aliens.
The president could do an about-face and complete the stalled border fence, and enforce all existing laws against employers of illegal aliens — putting off the messy fight over amnesty and guest workers until the borders are secure.
Liberals and unions would welcome the rise in wages once low-income American laborers had fewer illegal competitors. Conservatives could be assured that without an annual addition of a million new illegal aliens, there would be greater chances for integration and assimilation within American society.
Then there are the now-record annual deficits and spiraling national debt. Even the new revenue from a promised return to the higher Clinton-era tax rates and a radical lifting on the caps on income subject to payroll taxes won't balance the budget.
So as Obama continues to grow the government, he'll bring on even more partisan fights over ever-higher taxes.
Or he can acknowledge that new local, state, payroll health-care and income taxes will soon take over 60 percent of incomes of precisely those who pay the majority of existing taxes — and decide instead to offer a real freeze of all federal spending to the rate of inflation.
What lessons will the president draw for the future from last week's health-care brawl?
I doubt it will be that the president and Congress should not ram through unpopular legislation on a strictly partisan and bare majority.
More likely, Obama's conclusion will be that a win is a win, and it's time to move on for more of the same bare-knuckles brawling.
If the latter is true, Americans may see more change but surely will end up with far less hope.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. E-mail him at author@victorhanson.com.

I like Victor Hanson's views, I believe they are rooted in reality.

As far as Obama getting my approval:

Some time ago I called Boxer, Feinstein, and Obama and related that Obama's presidency was due to a backlash against Bush, who ran his office as though he were CEO of a corporation rather than the elected head representative of a democracy.

I warned that if Obama's election was represented to be a mandate to do whatever the hell he and all those other Democrats wanted to do, much like Bush saw a mandate in his second term, there could be a significant backlash on them as well.

I didn't expect them to take my large hint... and they are out as control as ever. And Obama can bite me, screw him and his far left buddies including Boxer and Feinstein.

So here is to my personal expectation that the Democrats will be severely beaten down. I have no better love for the Republicans, but hope they can smash Democrat "bags" for an object lesson Democrats so richly deserve.

As well as the situation being recognized as an object lesson the Republican party also needs to heed, a party which needs to be woken up as to exactly who and what their constituency really is, which is not exclusively an exclusionary extremist religious far, far right nor has to do with corporations and campaign contribution money.

I'm sick of acumulative Republican destructive crap as well.

And that's the way it should be for all of us.