Obama and the Clinton cargo cult

David Goldman aka "Spengler" at First Things, has some terrifying observations about the economic plight of the United States. Here's an excerpt from his take on President Obama's State of the Union Address last night. Me? I couldn't bear to watch it. I rather liked following Twitter on it. Loved the fact that Father Z was tweeting on it. Anyway, here's the excerpt:

Obama hasn’t been retooled, of course, but he decked himself out in new trim: a spending freeze (that affects only 17 percent of the budget, $50 billion worth of accelerated depreciation for capital investment (extending his own 2009 extension of part of the Bush stimulus), a bit of middle class tax cuts, and the obligatory pork in the form of teaching and transportation subsidies. Didn’t Bill Clinton veer to the right and confound his critics?

Clinton slyly positioned himself to claim credit for the Great Expansion launched in 1983 by the Reagan tax reforms. Employment roared after 1995—the economy added five million jobs in the next two years. Clinton’s theft of welfare reform from the Republicans was like picking up lost money off the sidewalk. It was easy to push people off welfare into a booming labor market. Cutting the capital gains tax in 1997 helped the tech boom at the decade’s end.

In his attempt to emulate Clinton’s success, President Obama resembles nothing so much a the New Guinea aboriginals who built model airfields complete with straw control towers and airplanes after the Second World War and the departure of the American army. The Americans had summoned cargo from the sky through such magical devices, so thought the aboriginals, and by building what looked like airfields, so might they. But Obama can no more conjure up an economic recovery by doing things that look like what Clinton did, than the natives of New Guinea could draw cargo from the sky with straw totems. Marx’s crack about history repeating itself—the first time as tragedy and the second as farce—comes to mind.

It was one thing for Clinton to steal the Republican growth agenda when there was a Republican agenda, and there also was growth. As Dick Morris told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly just before Obama began speaking, “Bill Clinton could reposition himself because he could control his image. Obama will be an outcome based president. All will depend on what the economy and employment does. As long as the employment rate is where it is and the underemployment rate is where it is, people are not going to have a positive view of Obama, even if he stands on his head. He’ll move to the center and people will say ‘center, schmenter, show me the employment.’”