Hip new ideas from Barry and Nancy

'As Reason contributing editor David Weigel wrote in 2008, NAFTA was "a New Democratic victory over the old union elements of the party." But free-market Clintonism is dead, and the old union elements have returned to their traditional place in the party.'
http://reason.com/news/show/136112.html

I would amend that last sentence slightly- the old union elements have been returned by Barack Obama to their traditional place in the party. Very early on in the Presidential race, probably mid-2007, Mark Steyn did a piece about how underneath the Obama veneer was all the same tired statist/socialist claptrap circa 1950. From that point on, that became my template for measuring Obamas policies. Sure enough, if you ignored the occasional tactical divergence/lie Obama told specific groups to persuade them he was one of them, his policy positions were exactly of a piece with the mid-twentieth century orthodoxies. Talk about lipstick on a pig- how that dreary crap can represent Hope and Change I can't figure at all.

From his antipathy to NAFTA, his support for laws which would make unionisation of businesses vastly easier (and harder to get rid of), his support of nationalisation, his continued bashing of profit-making business, his gleeful anticipation of sitting down with Americas enemies and talking to them without preconditions, his support for using massive amounts of taxpayers money for supporting cherry-picked industries and causes, and his support for tariffs to 'protect' American industries; Obama is an old-school statist who believes the government just can't be wrong. That big labour should dominate big business. That the government knows better how to use taxpayer money than taxpayers do. And all the other useless, hoary old formulations of the mid-twentieth century.

Despite hauling down both the British empire and the Soviet empire, these catastrophically stupid ideas are still current, at least in one large White house in America. And one large domed building up the road from it. How truly truly pathetic.