A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Obama’s litany of bad ideas are catching up with him

Mark Steyn filled in for Rush Limbaugh two different days this week, and for my money, it was the best six hours of radio since the last two Michael Jordan-led Bulls Championship games in 1998.

Now Mr. Steyn has followed that performance up with a fantastic column on the problem President Obama keeps running in to: himself.

The president’s strategy on January 20 was to hurl all the vast transformative spaghetti at the wall — stimulus, auto nationalization, cap’n’trade, health care — and make it stick through the sheer charisma of his personality. Unfortunately, the American people aren’t finding it quite so charismatic, and they’re beginning to spot the yawning gulf between the post-partisan hopeychangey rhetoric and the budget-busting prosperity-throttling future-beggaring big-government policies.

No wonder the poor chap’s running out of material. At the time of writing, one of his exercises for America’s schoolchildren is to suggest what you’d like him to do in his next speech. Here’s mine: Call in sick, sir. You’ll be doing your presidency a favor.

The president is not our ruler but our representative, a citizen-executive drawn from the people. It is unbecoming to a self-governing republic to require schoolchildren to (to cite another test question) select the three most important words in the president’s speech.

Here's a perfect example of the spectacular work Steyn does when filling in for El Rushbo: