Stuart Taylor Concedes Centrists Fear Obama Fooled Them
Instead of using "fraud" and "class warfare," however, Mr. Taylor politely referred to "deceptive" suggestions and promoting "class resentment."
When National Journal's independent centrist Stuart Taylor called public attention to what he characterized as conservative icon "Margaret Thatcher's 1980 wise warning against" "[t]he illusion that government can be a universal provider, and yet society still stay free and prosperous," "[t]he illusion that every loss can be covered by a subsidy" and "[t]he illusion that we can break the link between reward and effort, and still get the effort" in his latest article, titled "Obama's Left Turn" and subtitled "Centrists fear that the president's budget reveals his liberal leanings," it signaled that Mr. Taylor had become disillusioned with President Obama.
Yes, in the same article Mr. Taylor described Obama as "a popular president who puts a moderate face and an eloquent voice on an ambitiously liberal ideology," referred to "more moderate angels of Obama's nature" and "still h[e]ld out hope that Obama is not irrevocably 'casting his lot with collectivists and statists,' as asserted by Peter Wehner, a former Bush aide and a leading conservative intellectual now with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in Commentary magazine's blog Contentions.
But "with regret" Mr. Taylor is "now worry[ing] that [President Obama] may be deepening what looks more and more like a depression and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free."
Better to learn late than never!
Despite the efforts of the liberal media establishment depicting the then rookie United States Senator with no military service or executive experience and an unimpressive record as a legislator as a smart choice instead of an extreme one, President Obama's "liberal leanings" and ties to ACORN, Rev. Jeremiah A. "God damn America" Wright, Jr. and domestic terrorist William Ayers, were hardly undiscernable before Election Day 2008.
As Rev. Dr. Clenard H. Childress, Jr., senior pastor of The New Calvary Baptist Church in Montclair, New Jersey, founder of the website Blackgenocide.org and president of Life Education And Resource Network, Northeast, recently wrote in an article titled "Barack Obama's Betrayal of the Black Church":
"Obama's been a democrat from the beginning and prior to becoming president, was viewed as the most liberal Senator in the congress. Obama gained that distinction long before November 4th, 2008. No betrayal there! So, let's get to the point of why I am astounded.
"Though Obama may have broken a number of campaign promises and vacillated habitually on his methodology, he has been adamantly and unequivocally faithful to his values and sociological ideology. Unfortunately, the Black Church was not! Obama never betrayed his values — we betrayed ours, and by doing so, betrayed God. We betrayed conscience for color; principle for political power; Truth for the promise of Change. Barack Obama is being Barack Obama. It's like letting the Fox into your henhouse while hoping he becomes a vegetarian...."
Of course, Mr. Taylor wants "to be proved wrong," but his word choice suggests significant exasperation as well as trepidation.
Mr. Taylor:
"The house is burning down. It's no time to be watering the grass."
"...with the nation already plunging deep into probably necessary debt to rescue the crippled financial system and stimulate the economy, Obama's proposals for many hundreds of billions in additional spending on universal health care, universal postsecondary education, a massive overhaul of the energy economy, and other liberal programs seem grandiose and unaffordable.
"With little in the way of offsetting savings likely to materialize, the Obama agenda would probably generate trillion-dollar deficits with no end in sight, or send middle-class taxes soaring to record levels, or both.
"All this from a man who told the nation last week that he doesn't 'believe in bigger government' and who promised tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans."
Those (like Mr. Taylor) who served as a Harvard Law Review editor may have wanted to believe that a former president of it (Obama) would make a wonderful president and thus ignored the wisdom of the late William Buckley, who had warned of the danger of a Harvard education, stating, "I would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty."
Mr. Taylor essentially acknowledged that Obama's tax policy is a fraud.
Mr. Taylor:
"The numbers don't add up -- and still won't if and when, as seems almost certain, Obama ratchets up his so-far-fairly-modest new taxes on the top 2 percent. 'A tax policy that confiscated 100 percent of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue,' according to a February 27 editorial in The Wall Street Journal. 'That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable "dime" of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.'"
"As for the budget's $2 trillion in projected net 'savings,' Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag, admitted in testimony on Tuesday under questioning by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that $1.6 trillion comes from phantom cuts of the money that would be needed to sustain the troop surge in Iraq for another decade -- money that nobody ever intended to spend."
"Other supposed savings -- especially from Medicare -- seem unlikely to materialize absent benefit cuts, which Obama has not proposed. And the cost of any health care legislation -- to be drafted largely by a Congress that is allergic to the kind of cost-cutting necessary to make universal care sustainable -- is likely to be two or three times the $634 billion over 10 years that Obama has budgeted."
Instead of using "fraud" and "class warfare," however, Mr. Taylor politely referred to "deceptive" suggestions and promoting "class resentment."
Mr. Taylor:
"[President Obama] has been deceptive in basing his deficit projections on phantom expenditure cuts and wildly optimistic revenue estimates, and in proclaiming 'a new era of responsibility' to be paid for by raising taxes only on 'the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans."
"The president's suggestions that all the necessary tax increases can be squeezed out of the richest 2 percent are deceptive and likely to stir class resentment. And his apparent cave-ins to liberal interest groups may change the country for the worse.
"Such concerns may help explain why the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 17 percent from the morning of Inauguration Day (8,280) to its close on March 4 (6,876). The markets have also been deeply shaken by Obama's alarming failure to come up with a clear plan for fixing the crippled financial system --which has loomed since his election four months ago as by far his most urgent challenge -- or for working with foreign leaders to arrest the meltdown of the world economy."
Ever the centrist, Mr. Taylor blessed "the liberal wish list" while delicately pointing out that it is unrealistic:
"This is not to deny that the liberal wish list in Obama's staggering $3.6 trillion budget would be wonderful if we had limitless resources. But in the real world, it could put vast areas of the economy under permanent government mismanagement, kill millions of jobs, drive investors and employers overseas, and bankrupt the nation."
But Mr. Taylor even admitted that the liberal Democrat agenda probably would make things worse:
"...liberal Democrats in Congress are racing to gratify their interest groups in a slew of ways likely to do much more harm than good: pushing a union-backed 'card-check' bill that would bypass secret-ballot elections on unionization and facilitate intimidation of reluctant workers; slipping into the stimulus package a formula to reimburse states that increase welfare dependency among single mothers and reduce their incentives to work; defunding a program that now pays for the parents of some 1,700 poor kids to choose private schools over crumbling D.C. public schools; fencing out would-be immigrants with much-needed skills.
"Not to mention the $7.7 billion in an omnibus spending bill to pay for 9,000 earmarks of the kind that Obama campaigned against: $1.7 million for research on pig odors in Iowa; $1.7 million for a honeybee factory in Texas; $819,000 for research on catfish genetics in Alabama; $2 million to promote astronomy in Hawaii; $650,000 to manage beavers in North Carolina and Mississippi; and many more."
All that wasteful spending, yet no funds for finding Obama's birth certificate!
Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.
Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.
The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.
Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.