A shameful pressure tactic

A fortnight is a long time in politics. It corresponds most recently to the time between Barack Obama's inauguration as the 44th President of the United States, on the final crest of the "politics of hope," and his definitive exploitation of the "politics of fear" to get a near trillion-dollar stimulus package through the U.S. Senate.

"This recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose five million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse." [never reverse?]

Compare, if you will, another Democrat president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took office under considerably grimmer circumstances -- at the very bottom of the Depression -- in 1933:

"This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

Mr. Obama demands non-partisanship to get the bill passed. But opposition to the bill is huge, growing, and itself essentially non-partisan. Americans themselves are deeply troubled by the proposal that they should mortgage their children's future for a constantly growing bailout scheme that must, of necessity, reward the undeserving.

To try to frighten people, as President Obama has done, with the consequences to them if someone else does not pass a profligate spending bill, is an entirely illegitimate use of the weapon from every conceivable point of view. It is not a moral warning, but a shameful pressuring tactic.

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