[Victor Davis Hanson]
... They sense that if one collapses — can't pay taxes, can't pay credit cards, can't pay mortgage, can't pay the monthly health care premium, can't pay college tuition — the Obama administration will have some sort of new program for the can'ts. But they suspect there won't be a bailout for them, the cans, and they will inevitably end up paying in increased taxes, fees, or inflated dollars for these spread-the-wealth efforts.
Obama's challenge will be to assure the millions of Americans who pay all their bills, and who scrimped, and passed on gratuitous expenditures, that their capital is safe from the greed of Wall Street, the tentacles of government, and the redistributive demands of their fellow citizens.
In such a climate, one must tread carefully and speak about uplifting the American people. Yet, so far we've heard the opposite. Serial citations of the Great Depression, fiscal meltdown, and catastrophe coupled with finger-wagging lectures about cowards, the new California dust bowl, and the wrongs the U.S. committed abroad now seem to come daily from the new cabinet.
It is a reflection of an entrenched anti-establishment culture suddenly given the reins of power that has not adjusted to the idea that trashing incumbent conservatives is not the same as the responsibility of governance.
Or it could be that we are in perpetual us/they and "we are on the brink of disaster" campaign mode, deemed necessary to alter radically American government, the economy, and culture — or all three combined.
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