As Economy Flounders, Obama Focuses on What Americans Eat, Smoke and Drive

As Economy Flounders, Obama Focuses on What Americans Eat, Smoke and Drive: "Delivering his first address to a joint session of Congress in February 2009, Barack Obama told the assembled legislators that his plans for a federal spending binge of nearly a trillion dollars was “not because I believe in bigger government – I don’t.” Rather, he said, the stimulus plan was intended to “put people back to work and put money in their pockets.”

More than two years after that speech, two things are clear: Obama’s empirical projections were inaccurate and his ideological protestations were disingenuous. Indeed, the stimulus plan was not, as Obama tried to frame it, a triumph of supposed pragmatism over ideology (ala George W. Bush’s “I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system”). Rather, it was a leading indicator of the fact that Obama not only believes in big government, but in fact believes in virtually nothing else"