Two Little Words That Obama Will Regret

"I won."

Leave it to the British press to get it right (h/t Reader Sam):

MARY ELLEN SYNON: Arrogant at home, naive abroad. America is already suffering 'buyer's regret' over Obama

Yesterday, just eight days after the inauguration, President Obama had his £576bn so-called stimulus bill passed by the House of Representatives - but without a single vote from any Republican.

All 177 House Republicans opposed the bill. None of them fell for that 'bi-partisan' tripe, which is Democrat code for 'do it our way.'

Which gives me hope for the Republican Congressmen. Forget about 'change.' They know an old-style, Democrat pork-barrel piece of legislation - that is, a Bill designed to pay off or buy votes from vested interests - when they see one, and they aren't going to back it.


Congressman Eric Cantor, one of the leading House Republicans, says an analysis of the Bill shows it is mostly pork: just 12 cents of every dollar in the spending will go to any genuine economic stimulus, such as creating jobs.

More...Obama's controversial bill to revive economy is passed - but without any Republican backing

Yet Obama was keen to have support from the Republicans. He didn't get it, because what he really wanted was submission from the Republicans.

Clearly the Republicans on the Hill don't reckon they are going to get any backlash from the voters in their districts because they have given a No to The One. They understand that already their voters don't like what Obama is doing, or indeed the arrogance with which he is doing it.

Just two days after the inauguration, when Republican legislators told the president they objected to the massive spending bill, Obama dismissed them with two words: 'I won.'

That was a particularly stupid mistake by the new president. Hard-left Democrats may cheer at such gloating, but most Americans don't like that kind of contempt being shown to Congress.

Indeed, as the American website Politico points out, with those two words 'Obama brought the curtain down on the 48-hour era of bipartisanship.' He liberated the Republicans from any mainstream media pressure to offer support to Democrat policies. He dismissed 'bi-partisanship,' so why shouldn't they?

The big spending and the big arrogance are why Obama's support is already falling. During the transition from the Bush administration to the new administration - that is, during the weeks in which Obama kept near-quiet and had to do nothing - his ratings in the Gallup opinion poll were 83 percent. After just three days in office, Gallup showed his support had already dropped by 15 points to 68 percent.

As any economist will tell you, what is important in a statistic is not the number, it's the trend. In this case, the trend is down, and fast. Americans are already having buyer's regret about their new president.

The U.S. press dutifully blames the Republicans for any stalemates in Washington, and I'm sure we can find some blame to go around, but the reality is the new president decided to squander his political capital by taking an arrogant approach to the minority party. Had he truly listened to the GOP and incorporated some of their most important issues into the bill, it would have easily passed with strong bipartisan support.

The Wall Street Journal agrees:

“But the real risk here is to Mr. Obama, and it isn’t from Republicans. It’s from his fellow Democrats. Given the miserable economy and the Beltway’s neo-Keynesian policy consensus, a true compromise would have gathered overwhelming support. But rather than use Mr. Obama’s political capital to craft such a deal, the White House abdicated to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. House Democrats proceeded to ignore all GOP suggestions as they wrote the bill, shedding tax cuts while piling on spending for every imaginable interest group. The bipartisan opposition reflects how much the Pelosi bill became a vehicle for partisan social policy rather than economic stimulus.”