THE PORKALOOZA AND A ONE-TERM PRESIDENCY

Barack Hussein Obama is making an unforced error which will define his presidency, and could shorten it.  It’s puzzling why.

It’s very much in the president’s interest for Congress to pass an economic stimulus package that will work, because if the economy sinks further, it eventually will reflect upon him. 

And it is very much in the president’s interest to have a package that wins support of a quarter to a third of the Republicans in Congress, both because the public loves bipartisanship, and – more importantly – to spread the blame if the stimulus doesn’t work.

But the president has embraced a porkalooza that does neither, and he’s marketing it with harsh, partisan rhetoric that undermines the image he cultivated during the campaign.  Failure to pass the measure as is would be a "catastrophe," he says.  It’s critics are unpatriotic, he implies. 

The shrillness of his rhetoric suggests Mr. Obama fears he may lose.  But the great danger to him is that he may win.

In the last three months1.8 million jobs have been lost in the private sector, yet there is almost nothing in the upwards of $827 billion stimulus package that would help businesses, because its purpose is to grow the government, not the economy.

Though the porkalooza spends more money than there currently is in circulation (the Federal Reserve estimates that at $800 billion), the normal procedures of committee hearings and consideration were short-circuited.  There are only two reasons for doing this. 

The first is to give the appearance of bold, decisive leadership in response to the crisis.  But this could have been done with a smaller package — say a six month suspension of payroll taxes and a $2,000 tax credit for purchase of a new car in 2009 — that actually would stimulate the economy this year, and which would draw strong bipartisan support. 

The second is to sneak through payoffs to Democratic constituencies so blatant they would have been unlikely to survive the normal hearing process, even with the swollen Democratic majorities in Congress.

"This is probably the worst bill that’s been put forward since the 1930s," said Harvard economist Robert Barro.  "It’s wasting a tremendous amount of money.  It has some simplistic theory that I don’t think will work, so I don’t think the expenditure stuff is going to have the intended effect.  And the tax cutting isn’t really geared towards incentives…It’s more along the lines of throwing money at people.  On both sides I think it’s garbage."

The Congressional Budget Office thinks the porkalooza will have very little impact in 2009, and that in the years after 2010 actually will reduce economic growth.

Few economists — none associated with this administration — predicted the subprime mortgage crisis.  Two who did were Nouriel Roubini and Peter Schiff.  Prof. Roubini thinks the stimulus package reprises the mistakes of Japan‘s "lost decade."  Mr. Schiff says the porkalooza is an "unmitigated disaster" which will produce severe stagflation in 2010 and beyond.

And Barack Hussein Obama and the Democrat party will own it, all by themselves.

According to a Gallup Poll published Feb. 3, 75 percent of Americans agree a stimulus bill should be passed right away. But the more Americans learn what’s in this bill, the less they like it. 

According to a Rasmussen poll published Feb. 4, only 37 percent of Americans want the porkalooza passed as is, while 43 percent are opposed.  When Rasmussen polled on the question Jan. 21, when few details were available, 45 percent supported the measure, while just 34 percent were against it.  In the Feb. 3 Gallup Poll, only 38 percent of respondents wanted the bill passed as is, while 37 percent wanted major changes, and 17 percent wanted no bill at all.

Democratic majorities in the House and Senate are sufficiently large to pass the porkalooza pretty much as is, and that’s where the danger lies.  As more details of what’s in it become known, already tepid support will cool further.  And if the economy doesn’t turn around, support for the president will plummet. 

By passing the porkalooza, Barack Hussein Obama hopes to build a permanent Democrat majority.  But he’s more likely to reprise the Carter administration.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.