Betwixt and Between.

A friend of mine asked me Monday night if I wished President Obama success. I did not know how to answer him; success as to what? seems more appropriate of a question.

He wants to expand abortion rights. How can I really want that to be successful?

He wants a huge new amount of spending with, yes, some tax cuts. The tax cuts I can live with, depending on exactly what their nature may turn out to be. But the federal government is overblown as it is; why would I want it spending more?

I could offer more examples, but instead I'll cut to the chase: why should I want policies which I consider detrimental to the nation to be successful? So that unemployment eases? To end the banking and credit crises? To encourage job production? But I think that my conservative ideals better suited to that end. Every dollar spent by government is a dollar out of the private sector and into the hands of a bureaucrat. How can that kind of control ever be successful in the long run?

I suppose it is fair to ask that perhaps I am afraid of his potential success because it may disprove my beliefs. Yet even that sort of success begs certain questions, not the least of which is 'should the government have that much power over the people?' The more successful, the more calls for greater government investment, the more it runs our lives...eventually that bubble has to burst, and we are faced with an authoritarian dictatorship even if benevolent. Do we want that?

I don't. So while I don't want the human misery with which we are currently faced to run deeper, I have to believe that the expansion of government Obama apparently proposes so harmful over the course of history that the best we can hope for is that things stay lethargic and he gets dumped in 2012 for a better political/economic/philosophical thinker. Someone who sees long term and not only until tomorrow.

That man is not Barack Obama. As a result I am at the best ambivalent about his success.

Take that as you will. We'll talk again in four years.