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Obama continues crisis opportunism
By Jonathan Gurwitz, Express-News columnist : November 2, 2012 : Updated: November 3, 2012 7:08pm
Photo By Eric Gay/Associated Press
As Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama head down to the wire, columnists point out their flaws.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Those were the words of former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel during the financial crisis four years ago, words that became a mission statement for the Obama administration.
Rather than craft bipartisan measures to help the private sector get Americans back to work, President Obama staked a recovery on a so-called stimulus bill laden with special-interest handouts — such as the $535 million loan guarantee to the politically connected and now bankrupt Solyndra. Rather than focus on the economy and jobs, he rammed through a health care bill that, as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it, Congress had to pass so the American people could find out what was in it.
Four years later, crisis opportunism is still the operative strategy of the Obama administration and its supporters in the press. For seven weeks, the president and his national security team have been struggling to come up with a coherent explanation of what happened during the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. The latest unanswered questions: Were CIA agents on the ground denied permission to help Ambassador Chris Stevens while the consulate was under siege and why weren't nearby U.S. military assets utilized during the seven-hour-long assault?
“We leave nobody behind,” President Obama said last week. “We make sure that we respond as a nation and remind ourselves that whenever an American is in need, all of us stand together to make sure that we're providing the help that's necessary.” Not in Benghazi, though — the president was speaking about Sandy.
The New York Times, the nation's newspaper of record, can barely be bothered to report on the mounting Benghazi scandal, let alone the congressional inquiry into it. Yet while Sandy was still ravaging the East Coast on Tuesday morning, its opinion writers went to press with an editorial arguing that “a big storm requires a big government” and chastising Mitt Romney for allegedly wanting to transfer the Federal Emergency Management Agency's responsibility's to the states.
During a GOP primary debate in 2011, Romney was asked whether in an era of increasing budget constraints it made sense to allow states to take on a greater role in emergency response. Romney did not say that FEMA should be abolished. He did not say the federal government should renounce its emergency response power.
Romney did say that giving the states greater authority in emergency situations was moving in the “right direction.” A campaign statement last week reiterated that the states, as first responders, are in the best position to determine how to direct resources and assistance, including assistance from FEMA — a non-controversial observation confirmed by events in New Jersey and New York.
Even President Obama, in his 2013 budget proposal, requested a cut of $641.5 million, or 6 percent, in the FEMA budget while increasing grants to states. FEMA describes this as creating “a robust national response capacity using a Whole Community approach based on cross-jurisdictional and readily deployable state and local assets.”
That sounds like bureaucratese for moving in the right direction. What it doesn't sound like is an argument for increasing the size and scope of federal government.
Just because there are things that the federal government constitutionally can do — and occasionally do well, like coordinate disaster relief — doesn't mean that there aren't a whole host of things it shouldn't do or that state and local governments could do better.
But after four consecutive years of trillion-dollar deficits and the abdication of responsibility for a crushing national debt, and with the father of a former Navy SEAL slain in Benghazi asking uncomfortable questions, why let a perfectly good crisis go to waste?