100 Days of Obama: Revealing - and Frightening

Early this year, when I proposed to write this series of columns, I promised myself and the Standard that it would not be just a weekly Obama-bash. My intent was to look at issues from all sides, to find the substance behind the spin and to prompt thoughtful discourse. But I confess that as each week goes by I'm finding it harder and harder to find anything at all that I like about the direction our new administration is taking the country. There's a lot to be worried about.

I am writing this column on the 100th day of Mr. Obama's presidency, the traditional time for pundits' report cards on new presidents. Historically, it's too short a time for objective assessment - all presidents in recent memory, even Jimmy Carter, enjoyed high marks and strong public support at this point in their first terms. But in Obama's case, I think 100 days is a meaningful milestone. We knew so little about him going in, and now we know so much.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream media are aglow, telling us that the team they've been cheerleading for all along is every bit as dazzling as they'd predicted. It is also no surprise that some of us don't see it that way.

In fairness, it's not all bad. From the beginning of his term I've admired President Obama's energy and intensity, his bias for action, the way he obviously relishes the job and its challenges. He's not sitting back hoping everything will come out right. He is in the fray.

But that's just about it for the good news. There is no longer any mystery about his political orientation. He is hard, hard left. He fully deserves his reputation as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, and any illusions we may have had that he will govern from the center are long gone, a bad joke. He is the poster child for "tax and spend Democrat." He has unshakable faith in the government as the solution for every problem and a corresponding deep-seated distrust of private enterprise.

From that hard left base has come a blizzard of decisions, proposals and actions that will have pervasive, long term and, in my view, profoundly negative consequences on the lives of every American. The litany is much too long for this brief column, but it covers the waterfront - economy, defense, energy, taxes, social policy, role of government, our place and posture among world leaders. In every area he is marching to his own drum, and in my view, down the wrong track.

I am bothered as well by President Obama's MO. Like most of us, I don't know him personally, and I am reluctant to draw conclusions about his character based on media reports that are certainly biased either pro or con. But on important matters of fact he has been regularly untruthful, for example in continuing to promote the fiction that his social programs will be funded exclusively by increased taxes on the very wealthy. He seems to have an insatiable need to be liked, a very dangerous mentality for leaders at any level (ask any parent). He seems far too comfortable basking in the glow of an adoring public, reinforced by an adoring press - and as we saw in his recent trips to Europe and Mexico, confusing personal popularity with national respect.

I believe his complete lack of prior real-world experience is showing, badly. He has never held a job in the private sector, never been in or near the military, never been on the business end of a government contract, never built anything of significance. For most of his young life, he's been sequestered in elite Ivy League university environment and in work with leftist organizations. So is it a surprise that he has absolute trust in government to satisfy every one of our citizens' needs, or in the United Nations or the world community to act in our nation's best interests?

In short, these first 100 days reveal a single, intractable problem with the Obama presidency: this immensely impressive and popular figure is very effectively leading the nation - but in the wrong direction. We can argue about whether the U.S. is a center-right or center-left nation (most polls indicate the former). But it is not, and has never been, a hard left country. Barack Obama thinks it should be, his party has commanding control of both houses of Congress, and so he's dragging us that way. He is out of step with his constituents, even if many of them find him so likable that they don't mind - yet.

The recent Pew Research Center study confirmed that President Obama, so far, has been the most polarizing president in the last four decades. That is a fully predictable outcome for a president who is driving so hard in a direction counter to mainstream public sentiment, because he wants to and he can.

It was not very long ago that Republicans holding the White House and both houses of Congress also felt it an unnecessary inconvenience to build a broad support base. We know now how well that worked out for them. Now we are all invested in President Obama's success - with 1361 days to go, we can only hope that he does not fall for that trap.

Jack DeVine is a businessman who lives in Aiken.