Opinion

Kyle Smith on his lack of a second-term agenda

The worst-kept secret in Washington is that President Obama doesn’t have a second-term agenda. But actually that’s not quite true. He has a stated agenda, and it’s to increase partisanship, dial up the volume on the bickering and further divide us on ethnic lines.

But don’t believe me: Believe Team Obama, who in a carefully managed set of leaks orchestrated to accompany Time magazine’s cover story the week of the Democratic convention, said as much. The headline: “Obama Plays Hard Ball.” Aides told the magazine, without apparent irony, that they believed the president had been far too bipartisan in his first term (Republican votes for Obama- Care: zero. Republican votes for the stimulus: three, only one of whom will still be in office in January).

“We won’t make that mistake again,” the president’s top people told Time and other outlets, vowing to be even less deferential to the other side of the aisle.

Obama’s aides understand the Democratic Party will not be retaking the House of Representatives and hence will be unable to pass any liberal legislation. So they told Time their big goal for the next four years would be to propose an amnesty program for illegal aliens. They made it clear that immigration reform would finally come up not because Obama particularly cares about this issue (if he had, he would have pushed it when he had huge majorities in both houses of Congress, or at any other time in the last four years) but because the White House sees this as a wedge issue that will earn lots of media coverage intended to turn Latinos decisively against the Republican Party.

Otherwise, Obama will continue to press for tax hikes (not to close the deficit but just to punish the wealthy), believing that this time John Boehner will have to cave. And he’ll press for . . . not much else.

Even pieces published on NPR have been saying things like, “What would President Obama do with a second term? It’s been a bit of a mystery throughout the campaign.”

A bit.

But now we have the blueprint for the second term, or at least a souvenir photo album masquerading as an agenda called “The New Economic Patriotism: A Plan for Jobs & Middle-Class Security.” (Sorry, lower and upper classes: the president doesn’t care about you.)

Obama had counted on coasting to reelection by spending more money on character assassination than has ever been spent anywhere, ever. But it’s not working, so he was forced to throw together the booklet after the third debate.

Politico reports that a “Democrat close to the campaign” e-mailed, “Had to do it . . . It’s all about earning people’s votes.”

But the pamphlet is literally what Obama is figuratively: a lightweight.

Heavily padded with pictures of the chief executive looking all serious and problem solve-y, the booklet is the sound of a man digging in his heels, demanding that everyone recognize how awesome his first term has been. He keeps hoping failure will magically be transformed into success.

Micro-proposals like the creation of “manufacturing institutes” and more backing for community colleges have all the heft of Bill Clinton’s famous call for more school uniforms. Obama also calls for a temporary tax credit for business hiring that he imagines will create a million new manufacturing jobs, but businesses don’t take on permanent hires based on such fleeting blasts of energy — economic junk food.

In his improbable new incarnation as a lover of fossil fuels, Obama trumpets the oil and gas exploration that his EPA has been vigorously blocking, but he also pushes his “plan” — more like a daydream — for America to derive 80% of all energy from renewable sources by 2035. That’s unthinkable without massive penalties being dealt to the non-renewable side that provides the vast majority of our energy today.

On the big, worrisome issues — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the long-term deficit — Obama proposes nothing, though he continues to claim, preposterously, that he has saved us all $4 trillion in deficit spending in the long run. “Simply not accurate” was the ruling of the Washington Post’s fact checker, who added that “virtually no serious budget analyst agreed” that Obama’s $4 trillion in savings consisted of anything more than accounting gimmicks.

Reviews were meh. “There is not anything significantly new here,” said CNN’s Jessica Yellin. That’s a little troubling, because only 4% of Americans think more of the same is the right way to go in a second term. Bernie Madoff has higher approval ratings than that. (62% demand “major changes” from an Obama re-up.)

Obama’s second term “plan” is a nothing sandwich, a blast of hot air, a wet firecracker. It’s empty rhetoric from an empty suit, sitting on an empty chair.