DANIEL HENNINGER:: What Would Clint Eastwood Do? – WSJ
By MB Snow at February 16, 2012 | 1:10 pm | Print
The Barack Obama budget document just released is not a budget. It is a work of literature. It is Barack Obama’s published apologia for a second presidential term, in which—as the budget and its tax proposals make clear—he will reset the historic balance in America between the public sector and the private sector. This reset will require large wealth transfers—from individuals and companies to the government, and from the government back to the people.
The Obama budget is described everywhere as a “political document,” but it is more than that. Mr. Obama hasn’t assembled these ideas just to get elected. This budget is a statement of belief. It is a road map of where he wants the country to go.
This being so, it behooves us to revisit the most controversial political event of the past two weeks—Clint Eastwood’s Super Bowl commercial for the Chrysler car company.
This ad was widely viewed as an argument for a second Obama term. It is undoubtedly true that the pro-Obama admen who created the commercial embedded a pro-Obama spin. Asked about this afterward, Clint Eastwood said simply: “I certainly am not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama.”
No sensible person would try to disagree. When The Man With No Name looks at you dead on, as he did Super Bowl Sunday, and says it’s halftime in America and the country will come roaring back, you know the man speaking those words wasn’t talking about his embrace of the vision in Barack Obama’s 2013 budget.
In terms of the nation’s animating ethos, these two American icons could not be further apart. Clint Eastwood was talking about an America heading back up—”roaring” forward in the unpredictable, astonishing way it has since at least the days of the Wild West. The Obama budget is about an America whose path will be guided by the government far into the future. He is announcing that in his second term, the days of the private Wild West in America will come to a close.
There is no better way to discover this intent than in the president’s tax proposals. Taxes are a nation’s Rorschach test. In taxes you discover how a nation wants to be known to others. The burden of taxation may say that a nation more than anything wants to produce (say, Malaysia), or taxes may say that what a nation most wants is to be thought of as fair (Belgium).
What Mr. Obama wants, with the symbolic billionaire Warren Buffett propped at his side, is a wealth tax that redefines the U.S.
via Henninger: What Would Clint Eastwood Do? – WSJ.com.