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October 28, 2006
This Tired Old Man that we Elected King
I was thinking about how the Left thought about Reagan (note the lyric that titles this post) and the way that they think about Bush, as opposed to how the Left thinks of Clinton. It occurs to me that the Left's real problem is that they cannot get their heads around the notion that if they give power to an institution — be it the Congress or the Courts or the office of the President, or what have you — the power stays with the institution even when the Left is no longer in charge of it. Though Clinton had no less or fewer powers than Reagan or Bush, and used them no less ruthlessly (in many ways, more ruthlessly), Clinton is a shining paragon of virtue and open government in the eyes of the Left, while Reagan and Bush are incarnated demons for the least exercise of their powers, even those that were inherent in the office at its inception.
I think the real problem is that the Left is content to live in a world where the government has overwhelming power to compel people to do what the Left wants, but not in one where the government has overwhelming power to compel people to do what the Left doesn't want. The Right has, to a lesser extent, the mirror-image problem. I don't want either side telling me what to do.
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