The Chicago Tribune slammed its hometown hero in a Monday editorial: “The American public is having a credibility-shattering debate about the president: Did he not bother to learn the details of the law before he told us we could keep our doctors and our insurance, or did he know the truth and flat-out lie?”
Perhaps a better question: Why did this same Chicago Tribune editorial board endorse this accused liar or dilettante – twice? Now, the paper proclaims “It was a mistake to attempt such a massive government intrusion on a marketplace and a mistake to do so without anything close to a public consensus.” So why in 2012 did they write this?
Bolstered by his steadiness in office, cognizant of the vast unfinished business before him, we endorse the re-election of Barack Obama.
We do so with a plea to Obama and to Romney.
One of these decades, the children in which we now invest our hope, and our love, will speak with today’s adults about the America that we bequeathed to them. They will praise us for avoiding the financial ravages they watch other nations endure. Or they will condemn us for living ruinously beyond our means and forcing the enormous payback onto them -- a criminal act no previous American generation has committed against those that came next.
If the Tribune cared so passionately about debt reduction, how on Earth could they look at Obama’s largest deficits in American history and say “Yes, more of that!” In fact, the Tribune’s endorsement in 2012 reads like some executive at the Tribune Company headquarters made them do it. This is the only place Obamacare surfaced:
We have hammered the White House repeatedly for its failure to forge some path to a less indebted American citizenry. Yes, Republicans were obstructionists in Obama's second two years. But before that Obama had two years with a Democratic Congress and he chose to focus on Obamacare, a program whose wisdom we have questioned and whose cost estimates have swiftly grown.
The Tribune crew tried to argue that Obama gave America the best chance of a "Go Big" debt-reduction deal. As if Obama would agree to any cuts in entitlement programs? Again, what in Obama's history in national politics gave the Tribune any cause for optimism on that front?
Now, these confused editorialists are comparing Obamacare to the Manhattan Project -- the project to create a nuclear bomb:
The odds against a fundamental restructuring of the law are steep, given the deep distrust Republicans and Democrats have for each other. But that's what will be needed. A bold reboot, a Manhattan Project for health care reform that starts fresh with some basic principles.
That's a very strange metaphor for a health-care proposal. Perhaps they should take some sort of medication to avoid their political and economic schizophrenia. Their call for "basic principles" doesn't make any sense, since they professed to hate debt and then re-endorsed Obama. The Obama people may want to remind these high-minded Tribune people against debt that their Tribune Company is most recently known for "the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry."
