Paul Rahe: Obama to elderly: Drop dead!

8/23/09 • Power Line Blog

Hillsdale College history professor Paul Rahe writes to comment on the current political scene: Why are the Democrats in such trouble? I think that the answer is three-fold. First, as I argued in my last Power Line post, the so-called "stimulus bill" was passed in both the House and the Senate in a manner suggestive of tyranny. It was written in camera with the help of a legion of lobbyists, and it was presented and shoved through before anyone in Congress even had a chance to read it, much less think about it, and the same argument could be made concerning the passage of the cap-and-trade bill in the House and the Obama administration's handling of the bailout and the bankruptcy proceedings of Chrysler and General Motors. Second, the first of these bills was an obvious scam - a massive pay-off to Democratic party constituencies at the expense of the American taxpayer on a scale that guarantees much higher taxes before long and that almost certainly will drive up inter