Change = Stepping on the Gas

Much has been made about Obama's call back to a NYT journalist concerning a question about being labeled "socialist" to which he responded:

"I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. It wasn’t on my watch. And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement -– the prescription drug plan -- without a source of funding."

He did say during the campaign that "when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." But, that withstanding, the Cato blog concedes that he has a point:

Not to defend Obama’s unprecedented increase on government spending or plans to involve the government in almost every area of our lives…but he does have a point. As I pointed out in Leviathan on the Right, the Bush administration’s brand of big-government conservatism was, at the very least, the greatest expansion of government from Lyndon Johnson to, well, Barack Obama.

This was well noted by conservative Phil Klien back in 2007:

In a sense, President Bush has already paved the road for a figure with Obama's skills to reassert liberalism. Under Bush, the size of government has increased at a faster rate than during any administration since Lyndon Johnson's, and it has given us the monstrosities of the Medicare prescription drug benefit and No Child Left Behind. Rhetorically, Bush gave away the store by touting "compassionate conservatism "and notoriously uttering, "When somebody hurts, government has got to move." Considering that this all came from somebody identified as a conservative president, Republicans are left with little leverage to argue against Obama's "slight change in priorities."

Which is why I voted on principles of smaller, more local government, or threw my vote away, depending on how you look at it.

Obama continued his quote above by stating that his administration has "actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles..."

Very interesting.