Rich Lowry: The Last 20th-Century President?

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com.

Sometime between 2008 and today, Pres. Barack Obama lost the future.

He rose to high office on a gust of hope and change, but despite the future-oriented marketing, he has proven himself devoted to old pieties and existing governmental structures. At this rate, he’ll be remembered as the last president of the 20th century.

His economic policy has been a reprise of the best economic thinking circa 1932. It’s been all Keynesian stimulus, and the soggy results are all around us. With the economy still weak and unemployment still high, he’s checkmated by his own stale orthodoxy. He’s unable to advance any significant proposals that wouldn’t simply be more of the same and politically unacceptable in this era of anxiety over the debt.

In his misplaced faith in the “shovel ready” project, he must have had visions of the Hoover Dam and the interstate highway system — those jewels of 20th-century American infrastructure, built relatively rapidly before the regulatory state had tied itself in knots — rising up from his stimulus. Instead, the stimulus has built little or nothing anyone will remember…