Gov. Mark Sanford has an article about President Obama’s first 100 days over at HumanEvents.com. He writes:
Based on the campaign that President Obama ran, and the expectations that he therefore set for his presidency, it seems to me that there are two arenas in which it is fair to judge him — on policy and on political terms. On the policy front, those judgments are fairly straightforward: do we believe the decisions he’s made will in the end have a positive or negative effect on our nation? On the political front we have a different metric, one set by the President himself: has he truly ushered in an era of the “new politics” we were promised or are we — using words we heard a fair amount last year — looking at more of the same?
Obviously, anyone who has followed the debate (here and here) between the governor and the president over how to spend the stimulus money will know that Sanford believes that Obama’s policies will have a negative impact on our economy. But there is more. As Sanford rightfully explains, Obama put in place a series of actions by the federal government that completely altered the long-defined and successful relationship between the private sector and the government in this country.
As for the second question, Sanford is not convinced either. He writes:
In his inaugural address, the President proclaimed “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics,” something I joined with millions of Americans in hoping for as my years in public life have reinforced how needed that change is.
Yet when I proposed using a portion of the stimulus dollars to pay down debt in South Carolina, under the notion that states are the laboratories of democracy and a one-size fits all approach dictated from Washington does not fit with the principles this nation was indeed founded upon, President Obama’s DNC launched attack ads against me. Worse, these ads hit the airwaves before the White House even bothered to respond to our waiver request. I’d suggest that actions like these shatter the idea of “change” the President so eloquently articulated in his inaugural.
I agree with Governor Sanford. To put it differently, I would say that much of Obama’s actions might end up making federalism a thing of the past.
Read the whole thing here.