John Chettle’s piece in the Weekly Standard absolutely says it all.  The President’s mistakes all stem from two things.  First, he has the wrong orientation towards economics.  He believes – quite sincerely but wrongly – that free markets are the problem and that unless they are minutely controlled by Washington they will do bad things to America.  Second – and this is where he differs from other liberal Democrats like Hillary Clinton – he is not experienced enough to be willing to question his ideology when it conflicts with reality.  A wiser leader would know not to have tried the current policies in the first place.  A more experienced leader would be open to the obvious reality that the policies are failing and in fact have become the problem.  So the President continues to do the wrong things in the worst possible way:  to burden the economy with taxes and regulations and to impose the taxes and regulations with so much uncertainty that business people literally do now know how to plan for the future.

All of this would be interesting if it were just an academic exercise.   But it’s not.  It’s hurting people, and of course people who were most vulnerable in the first place are in the greatest danger now.

Moving forward, it will be necessary to reverse these policies but also to discredit them.  The objective must be to restore the bipartisan consensus – which the President has disrupted – that prosperity is essential to everyone’s agenda, that prosperity depends on healthy free markets, and that the government must therefore respect the private economy.