A NEW PARADIGM?
I promised not to publish names, but a lawyer I know told me several of President Obama’s top political advisors stayed at the same hotel where he was last week in London.
“It was like they were following me around the hotel, but I don’t think they realized I was from New York. I had the next table at breakfast the first day I was there. These guys . . . actually it was three men and one woman. I recognized the woman and two of the men from pictures in the paper and on T.V. I nodded “hello” the first time I came back from the buffet table, but they pretended not to notice. They went on talking as if I wasn’t there.”
What were they talking about?
“Mostly about what they called the new paradigm. I had to look the word up when I got back to my room. [It means model or standard for in their case it seemed, government controlled social enterprise.] They were laughing about how lucky they were that the two Johns . . . Kerry and Edwards . . . didn’t get elected in 2004. If they had, Kerry wouldn’t have had the guts to go as far a Obama already has gone, and Edwards, who was the real populist of the Party, was in disgrace, and neither were re-electable.”
So you just sat there and listened while they talked?
“Yes. I was invisible. Maybe they thought I was some dumb Englishman. It was a French-owned hotel, so maybe they didn’t think English was my first language. But I had a ringside seat. It was almost embarrassing.”
Too bad you didn’t have your cell phone camera out. You could have put them on My Space.
“I don’t think I was that invisible.”
So what else did they say?
“The best was that evening in the lounge. I went in for a drink and sat at the bar by myself. Two of the men came in after me and sat at a table. The barroom was very small and they were within earshot of where I was sitting.”
And . . . ?
“I thought one of them recognized me from earlier, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. They were sounding off about American banks and companies no longer being able to influence U.S. foreign policy around the globe and how great it was that Citibank has had to close two of their offices in London. Then they started talking about some professor at Harvard who was in London to receive an award from the Economist Magazine. The gist of this was that Obama’s people now have the paradigm nailed down at both ends – getting to the future leaders while they’re young and still in school, and by putting in place forever the institutions of government to control every aspect of our social environment. I have to tell you it was pretty scary.”
How much did you have to drink?
“I was very sober – I’ll tell you that. I had an important dinner meeting that night, or I might have drowned myself.”
Did you see them again?
“The woman and one of the men were on my flight back to New York. They were up in First Class, so I didn’t get close enough to hear if they were still talking it up. I did wonder, though, if my taxes were paying for their First Class seat, and they were picked up at JFK by a big limo with the United Nations logo on the side panels. It reminded me how populism works in Latin America . . . promise the less-fortunate everything to get their vote, but keep the percs for yourself.”
So you think we’re going down that road?
“Look, I voted for Obama, because I thought we needed to shake things up in Washington a little. Since listening in on these people, I’ve begun to see and hear similar notions and concepts from others . . . both in the media and from the elite and university intelligencia at my college reuinion over last weekend. I’ll tell you this . . . I don’t think this is the Paradigm for how I make my living tomorrow, and I don’t see it catching on in the real world once we work our way out of this depression. But it wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong about things.”
