Obama Now Says He Wants to Reform Government

I watched the president's announcement. When he started touting the "billions" saved reforming the check mailing process I almost gagged. And I'm not the only one.

See the Wall Street Journal, "The Reorganization Man":

The Washington rap on President Obama is that he's humorless, but that's unfair. He may not be Jay Leno funny, but his bit Friday on reforming and reducing government was great.

There he was in the East Room, explaining that "the government we have is not the government we need." That's for sure, and Mr. Obama even added the Gingrichian theme that "We live in a 21st-century economy, but we've still got a government organized for the 20th century. Our economy has fundamentally changed—as has the world—but our government, our agencies, has not."

Alas, the President wasn't talking about modernizing Medicare or the entitlement state. He merely wants Congress to give him more power to reorganize the government. He says he wants his team to scrub down the executive branch looking for waste, duplication and bureaucratic complexity, and then to fast-track their proposals to Congress for an up-or-down vote within 90 days.

Mr. Obama's first targets for such "consolidation authority" are the six agencies related to business and the world economy, from the Commerce Department to the Export-Import Bank to the U.S. Trade Representative. Maybe the White House chose to start there because, with an eye on the GOP campaign, Rick Perry wants to eliminate Commerce and a few other cabinet departments he can't remember.

Another way of putting it is that this new emphasis on streamlining the bureaucracy is Mr. Obama's version of the Texas Governor's "Oops." Having presided over the largest expansion of government since LBJ—health care, financial reregulation, spending 24% of GDP, the surge of industrial policy—Mr. Obama's pollsters must be saying that voters have the jimmy-legs about bigger government and that he thus can't run only as a Great Society man.

But let's go to the videotape...

Yeah, go to the tape, at 7:00 minutes above, where Obama gushes about "rooting out waste" in the check delivery process. There's got to be some deeper Freudian ironic significance in there somewhere. I mean, really: "rooting out waste" by sending checks to the right place? Maybe we could stop sending out so many checks in the first place, eh? Oh, well, perhaps not. That wouldn't be funny.