Tweedledum and Tweedledee

My husband's post from The Corner today.

We should remember that when he came into office, Gordon Brown had such a spectacular honeymoon period that he was looking into the prospect of a general election that could have destroyed the Conservative Party forever. Today, it looks like the Conservatives will be returned to power with a huge majority. So when he sat down with the President in the Oval Office today, it was tempting to think that the two men, obviously unseparated in ideology, are merely separated by their relative positions on the curve of their political careers. Certainly the two share the same capacity for self-delusion over the role of regulation in the banking crisis, as I explain here. Therefore, when they call for a Global New Deal, I suspect they do not realize that they are heading down a road Pete Wehner describes here:

Barack Obama — supremely ambitious, young, and new — has revived an age-old debate over how the economy works. He is casting his lot with collectivists and statists; his intent is to put us on a glide path to European-style socialism. Unless he is able to suspend the laws of economics, I rather doubt Obama will succeed. As a result, he may end up not repudiating Thatcherism and Reaganism, but revivifying them.

One can but hope.