“Chicago Does Socialism,” that’s what Victor Davis Hanson calls the aggregate effect of the Obama administration’s year in office:

The president promises a state fix for health care; then student loans; and next energy. There are to be subsidies, credits, and always new entitlements for every problem, all requiring hordes of fresh technocrats and Civil Service employees. Like a perpetual teenager, who wants and buys but never produces, the president is focused on the acquisitive and consumptive urges, never on the productive — as in how all his magnanimous largesse is to be paid for by someone else. …
[With taxation, once] again, Obama never honestly connects the dots and comes clean with the American people about the net effect: On vast swaths of upper income, new state and federal taxes — aside from any rises in sales, property, capital-gains, or inheritance taxes — could confiscate an aggregate of 65 to 70 percent. …
[On transparency and promises,] I could go on and on, but again the pattern is clear. Each time Obama prevaricates, we grant him an exemption because of his lofty rhetoric about bipartisanship and his soothing words about unity. Only later do we notice that in retrospect each untruth is part of a pattern of dissimulation within just a single year of governance. Obama has proven so far that in fact one can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time. …
[With respect to international affairs,] again, connect these seemingly isolated dots and a picture emerges of a new radical foreign policy of “neutralism.” Traditional allies are ignored, and old enemies are courted — until both are on the same moral and political plane. The one constant is that a socialist anti-Western philosophy abroad (which blames the West for a nation’s own self-inflicted misery) wins sympathy with the Obama administration, while capitalist Western culture is seen as mostly passé.

His appropriate response to 9/11 excepted, President Bush’s years in office nudged the nation in the wrong direction as his administration attempted to walk the line between bolstering the public sector and keeping the private sector alive, while anticipating and adjusting for foreign developments. Obama’s years in office, unless they prove to be a repealable four-year binge, are going to be absolutely disastrous. As Mark Steyn puts it, after describing the inevitable decline ushered in with the healthcare usurpation and the foreign variables like “the price of oil when the Straits of Hormuz are under a de facto Iranian nuclear umbrella”:

… right now the future lies somewhere between the certainty of decline and the probability of catastrophe. What can stop it? Not a lot.