Whassup With Obama's Desire to Emulate the European Paradigm of Unsustainability?

Mark Helprin takes a stab at explaining it:

Both in his re-election campaign and as the core principle of his presidency, Barack Obama asks America to cast off reliance on the free market—because, in his characterization, the free market "doesn't work"—in favor of the European model of ever-tightening, ever-regulating, ever-expanding governance. This he does, astonishingly, at the very moment of the European model's long-predictable crisis, collapse, bankruptcy, and devolution.

With his trademark certainty he proposes—indeed, at times commands—that we follow him over the Niagara to which his back is turned. The writer Henry James cautioned that, "It's a complex fate, being an American, & one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe." Promiscuous endorsement of things European, inveterate in the president's academic coterie, has long been characteristic of American snobs. As Harvard once dispatched missionaries to better the savages, it now sends students abroad so they might better us. To be wrong on both counts requires congenital blindness to the facts, which suggest that despite our own grievous failings Europe is hardly worthy of imitation.

Snobbery, congenital blindness, the malign influence of academia: that pretty much covers it, I'd say.

America hurtles over the falls with Europhile Obama--without a barrel