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According to Scott Rasmussen, a noted pollster, Reaganism is not dead.
Barack Obama won the White House by campaigning against an unpopular incumbent in a time of economic anxiety and lingering foreign policy concerns. He offered voters an upbeat message, praised the nation as a land of opportunity, promised tax cuts to just about everyone, and overcame doubts about his experience with a strong performance in the presidential debates.
Does this sound familiar? It should. Mr. Obama followed the approach that worked for Ronald Reagan. His victory confirmed that voters still embrace the guiding beliefs of the Reagan era.
During Reagan’s campaign, the nation suffered from high unemployment and high inflation. This time around, data from the Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll showed that Mr. Obama took command of the race during the 10 days following the collapse of Lehman Brothers — when the Wall Street meltdown hit Main Street. Before that event John McCain was leading nationally by three percentage points. Ten days later Mr. Obama was up by five and never relinquished his lead. …
David Warren says soon Obama’s mettle will be tested.
America elected her demagogue Tuesday, after a fine rhetorical show before massed crowds, in which the candidate showed great discipline in avoiding substantial commitments, and simply painted the air with exhilarating, meaningless phrases. After successive chameleon changes in political colouration, and the successful moulting of his various radical associations, “O-ba-ma!” ended the campaign posing as a centrist — with a thick wad of reassuringly conventional Democrat policies, and one of the oldest of the old-style politicians as his running mate.
The election was no blow-out, and the result showed the same alignments across the U.S. electoral map as in the last several elections, with just a couple points seasonal swing to the left; but still sufficient balance to allow a swing back at the next electoral juncture.
Nor did it vindicate the international media declaration that, “America has moved beyond race.” If you look at the exit polls, the people who said they had voted on the basis of race, or that race was a major factor in their decision, were overwhelmingly voting for Obama. And if you add them up, they correspond approximately to his victory margins, not only nationally but in each swing state. In that sense, one could plausibly argue it was the most racist election in U.S. history. Moreover, it was an election in which 97 per cent of black voters voted for the visibly black candidate. Puh-lease don’t tell me America has moved beyond race. …
Speaking of Obama, John Derbyshire posts at the Corner.
… The sputtering-Left component of my email bag took particular exception to my calling Obama “shallow, ignorant, and self-obsessed.” How dare I? Well, let’s unpack it.
Shallow: Have you ever heard Obama say anything interesting? Me neither. I saw him on the telly the other day fielding a question about illegal immigrants. He said something like: “We can’t deport ten million people. We need to find a way to bring them out of the shadows. Thet should have to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for citizenship.” Now, here is an issue that’s of major concern to millions of Americans, who feel they are losing the nation they grew up in. It’s been argued for years at high levels of discourse, with many fine books written. (Most recently, one by our own Mark Krikorian.) Yet Obama can address it only with the tiredest, most threadbare clichés of the open-borders Left. It’s plain he has never given a moment’s real thought to the issue. Shallow.
Ignorant: Obama strikes me as a very intelligent person, but with that intelligence narrowly focused. He has spent his adult life among the tiny sub-class of black Americans who have grown wealthy, or hope to, via the affirmative-action rackets. He has never ventured outside that milieu, and I seriously doubt he knows much about life outside it. I doubt, for example, that he knows anything much at all about business, the military, science, work (other than paper-shuffling), or high culture. I’ll be glad to be proved wrong, but nothing I’ve heard him say, nor my (admittedly incomplete) acquaintance with what he’s written, refutes that.
Self-obsessed: A guy who publishes a 464-page autobiography at age 34 is self-obsessed, what can I tell ya? If he publishes a second autobiography at age 45, you can print “self-obsessed” in capital letters. (Yeah, I know, it’s a “campaign book.” The content is mainly autobiographical, though.) …
In a Sun-Times column dated five years ago, Mark Steyn tells us what it was really like the last time the media worshipped a president. And, he reminds us of the courage of George Bush.
… History is selective. We remember moments, and, because that moment in Dallas blazes so vividly, everything around it fades to a gray blur. So here, from the archives, is an alternative 40th anniversary from November 1963:
8 a.m. Nov. 2: Troops enter a Catholic church in Saigon and arrest two men. They’re tossed into the back of an armored personnel carrier and driven up the road a little ways to a railroad crossing. The M-113 stops, the pair are riddled with bullets and their mutilated corpses taken to staff HQ for inspection by the army’s commanders. One of the deceased is Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam. The other is Ngo Dinh Nhu, his brother and chief adviser.
Back in the White House, President Kennedy gets the cable and is stunned. When Washington had given tacit approval to the coup, the deal was that Diem was supposed to be offered asylum in the United States. But something had gone wrong. I use “gone wrong” in the debased sense in which a drug deal that turns into a double murder is said to have “gone wrong.”
Kennedy had known Diem for the best part of a decade. If he felt bad about his part in the murder of an ally, he didn’t feel bad for long: Within three weeks, he too was dead. Looked at coolly, there seems something faintly ridiculous about cooing dreamily over the one brief shining moment of a slain head of state who only a month earlier had set in motion the events leading to the slaying of another head of state. The noble ideals of Camelot did not extend to the State Department or the CIA. …
Noemie Emery says we should watch and wait.
Refusing to take Ronald Reagan’s famous advice–don’t just do something, stand there–conservative machers are all in a swivet, reading the leaves of the 2008 verdict, plotting to pick off this or that set of voters, opining on what it all means. Actually, just standing there seems like a pretty good option, at least for the moment, and perhaps for the next few weeks and months. Plans made right now may turn out to be useless. There are too many things we don’t know.
We don’t know yet what happened on Tuesday, and what kind of win it will be: a pivotal one, like 1932 and 1980; or a transient success–1964, 1976, 1988, 2004–that at the moment appeared monumental, but four years later had turned out not to be. How much of the glow now surrounding the Democrats is due to themselves, and how much to the nature of Barack Obama, who has a personality that comes along twice in a century, and how long will this last? Which Obama will turn up to govern, the man of moderate temperament, or the functional liberal, whose record is way left of center? …
Michael Barone thinks Obama’s win was not a win for a left turn.
… Do Obama and the Democrats have a mandate? Obama got a larger percentage than any other Democrat since 1964, and Democrats have congressional majorities comparable to those in Bill Clinton’s first two years. But their policies of protectionism and greater taxes on high earners seem ill-suited to a country facing a recession (see Hoover, Herbert). The public fisc does not appear to be overflowing enough to finance refundable tax credits, government health insurance or universal pre-kindergarten.
The half of the electorate that doesn’t remember the 1970s may be more open to big government than those of us who do. But “open to” does not equal “demand.” The decisive shift of public opinion came when the financial crisis hit. McCain approached it like a fighter pilot, denouncing Wall Street, suspending his campaign, threatening to skip the first debate. Obama approached it like a law professor, cool and detached. Voters preferred law professor to fighter pilot. This was a triumph of temperament, not policy. …
Couple of shorts from John Fund. First on the strategery of Alaska voters. Second, the accuracy of pollsters this year.
… But the real reason for his (Ted Stevens) survival appears to be tactical voting on the part of the state’s voters. GOP sources tell me word was spread that the only way to keep the seat in the Republican column and prevent a possible 60-seat filibuster-proof Democratic majority was for voters to hold their noses and re-elect Mr. Stevens. Mr. Stevens himself implied as much in the race’s only debate, held after his conviction. …
Writing in Human Events, Ted Nugent wishes Happy Birthday to the Marines.
From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, all across America and in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever America is being defended, the world’s most exclusive gun club is the celebrating its 233 birthday today.
Born in a roughneck Philadelphia bar in 1775 on a dare to surpass standard warrior excellence, the United States Marines Corps has distinguished itself over its history as the finest military force the world has ever seen. Do not point the US Marines Corps at anything you do not wish conquer. They are the pointy end of America’s spear. …
Al Dente Blog, (where serious gastronomy meets culinary calamity), posts on a race in CO where Bacon was way ahead of Fries. Which prompted this comment;
Obviously bacon is better. It is naturally bad for you, whereas fries, which are just potatoes, have to be fried to be bad for you.