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Victor Davis Hanson writes on “The Coming Post-Obama Renaissance.” This could have used an editor, but contains the germs of interesting thoughts.
… I, like many, am worried about the Republican field — as is the custom at this early stage. There is more to be endured in 2012. The Obama decline will spark venomous politics of the sort we haven’t seen in years. This time hope and change will be even more “Bush did it!/’You’re all racists!/“They” will take your Social Security.” The financial crisis is not over. We are not yet at the beginning of the end for statism, but the Churchillian end of its new beginning.
Still, let us cheer up a bit. The country always knew, but for just a bit forgot, that you cannot print money and borrow endlessly. It always knew that bureaucrats were less efficient than employers. It knew that Guantanamo was not a gulag and Iraq was not “lost.” But given the anguish over Iraq, the anger at Bush, the Obama postracial novelty and “centrist” façade, and the Freddie/Fannie/Wall Street collapse, it wanted to believe what it knew might not be true. Now three years of Obama have slapped voters out of their collective trance.
The spell has now passed; and we are stronger for its passing. There is going to be soon a sense of relief that we have not experienced in decades. In short, sadder but wiser Americans will soon be turned loose with a vigor unseen in decades. …
James Pethokoukis says the numbers are working against the administration.
The Misery Index—the sum of the unemployment rate plus inflation rate—is a shorthand way of looking at how the U.S. economy might affect the political fortunes of American presidents. The current MI is around 13, which is as high as it’s been since the early 1980s when stagflation was finally loosening its grip. When Jimmy Carter was blown out by Ronald Reagan in 1980, the MI was around 20. When Barack Obama took office in January 2009, it was 8.
A more direct way of measuring the mood of America is by looking at various measures of sentiment. Pollsters frequently ask voters a) if they are “satisfied” with the way things are going, and b) if the country is “heading in the right direction.” By those metrics, as compiled by AEI, Obama looks to be in big trouble: …
Noemie Emery says he’s not that smart.
… If Obama had been a good politician, he would have realized that he had been elected not by a broad and deep swath of newly minted liberal voters, but by a temporary alliance of faithful progressives (numerous, but not enough to win elections) and centrist swing voters scared out of their wits by the crash. Before the crash, as David Paul Kuhn wrote on RealClearPolitics later, McCain led Obama in the Gallup polls for nine days in succession; after, he never led again. Before, Obama cracked the 50 percent mark only once, and that was at the peak of his convention; after, he passed it 33 times. He won nine states Bush had carried four years earlier, but in six of these (including Ohio and Florida) McCain tied or led him before September 15. Why? Most of these states had large, wealthy suburbs around their big cities, where stockholders and homeowners saw huge paper losses. It was during this period that Democrats made their gains among whites, and white males.
At the same time as this massive swing towards the Democratic ticket, polls showed that the ideological split remained where it had been in the Clinton/Bush era: self-identified conservatives around 41 percent, moderates around 37 percent, liberals around 21 percent. Many people who voted for Obama were not in fact liberal, but centrist or center-right voters unnerved by the crash and the chaos in the Republican party, and drawn to Obama’s misleading aura of calm. This meant there was also a split in Obama’s electorate: The progressives liked his liberal ideas, the centrists his so-called “conservative” temperament; the progressives wanted transformation, the centrists stability; the progressives wanted the government grown, the centrists wanted the economy stabilized; the centrists were prepared for the small shift to the left that comes with the usual change from a center-right to a left-center government, the progressives were bent on sweeping and radical change.
An adept politician would have looked at the polls and realized he had a frail coalition that had to be nudged along carefully, knowing schism would destroy his majority. Obama’s mistake was to assume that the shock of the crash had turned the center hard left and to govern accordingly. “The coalition that carried Obama to victory is every bit as sturdy as America’s last two dominant political coalitions: the ones that elected Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan,” wrote Peter Beinart, reflecting the view of the press and the president. As it happened, “the coalition that carried Obama to victory” would shatter in less than nine months.
The coalition Obama never realized existed took its first hit in his first month, with his $800 billion stimulus package, which would fail to address the problem of job loss and fail in its long-run ambition to hold unemployment under 8 percent. It took its second hit just a month later, with a bailout for homeowners behind in their payments, prompting CNBC’s Rick Santelli to suggest dumping worthless derivatives into Lake Michigan, thus launching the Tea Party movement, which Obama and allies, with typical brilliance, dismissed.
The third hit, and the one that proved fatal, was the launching of national health care, a sacred cause to the left but to no one else in the country, a massive restructuring of one-sixth of the country’s economy, which would prove a mistake in its timing (FDR had waited two years to introduce Social Security), a mistake in its structure, and a mistake in the way it was framed. To keep his coalition intact, it should have been incremental, built out from the center, and addressed to the main concern of the public, which was affordability. Instead, the plan that emerged from Congress was comprehensive, built out from the left, geared to help the uninsured (one-sixth of the country) at the expense of everything else in the system, and based on the premise, which no one believed, that it could expand subsidized coverage to millions of people while at the same time keeping costs down.
This was not what the centrists had signed on for, and in the course of the summer, they started to flee. Obama’s numbers began drifting down from their astronomical highs to more human levels, and support for his bill into negative country. Democrats from purple and red states found themselves besieged by angry constituents, whose concerns Obama did nothing to appease or acknowledge. They then flung themselves into the arms of Republicans, who, dazed and despondent after Obama’s election, could scarcely believe their own luck.
In October, Democrats rammed the bill through the House, winning by 7 votes out of a 79-seat majority, with no Republicans voting in favor, and 34 Democrats voting against. In November came the off-year elections for governor, in New Jersey, a blue state which Obama had won a year earlier by a 15-point margin, and Virginia, a purple/red state which Obama had carried by 7. Obama wrapped his arms around Democrats Creigh Deeds and Jon Corzine. Independents, who had rallied for him a year earlier, looked, and ran hard in the other direction. Deeds lost by 18 points to Bob McDonnell. Corzine lost to Chris Christie by 3.
In December, Democrats pushed the bill through the Senate, by means of hundreds of millions in bribes and kickbacks to wavering members of their own party. House speaker Nancy Pelosi called it a “gift for the American people.” The people thought differently. In January, Scott Brown won a Senate race in Massachusetts, taking the seat vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy, and becoming the first member of his party to represent his state in that body in 30 years. The bill was thought dead, and most Democrats breathed sighs of relief and exhaustion. But their perils were not over yet.
Proving there was no pain he would not inflict on his party, Obama seized on a loophole to push it back through the House, a Pickett’s charge of a mission which would prove a death sentence for many congressional Democrats. “The legislation has become a disaster,” wrote Howard Fineman in what used to be Newsweek. “The leaders of Troy knew they were making a mistake when they wheeled that horse into their besieged city, but they did it anyway. We’ll see what happens this fall.”
Obamacare passed the Senate 60-39, and they saw. “The Democrats’ hope with health care was that ‘people will like it after we pass it.’ Well, they hate it,” wrote pollster Pat Caddell in September. Time magazine found “a sense of disappointment, bordering on betrayal” among many voters. “In Nevada, a state Obama won with 55 percent, . . . only 29 percent of likely voters . . . think the president’s actions have helped the economy.” In Indiana, a state legislator said she was often approached by former Obama supporters who wanted to “vent” their frustrations: “Betrayed by the health care vote,” “He’s not what I voted for,” “What are they thinking when it comes to spending?” were the most common themes.
In one go, the 2010 midterms wiped out the combined Democratic gains in the House of the previous two “wave” elections, took from them 6 seats in the Senate and 10 governorships, along with control of state houses, in swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. An army of rising young GOP stars vowed to work for health care repeal in the House and the Senate; governors vowed to work for repeal and resist implementation; and state attorneys general wasted no time in filing suits in federal courts to have the law declared unconstitutional. The use of wedge issues is common in politics—issues carefully selected to unite one party while dividing the other—but it is rare to use them against one’s own party. It takes an unusual politician to achieve this objective. One who’s not very good at his craft.
Good politicians are in sync with their times, understand them, and deal with their challenges. But Obama is at odds, and often at war, with his own. In an age when debt is a problem, he is a big spender; when government has to cut back, he wants to expand both its expense and its reach. Nothing that happens appears to deter him, not the massive pushback from the American people in the 2009 and 2010 elections; not the crisis in Europe, kicked off by the collapse of Greece’s finances in April 2010, which caused an austerity panic all over Europe, and should have driven home the most cogent of lessons: that exactly as he was trying to turn his country into a social democracy like those of old Europe, which the American left had long admired, the European social democracies had been forced to admit that their model could not be sustained.
The result is that Obama is now an outlier among the world’s leaders: …
Michael Barone says it is a mistake to keep step with unions.
Leadership is something you can’t be taught or learn, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said in his press conference Tuesday announcing he would not reverse his decision not to run for president. “Leadership today in America has to be about doing the big things and being courageous.”
No one doubts that Christie has shown this kind of leadership in New Jersey. Call him bombastic, call him confrontational, but don’t call him wobbly. He leads, and even with a Democratic-majority legislature, the state is moving in his direction.
Things are different on the national level. The day before Christie spoke in Trenton, the Obama White House officially delivered the free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama to Congress for approval. That was the 986th day that Barack Obama has been president.
He could have sent them 985 days earlier; negotiations were completed in 2006 and 2007. Or, if he were concerned they’d be deep-sixed when his fellow Democrats controlled Congress, he could have sent them 274 days earlier when Republicans took over the House.
To be sure, they are opposed by many labor union leaders and congressional Democrats. There is a nostalgia among many union and party old-timers for the days, more than 30 years distant, when the auto and steel workers’ unions had nearly 2 million members.
Now each has less than half a million. But the old-timers seem to feel that somehow something like those olden days can be brought back if they oppose FTAs.
Any responsible president has to take a different view. …
Josh Kraushaar says the president’s rhetoric and actions are incoherent.
President Obama’s reelection is in trouble because of the nation’s rocky economy, but he’s been exacerbating his problems by running a populist campaign at odds with the electoral strategy his advisers have laid out. Not only is his new rhetoric chastising the wealthy to pay their fair share at odds with the president’s well-crafted image of being a post-partisan uniter, but it risks alienating the white-collar professionals who have become an increasingly important part of a winning Democratic coalition.
The president’s team has been arguing that the path to reelection lies in winning diverse, white-collar battleground states like Colorado, Virginia, and North Carolina—more-affluent states with growing numbers of independents. But the president’s latest rhetoric, pitting the affluent against the middle class, threatens to turn off the very independents he’s seeking to win back. It’s the type of populist message that’s better geared toward blue-collar voters in the Rust Belt, which the campaign is viewing as close to a lost cause. …