How Obama Crushed the Dreams of a Generation…
How Obama Crushed the Dreams of a Generation (of Lefties): It isn’t just the Nobel Peace Prize Committee that must be sorely disappointed in Obama today. Few people talk about it anymore, but Obama became president riding on a number of promises: he was the rock star that would save the Democratic Party; an enlightened being who would redeem America and unite the country while immanentizing the Eschaton. He would literally make for a better planet.
After the Left successfully demagogued every single move the Bush administration made for 8 years, here he was: a candidate upon whom every single aspiration of the Left could be projected and then some. Independents flocked to him. Crowds gathered in far off countries just to hear him speak. He was The One.
But he was also a product. A product that was marketed and sold, like a Hollywood movie. And like a bad Hollywood movie, he didn’t live up to the hype. And then, irony of ironies, fate turned the tables on Obama and his administration.
Where as in 2000 the Left got behind Al Gore’s ill-advised recount to clamor “stolen election!”, Obama and his DOJ let voter intimidation occur with impunity.
Back in the Bush years, enacting and enforcing the Patriot Act allowed the Left to lament the rise of an Orwellian tyranny under Bush. But then Obama carried on with the same approach to surveillance…and later he let the TSA get away with invading people’s privacy in a far more tangible way.
Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney were demonized for erecting the Guantanamo prisoner facility. And yet Obama has kept Guantanamo open.
Transparency, corruption, the economy (the economy was supposed to be bad during the Bush years. Does anyone still believe that?). You name it. Whatever the Bush White House was accused of doing wrong, Obama has done just the same or worse.
Now Obama has his very own war in his hands. A war that is vulnerable to the same criticisms with which the Left barraged the Iraq War Bush pursued.
All of the above and much more present the Left with a monumental problem. Now they look like hypocrites…or fools (Rubes!). Or both. It’s almost as if they forgot about Alinsky’s rules. But they had it coming. They backed the wrong candidate. Many of them probably knew it (how could they have not known it?), but they backed him anyway. They wanted the power. Now they’ve paid for it with their credibility.
It will probably be a whole generation before the Left can effectively demagogue geopolitics and national security the way it did during the Bush years. It will be a generation before Americans respond to the siren song of Utopia in the numbers they did back in 2008. I’d be very surprised if Obama got re-elected in 2012. If he runs at all. How many of his bases has he isolated now?
How will he effectively repel any attacks from his right on the role of America in the world, now that it is clear that the world still looks to America for leadership? How will he Teleprompter his way out of that one, now that it is clear that – as much as some people dislike it – we are a superpower and on occasion we must act like one; now that it is clear that geopolitical power, like nature, abhors a vacuum?
President Obama: He was the rock star who would put the Left in its rightful, exalted place. Instead, he’s made Lefties look like the empty vessels of vitriol with nothing new to offer into which they evolved a long time ago. In that sense, his Presidency has failed. And not by Rush Limbaugh’s hand either.
George Soros must be furious…
UPDATE: I agree. Most Lefties won’t find anything wrong with Obama going to war in Libya. They’ll rationalize it just fine, just like they rationalize everything else (It’s not a double standard. It’s the party line).
But for the Left to achieve a political victory on the level of what they accomplished back in 2008 when Obama was elected POTUS, they need to get many more millions of Americans to drink that Kool-Aid. And that will be a tough trick to pull off, because – fortunately - most Americans believe a broken promise will leave an ugly scar on both the promisor and the promisee. Or to put it in car salesman terms: no one likes a lemon.
MORE: Ed Driscoll links with related content. And his rhetorical question is warranted. The Left won’t stop voting for Leftist candidates just because they backed a false prophet. My point is their loss of credibility will reduce the significant amount of traction with the average American voter that we saw them develop during the Bush years (the fact that the Bush White House was never good at defending itself also played a role in this phenomenon, of course).
This low level of credibility with most Americans is par for the course for the Left, however. Still, it’s an obstacle they’ve always been able to circumvent by pursuing in the courts what they cannot legislate, eliciting mass hysteria about their cause du jour with the aid of their allies in the press and academia, and so on. California was not turned into a mess in a day, after all. It became the socialist miasma that it is today one little step at a time.
To sum up, Obama putting his lemonhood in full display for all the world to see is neither a defeat nor a victory. It is merely an ironic reversal that – in my opinion – cannot be dismissed as a little instance of “I told you so”. People don’t easily forget emperors who parade in the nude; but political victories and defeats take a lot more effort than that. But I do believe that the marketing formula that brought Obama to power won’t work again for some time to come.
