Barack Obama’s liberal base is not happy with the economy or the resolution of the debt ceiling crisis or the president’s waning popularity and the looming disaster of the next election coming right their way. Maureen Dowd recently tore her garments and sat by the side of the road pouring ashes over her head, as she alternately keened and cursed the current president.
Democratic lawmakers worry that the Tea Party freshmen have already “neutered” the president, as one told me. They fret that Obama is an inept negotiator. They worry that he should have been out in the country selling a concrete plan, rather than once more kowtowing to Republicans and, as with the stimulus plan, health care and Libya, leading from behind.
As one Democratic senator complained: “The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent.” (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: “We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.” ..
More and more, 2008 looks like the tulip mania. …
What if this is all a cruel joke on us? What if the people who hate government are good at it and the people who love government are bad at it?
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Dr. Milton R. Wolf (who claims to be a cousin of Barack Obama’s) explains that there is really no reason for surprise at how things are turning out. You elect an ultra-liberal president, and he will apply ultra-liberal (i.e., socialist) policies. Socialist policies always turn out the same way, producing economic disaster.
Remember when liberals claimed Barack Obama was “probably the smartest guy ever to become president” and was “a sort of god”? Today they say “we are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes,” and the center point of his presidency is “a disaster.” So what changed exactly?
Is President Obama really a different man today than he was before he entered the Oval Office? The same Illinois legislator who voted “present” 129 times is now the debt-crisis-AWOL president who refused to present a specific plan of his own. The same presidential candidate who wanted to “spread the wealth” has unleashed redistributionist, collectivist policies on everything from health care and energy supply to runaway Keynesian spending and ever-increasing taxes. Should we be surprised? …
[I]n recent weeks, his approval rating has crumbled, particularly among liberals, to an all-time low of 40 percent in a recent Gallup poll. Another poll shows that even among liberal Democrats, strong support for Mr. Obama’s record on jobs has plummeted 22 points, to a paltry 31 percent. The hope and change of 2008 have given way to the joblessness and foreclosures of Obamanomics.
The only thing worse than the abject failure of a liberal president, at least in the eyes of the liberal, is the undeniable failure of liberalism itself. …
[A]s the liberal presidency of Mr. Obama becomes increasingly indefensible, the liberal is faced with an unthinkable dilemma: acknowledge the fundamental failure of his collectivist liberal philosophy, which tends toward socialism, or blame its failures on a single man whom, until just recently, the liberal deified.
The conflict between liberal collectivist ideology and its application was easily predictable by anyone who has studied big-government economic failures throughout history. … The degree of autocracy may vary, but still the collectivist road to economic ruin is universal.
The American left is actually kind of lucky that Barack Obama has not been equally ideologically consistent and reliable on foreign policy, or we would have some overseas disaster, American humiliation, or hostage crisis making even more damaging headlines.
Obama’s only real success has been in precisely the area in which he failed to fulfill his campaign promises of an approach radically different that of George W. Bush. He has not closed Guantanamo. He has continued surveillance programs and covert operations passionately opposed by the left. He ignored International Law pieties and violated Pakistani sovereignty, and he consequently bagged bin Laden.
If Barack Obama had been as inflexible and doctrinaire a left-wing ideologue in foreign policy as he has been domestically, he could have been considerably worse off.
- Excited
- Angry
- Not as Angry
- Bored
- Indifferent
- Sad
