Obama rallying his armies of the left for 2012
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
The more Barack Obama peels off layers of whatever is at his core, the fascinating question is where does he go from here?
If polls can be believed, he is at odds with the majority of Americans on issues including debts, deficits, national security, border control, jobs creation, energy rationing, Manhattan trials for terrorist masterminds, oil spill response, and containment of the world’s worst dictators.
Even with health care, Americans favored change, but not ObamaCare change. Few wanted to dismantle the medical edifice that is the acknowledged envy of the world.
And yet that is what Obama and congressional Democrats gave them. Did Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi forget that people come to America when their own lives are on the line? Americans don’t go to their countries.
Unless even the Democrat Party deep-thinkers are wrong, Obama’s House and Senate allies will pay a fearsome price in the mid-term elections this November for following the leader on the above range of issues.
Some have already called it quits, for whatever reasons: Sens. Evan Bayh of Indiana, Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, lead the list.
So, after charming, threatening or bribing so many Democrats to walk the plank for his costly ideas, where will the president come down?
Will he run to the center the way Bill Clinton did after the clobbering of HillaryCare and subsequent Democrat loss of Congress in 1994 after 40 years of control? For Obama to say “follow me” and then backtrack will leave a lot of off-the-cliff Democrat politicians screaming “Ouch!”
Clinton saved his presidency and won a second term in 1996 by switching quickly from dud programs such as HillaryCare in favor of conservative, virtual Republican-style welfare reform and NAFTA programs.
This writer doesn’t think Obama will do that. He’s smart enough to understand Clinton’s moves, check. But he’s far too much the stiff elitist ideologue to bend to the good old boy Bill model.
It’s this writer’s guess that Obama will not betray the socialist self he has proven to be nor his rambunctious, if not to say, rowdy street soldiers, among which are the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and ACORN, the community organizer group.
With that assumption, the 2010-2012 period will see him morph into a more truculent leader of a streamlined radical base.
The run-up to 2012 will thus produce a hard-edge kind of agitation politics, better known to Europe than America. It is in that light that Obama’s strange, even nonsensical, stands defying the public will are to be examined.
He is refining his leftist base to do battle under a theory that a dedicated minority of true believers can overwhelm any majority through tactics of pressure and release, pressure and release.
Our columnists Thomas Sowell and Charles Krauthammer have opined that Obama nurses a vision of himself as president of all the world, a leader beyond mere national politics.
That may be. If so, what is losing a national election compared to ascending to world leadership of one’s own movement?
Isn’t that what being a messiah is all about?
June 25, 2010
