Left wing base is Obama’s hope for avoiding change
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
The stubbornness of President Obama’s refusal to move to the center ahead of the November presidential election tells this writer that, yes, he is stubborn.
But there is much more. Some guesses:
He is resigned to losing to any credible nominee the Republicans put up.
True, a third party candidacy from the right would muddy this thought, but Obama himself is vulnerable from the Democrat left, if he doesn’t glue himself to their unpopular ideology.
The movement is restless and theoretically, at least, could bolt.
By not vacating the leftist position, he closes the door on extremists even more ideological than he.
It is not as if Obama lacked a successful template for a come-from-behind victory. President Bill Clinton seemed headed for defeat in 1996, when he pivoted to the center and decisively beat Republican Bob Dole.
The president has seen the fate of Democrats who followed him on ObamaCare, stimulus, bail-outs, and energy policy.
The entire Democrat margin of control in the House of Representatives went down after 2010. At least five Senate Democrats and one Democrat-turned-Independent have thrown in their hands rather than face voters on Obama’s agenda.
Nebraska’s Ben Nelson is but the most recent drop out.
So fear must be factored in as a motive keeping Obama close to his relatively small but testy base.
Arguably, based on his actions and words, the out of nowhere community organizer from Chicago sees himself as a larger-than-life world figure, far beyond any merely national president.
His most faithful followers have proclaimed Obama as the messianic bearer of a testament all the world is waiting for. Toss in a dollop of narcissism and to Obama, moving on to world leadership of an as yet semi-mystical world movement might seem acceptable, even if a national office is forfeited.
Windows into the Obama psyche are easy to find. Consider Obama’s choice of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, short-lived symbol of Nazi power until 1945, for his maiden speech to the world.
Eventually the venue had to be transferred to a different plaza in the German capital at insistence of the German government. The chutzpah of the affair was evident, coming as it did on July 24, 2008, even before the rookie senator from Illinois was officially recognized as the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.
The actual acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention did not come until Aug. 28 in Denver’s Invesco Stadium with on-stage trappings in white plaster colonnades suggesting the power and glory of ancient Rome and Greece.
For today’s moment of Obama splendor, he has a ragtag mix of radical leftists, utopians, malcontents and thugs — “occupiers” — hibernating in major urban centers, waiting for a sign.
At the least, the occupiers can be useful to politicians. Not all their members are cranks, but enough are to signal danger if the guardians of America’s freedom and liberty are unprepared.
A potential union problem seems ahead for Obama’s wing of the Democratic Party. For the “why,” search no farther than the Obama administration’s Jan. 18 decision to stall, again, the Keystone Pipeline. Keystone has been studied to death since 2008.
Uneconomic green energy as now envisioned — solar, wind, biochemical, included — may truly be the thing of the future.
Keystone and other projects such as oil from Alaska, the Gulf, offshore elsewhere and shale and natural gas from almost everywhere mean jobs and investment income and revenues for needy government units now.
President Obama has waged class war as a strategy, added $5 trillion to our debt, registered at best 8.5-9 percent unemployment, and has yet to offer a credible economic vision forward.
Can the political left of his party really offer hope to avoid change, his change, on Nov. 6?
Possibly. Probably not.
January 20, 2012
