Posted on 09/05/2009 11:24:33 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
What happened to President Obama? His wax wings having melted, he is the man who fell to earth. What happened to bring his popularity down further than that of any new president in polling history save Gerald Ford (post-Nixon pardon)?
The conventional wisdom is that Obama made a tactical mistake by farming out his agenda to Congress and allowing himself to be pulled left by the doctrinaire liberals of the Democratic congressional leadership. But the idea of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pulling Obama left is quite ridiculous.
Just look at Obama’s behavior as president, beginning with his first address to Congress. Unbidden, unforced and unpushed by the congressional leadership, Obama gave his most deeply felt vision of America, delivering the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president. In American politics, you can’t get more left than that speech and still be on the playing field.
In a center-right country, that was problem enough. Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal.
Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party, town-hall resistance.
Obama’s reaction to that resistance made things worse. Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grassroots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist, special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grassroots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob - misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest - from drug companies to auto unions to doctors - in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged.
Things got worse still. With answers so slippery and implausible and, well, fishy, he began jeopardizing the most fundamental asset of any new president - trust. You can’t say that the system is totally broken and in need of radical reconstruction, but nothing will change for you; that Medicare is bankrupting the country, but $500 billion in cuts will have no effect on care; that you will expand coverage while reducing deficits - and not inspire incredulity and mistrust.
When ordinary citizens understand they are being played for fools, they bristle.
After a disastrous summer - mistaking his mandate, believing his press, centralizing power, governing left, disdaining citizens for (of all things) organizing - Obama is in trouble.
Let’s be clear: This is a fall, not a collapse. He’s not been repudiated or even defeated. He will likely regroup and pass some version of health insurance reform that will restore some of his clout and popularity.
But what has occurred - irreversibly - is this: He’s become ordinary.
The spell is broken. The charismatic conjurer of 2008 has shed his magic. He’s regressed to the mean, tellingly expressed in poll numbers hovering at 50 percent.
For a man who only recently bred a cult, ordinariness is a great burden, and for his acolytes, a crushing disappointment. Obama has become a politician like others. And like other flailing presidents, he will try to salvage a cherished reform - and his own standing - with yet another prime-time speech.
But for the first time since election night in Grant Park, he will appear in the most unfamiliar of guises - mere mortal, a treacherous transformation to which a man of Obama’s supreme self-regard may never adapt.
I really don’t think he’s “historic” either.
“What say you? “
Bring it on.
"Don't blame ME. I voted for and whatshisname."
Cheers!
I learned about people in the sixties and seventies, I thought revolution was in the air, especially after Ohio State, but in reality white Americans are not like that, we have political upheavals like the 1994 election and then the emotion settles down.
The best that you can hope for is higher religious voter participation and winning some moderates in 2010 and 2012.
Bottom line:
0bamaboy is waking up to the fact that he is being used and abused. 0bamaboy has his own agenda but is now coming to realize he is being used as a tool of others.
0bamaboy’s agenda is now secondary.
0bamaboy is pissed and scared.
Look at his body language.
Yeah, what was that old group-of-six, amnesty-loving RINO’s name? [scratches head] McDonald? McGriddle? Something like that...
He is definitely looking all "wee wee'd up" and "paranoid."
He is definitely looking all “wee wee’d up” and “paranoid.”
__________________________
I think he is beginning to realize that he will be “thrown
under the bus” once he has served their purpose.
The Civil War this go around will not come from the White or the Right, it will come from the Black’s and the Left. Once the Obama machine begin to unfold or it is removed from power, by vote or by articles of impeachment.
Thats when the ball will drop.
Actually, they do more than just bristle. Bristling would denote a "ho-hum" response on the part of those in Flyover.
We are way past bristling.
There is no actual war of combat coming up, it is all political and voting.
“But what has occurred - irreversibly - is this: He’s become ordinary.”
Krauthammer gives him way too much credit. He’s become what he always was a lying marxist.
Hennety was right in hammering away at his radical, anti-american connections before the elections and he didn’t get enough credit for it. Now we’re paying the price.
Thank god Beck has picked up the baton.
“I think he is beginning to realize that he will be “thrown
under the bus” once he has served their purpose.”
The ‘rats are going to have a tough time doing that.... because he’s black. I don’t think they’ll touch him with a 10ft pole. If they attempt that the democrat party will blow up, which will be the sweetest justice, given their penchant for constantly playing the race card.
We’re already in a political civil war. We have a situation where thirty to forty percent of the country will ABSOLUTELY HATE whoever the President is and—this is big—regard his or her Presidency as illegitimate. The left felt that way about Bush, most on the right feel that way about Obama. Things will get worse and worse and whoever is running Congress and the White House will find it impossible to truly shrink the government and cut deficits in a responsible way (my money is on gutting the military). Social spending debt will bring the Federal government to its knees twenty or so years from now, chaos will break out as businesses no longer accept dollars, food riots, mass exodus from the cities, the military tries to take control, etc. and then the real civil war will start. I plan on being in Australia. :-)
Note to lurking DUers, no, that’s certainly not what I *want* to happen, it’s what I fear will happen.
If there’s one thing about Zero that’s beneficial it’s that the race card is losing it’s effect on a lot of people.
“You don’t want to buy insurance for those poor, uninsured people? RACIST!!!!!”
To which an appropriate response is increasingly becoming:
- p*ss off.
- cry me a river.
- want insurance? get a job.
- bite me (okay, maybe that one’s a little dangerous nowadays if you’re unarmed).
- I don’t give a sh*t if you’re black.
Being black isn’t an automatic “shut up and give me what I want” argument anymore. And, if nothing else, that’s a good thing.
Just watch and see! 0bamaboy will become a Martyr. .Martyr’ become 0bamaboys.
“I learned about people in the sixties and seventies, I thought revolution was in the air, especially after Ohio State, but in reality white Americans are not like that, we have political upheavals like the 1994 election and then the emotion settles down.....”
Ya...well back then ...those folks were a little more employed I think.....
You are on track.
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