How Can Anyone Continue to Support Obama?

The left’s kneejerk propensity for blaming George W. Bush for every disaster, from the Lincoln assassination to a bad hair day, has long served as comedy fodder among conservatives. But the serious psychological disorder known as BDS – Bush Derangement Syndrome – is no joke among President Obama’s faithful, who six years later still cling to the notion that Bush is the reason Obama hasn’t yet shown us the promised land and healed the planet as he promised in his 2008 nomination speech.

Last Tuesday, a bipartisan poll found that Obama’s approval rating has hit an all-time (for him) low of 40%, with his handling of foreign policy at a dismal 36%. And yet, for those of us who consider his presidency to be an unmitigated disaster, it’s difficult to comprehend why his approval rating at this point isn’t at zero. In all seriousness, how is it possible that 40% of Americans can still be giving him a thumbs-up? Obviously there is a variety of explanations: low-information voters, willful blindness, progressive brainwashing, or just plain stubbornness among those who can’t admit that their Messiah is a false prophet. And of course there are those radicals who are simply in ideological lockstep with his agenda. But BDS threads throughout it all; “it’s Bush’s fault” remains an unassailable article of progressive faith – and a very convenient excuse.

In a Fox News segment recently on Obama’s leadership, pollster Frank Luntz spoke with about thirty average citizens, half of whom had been Obama voters, about the President’s sagging numbers in terms of favorability and job approval. The bloom was off the rose for some of the disillusioned participants who had previously supported him, but others among the studio audience still stood by their man. A hardcore supporter with the nametag “Shelton” said he believes Obama “is doing an excellent job, considering the circumstances in which he took the office, and all the things piled on his desk.” In other words, as Shelton put it later, “he’s cleaning up George Bush’s mess.”

Even conceding that GWB did leave behind some serious fires to put out, it’s unclear how creating entirely new conflagrations – encouraging a southern border invasion, imposing upon us a health care leviathan, directly contributing to the “Arab Spring” chaos, alienating our allies and empowering our enemies, exacerbating race relations, dismantling our military, turning the IRS into a political weapon, to name some (but by no means all) – can be considered “cleaning up.” Almost six years into the Obama era, he hasn’t even begun to fix “Bush’s mess” – if anything, he has exacerbated it by overloading our national debt and expanding the NSA surveillance state. Obama isn’t cleaning up the Bush legacy – he is burdening us with his own.

Shelton disagreed: “He’s keeping the country out of war, he’s keeping the economy stable –” At that point Luntz interrupted him to turn to another participant who had been shaking his head in disagreement. When that man pressed him to name even one Obama accomplishment, Shelton again responded, “He’s keeping us out of war! Isn’t that enough?” Well, no, especially considering that he hasn’t done even that. Obama didn’t end the war in Iraq – the troop drawdown was scheduled under Bush, although Obama took credit for ending it until he began to be blamed for leaving a vacuum there for ISIS to fill. And Obama increased the number of our troops in Afghanistan where they are still dying (including a brigadier general, the highest ranking officer to die there); as of last year, we still have nearly twice as many there as when he took office. This is to say nothing of the future wars Obama is courting because he has demonstrated to the world that America under him is weak. This has not gone unnoticed by an empowered, resurgent Russia, China, Iran, and our non-state Islamic enemies. But in Shelton’s mind, Obama ended Bush’s illegal wars and so now “war is over,” as John Lennon sang.

Then a woman in the group urged, “Let’s bring back George Bush. Let’s have a great leader.” The suggestion was like a bomb going off in the studio. “It’s George Bush’s fault!” shouted one man. Shelton jumped in with, “George Bush lied about the Iraq War. He lied, and Barack Obama is getting us out of a mess!” This was the same man who moments before had said that Obama hadn’t lied about Obamacare or Benghazi.

Another woman agreed with Shelton, claiming that “[Obama] can’t clean this up in 10 years, 12 years, 14 years. This takes time. He’s just prepping the next President.” One man who didn’t vote for Obama pointed out, however, that “when Reagan took over from Carter it took him three years, but he solved it. When Clinton took over, he took two years, but he solved it. ”The Obama fans didn’t respond – evidently, rather than expect their man to solve problems, they just plan to keep blaming Bush indefinitely, or at least for the next 14 years.

In closing the segment, Luntz asked why we stop being civil with each other when Bush’s name comes up, and one gentleman complained that it’s because the left “keeps going back to Bush” instead of moving forward and taking responsibility for the current state of affairs. But of course that’s the whole point: without clinging to their delusional rationalization about Bush, how else could so many Americans convince themselves that nothing in the current state of affairs can possibly be Obama’s fault?

Shelton put it later, “he’s cleaning up George Bush’s mess.”

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When Clinton took over, he took two years, but he solved it.

When Clinton took over it was already solved. The Cold War and its financial burden was over, the economy was already growing for over a year, and the Tech Boom was about to create plenty of jobs and tax revenue. Clinton had nothing to do with any of this, but he was in office when the payoff came, so he got the credit.

Mark Tapson hits the target that many have been discussing in quiet, private circles ...”What is psychologically wrong with the left?”

Many of my clients were and remain staunch 0bama supporters. It is an amazing thing to hear them talk about their savior, even when at least one of them has faced an 0bamacare denial of care for desperately needed back surgery. The rationalization is that someone else must need the medical treatment money more than themselves. So their forced pain, suffering, and taxation is normalized away as some sort of higher calling.

But, as conservatives know and understand, once a person takes over an office from someone who leaves or is fired, there is a short window of time to resolve the outstanding problems successfully. The keyword there is “successfully,” for if one is not successful one finds themselves getting the boot too. But with the left, they have been so ingrained with blaming failure on something else and/or everyone else, the cannot accept responsibility for their own actions, let alone assign blame to the President. They must at all costs avoid blaming a ...black man... for the woes of the nation and now, the world.

Instead, the will continue to be addicted to their political correctness to the point that assigning blame to what they perceive as a persecuted man/victim of the white world circumstances. They are enablers in the failure of this President’s policies for that whole branch of the democrat party has fallen into the dysfunctional affair with their own enabling delusions.

Personally, I think those who continue to support 0bama do so out of a place of guilt, their own low self-esteem, and the democrat party’s ability to manipulate them by using the all their race, gender, homo agendas.

I like to apply this conclusion from, Darlene Albury, LMSW, “Sometimes enabling takes the form of doing something for another that they should do for themselves. It also takes the form of making excuses for someone else’s behavior... You more than likely enable out of your own low self-esteem. You haven’t gained the ability to say no, without fear of losing the love or caring of that other person. People who learn tough love have to learn that their former behaviors have been enabling and that to continue in them would represent allowing the other person’s pattern of behavior to continue and to worsen.” The Democrat Party has preyed upon these people’s low self-esteem to the point they cannot separate themselves from the abusive relationship with the President.

Instead they need and crave the constant feedback from their big government ‘daddy.’ Why do they continue to support him? One only needs to look at the personal message played to the low self-esteem crowd in Cleveland this past weekend for the gay games. His words fed their low self-esteem. The very idea of having separate ‘gay games’ is a dysfunctional outgrowth of their own low self-esteem. Their own belief that the world cannot relate to them, their own desire to prove their good enough. Instead they choose to justify themselves through their own segregation and self adulations. They love this President because he fed their ego, he fed their dysfunction, he validated them.

This is why when we try to defend ourselves as being against the policies we’re defined as being racist. If one has dealt with an enabler or codependent, you quickly realize your normal reactions are a threat to that relationship. See the reaction described in the article, the visceral reaction, is by all normal accounts inconsistent with the conversation. This is not just a loyalist defense of 0bama, it is a defense of their own low self-esteem and insecurities.

Years ago we had the left feeding these young people the dose of ‘lack of self-esteem,’ the everybody wins, because we can’t have people feeling bad. They set them up, they groomed them and our children to never grow-up, mature, and develop healthy relationships with the world around them.

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