Wednesday, June 20, 2012
The next five months should be interesting — given that
Barack Obama is now experiencing something entirely unique in his heretofore
stellar career: widespread criticism of his performance and increasing
weariness with his boilerplate and his teleprompted eloquence.
Starting with his Occidental days, and going on through
Columbia, Harvard, Chicago, the U.S. Senate, and the 2008 campaign, rarely has
Mr. Obama faced much criticism, much less any accountability that would involve
judging his rhetoric by actual achievement.
Yet what worked for so long now does no longer. Obama
simply cannot run on 40 months of 8 percent–plus unemployment, a June 2009
recovery that sputtered, $5 trillion in new debt, serial $1 trillion–plus
annual deficits, and dismal GDP growth. Few believe any more that what he and
the Democratic Congress passed in the first two years of his administration
worked — and fewer still that the Republicans are to blame in the last 17
months for stopping him from pursuing even more disastrous policies. He cannot
turn instead to the advantages of Obamacare, a dynamic foreign policy,
national-security sobriety, a scandal-free administration, or stellar
presidential appointments. The furor over security leaks makes it harder to
keep conjuring up the ghost of Osama bin Laden.
What then to expect if the race remains tight or Obama
finds himself behind?
1. There will be lots more “the dog ate my homework”
excuses for the dismal economy. The troubles in the EU, the Japanese tsunami,
the East Coast earthquake, ATM machines, Wall Street, inclement weather, the
Republican Congress, the Tea Party, and George W. Bush have pretty much been
exhausted. But there is always hurricane season, a Greek exit from the euro, or
a Middle East flare-up. Expect sometime before October to hear that a new
“they” upset the brilliant recovery and is to blame for the chronic economic
lethargy. One of the strangest aspects of Obama’s rationalizations is their
utter incoherence and illogic: He brags that America pumped more oil and gas
under his watch, even as he did his best to stop just that on public lands; he
brags that he put in fewer regulations than did Bush, even as he boasts that he
reined in business; he brags that he had to borrow $5 trillion to grow
government in order to save the country, even as he claims he reduced the size
of government. Why does Obama try to take credit for things on Tuesday that he
damned on Monday? Is his new campaign theme: Despite (rather than because of)
Obama?
2. Mitt Romney is a tough target. If Obama once loudly
admitted to abuse of coke, Romney quietly confesses to avoidance even of
Coca-Cola. His personal life is blameless. His family seems the subject of a
Norman Rockwell painting. And Romney has more or less succeeded at most things he
has attempted. No matter, he is Mormon. Expect legions of Obama surrogates to
focus on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, especially its
supposed endemic racism, sexism, and homophobia. Religious bigotry is not
especially liberal, but the race/class/gender agenda trumps all such qualms,
and in any case Obama and his team have never claimed to be especially tolerant
or fair-minded in using any means necessary to achieve noble ends. Whereas the
Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Trinity Church were off the table in 2008,
Mormonism will be very much on it by late summer.
3. We will read and hear about race 24/7. Racism is not
an easy sell today, given that without tens of millions of white voters, Barack
Obama would not have been elected. Nor is it easy to condemn America as racist
when the white vote in 2008 was split far more evenly than were the 96 percent
of African-American voters who preferred Barack Obama. Nonetheless, racial
relations are at an all-time low. Almost weekly a member of the Congressional
Black Caucus levels yet another bizarre charge of racism, and a Hollywood actor
or singer blurts out something that would be deemed racially offensive were he
not African-American; the polarization over the Trayvon Martin case threatens
to overshadow the polarization over the O. J. Simpson trial; flash mobbing in
the inner cities is as much daily fare on the uncensored Internet as it is
absent from the network news; and both Barack Obama (the Skip Gates affair, the
Trayvon Martin quip, the “punish our enemies” call, etc.) and Eric Holder
(“cowards,” congressional oversight is racially motivated, “my people,” etc.)
have made it a point to make race essential, not incidental, to their
governance. If in 2008 liberals celebrated the election of Barack Obama as
proof of a new postracial harmony, in 2012 a tight race will be cited as
greater proof of a new ascendant racism. The idea that to elect Obama wins the
nation racial exemption, and to defeat him earns condemnation, is illogical. No
matter: By late fall, expect a desperate Obama administration to be dredging up
the charge overtly, nonstop, and in person.
4. We should look for new furor against the “system” in
direct proportion to the praise heaped on it in 2008 for being redeemed. The
polls, if unfavorable, will be described as innately biased. The uncivil Rush
Limbaugh, talk radio generally, Fox News, and tea-party bloggers, we will be
lectured, are subversive, peddle hate, foment violence, and should be silenced.
Whereas David Brooks, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and Christopher Buckley were
recommended reading in 2008, given their balanced and fair-minded critiques of
George W. Bush and their appreciation of Barack Obama, in 2012 we will learn
that they are right-wing attack dogs for losing their enthusiasm for the
first-class mind and temperament of Barack Obama. Whereas a Pat Buchanan on
MSNBC railing against Bush’s war and McCain’s neocon advisers was a reminder of
how the libertarian Right has positive affinities with the liberal Left, in
2012 such a paleocon “racist” must be kept off the airwaves. Voter-registration
laws and voter-ID requirements, remember, are designed to exclude the oppressed
and must be relaxed. Advertising has warped American politics. Super PACs are
Romney conspiracies. If big Wall Street money went for Obama in 2008 and
thereby won investment banking and the stock market exemption from charges of
greed and corruption, in 2012 investors may swing to Romney and thereby incite
calls to rein in “big money” and furious op-eds about the toxic mix of politics
and cash. If Romney outraises Obama, we will hear again the calls for public
campaign financing, which were ignored when a cash-flush Obama renounced public
financing in 2008. In 2008, academics, foundation people, the Hollywood crowd,
journalists, and liberal politicians confessed that they had fallen in love
again with an America that had proved it was not hopeless after all; in 2012,
America may prove unsalvageable, with thousands vowing to move to Canada.
5. Suddenly around October the world will become
absolutely unsafe. In these dangerous times, Americans must forget their
differences, come together, and embrace a bipartisan unity — given that it may
be necessary, after all, to hit the Iranian nuclear facilities, since we’ll
have learned that the bomb may be a reality by, say, mid-November. Just as we
have been reminded that Barack Obama has saved us by his brave decisions to use
double agents in Yemen, computer viruses in Iran, Seal Team Six in Pakistan,
and philosophically guided Predator assassination hits, so too a strike against
Iran may suddenly be of vital national-security interest, though keenly
lamented by a Nobel laureate nose-deep in Thomas Aquinas. Cancellation of the
Keystone Pipeline delighted greens; the war on the war on women pleased
feminists; gays are now on board after Barack Obama decided he really did favor
gay marriage; Latinos got nearly a million illegal aliens exempted from
immigration law. And yet all those partisan gifts have not yet resulted in a 50
percent approval rating or a lead over Mitt Romney. Something more dramatic is
needed, given that there are only so many Obama heroics that can be cobbled
together and leaked from classified sources.
We do not know who is going to win the 2012 election,
only that it will be closer than the 2008 one — and if Obama keeps it up at his
present rate he may destroy the Democratic party for a generation. There is no
longer an incumbent George Bush to blame. Romney is a feistier candidate than
was John McCain. Fundraising is no longer lopsided. The novelty of the first
African-American president has become passé. And “hope and change” has been
replaced by a concrete record of three and a half years. Given those realities,
if his being an unknown quantity was a reason to vote for Barack Obama in 2008,
his being all too familiar will be cause for rejecting him in 2012.
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