By Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
It could not last — the attendee of the Reverend Jeremiah
Wright’s church sermonizing on tolerance; the practitioner of Chicago politics
lecturing on civility; the most partisan voting record in the Senate as proof
of a new promised bipartisanship; earlier books and speeches calling for
hard-core progressivism as evidence of a no-more-red-state-blue-state
conciliation. And in fact the disconnect did not last, and Barack Obama finds
himself dealing with assorted chickens coming home to roost.
In the summer of 2004, Michael Moore released a crude
propaganda film, Fahrenheit 9/11, full of distortions and half-truths, and yet
passed off as a documentary — all designed to help swing the election to
Democratic challenger John Kerry. Hollywood, the media, and the Left in general
did not worry about the film’s inaccuracies or the mythology that the
infomercial was a disinterested documentary. Instead, liberals deified Moore.
Indeed, he was an honored guest at the Democratic Convention, and liberal
luminaries paid him obeisance at various showings of the film.
The goddess Nemesis took note, and this year Dinesh
D’Souza and John Sullivan followed Moore’s model. The result is a blockbuster
“documentary,” 2016: Obama’s America, that does more to Barack Obama than Michael
Moore once did to George W. Bush. The Left is perturbed, unappreciative that
its own methods and objectives have been turned against itself, and in a more
sophisticated and far more effective manner than Moore’s buffoonery.
The Left in the era of Barack Obama established other
ends-justify-the-means precedents. In 2008, Obama surmised that no one else
would ever raise the sorts of gigantic sums that he was then amassing (in toto
nearly $800 million, more than twice the amount raised by John McCain), and so
was the first candidate to renounce public financing of a presidential campaign
in the general election since the law was passed. But, of course, Obama never
imagined that four years later his approval ratings would be less than 50
percent, or that he would be running against a financier who could match his
efforts dollar for dollar.
Nor did Obama think that a mesmerized Wall Street, from
which he raised more cash than any prior candidate, would object all that much
to his populist boilerplate against “1 percenters,” “fat-cat bankers,” and
owners of “corporate jets.” So now what exactly will he do? Appeal to Romney to
abide by public-financing rules? Blast Romney for raising too much money? Damn
Romney for courting Wall Street?
Beneath the folksy veneer and the serial calls for
“civility,” Obama proved vicious in his denunciations of George Bush, at one
point calling him “unpatriotic” for adding $4 trillion to the national debt
over eight years. Obama offered two general arguments: that the chief executive
is solely responsible for economic hard times, and that four years is easily
long enough to right the ship. Obama scoffed at the Bush defense that
politically driven interventions by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae — hand in glove
with congressional overseers — had distorted the real-estate market and
contributed to the subprime-mortgage collapse, which destroyed an otherwise
strong economy.
Obama boasted further that he would cut the deficit by
half during his first term, and asserted that he would rather be a successful
president than a two-term one. And he added that he should not be reelected if
the economy was not restored to health. Apparently Obama assumed that after
every recession (this one ended in June 2009) there is a natural recovery, the
latter all the more robust when the former is severe. For all the right-wing
scare talk about Obamacare, federal takeovers, more taxes, and too many
regulations, Obama also took for granted that the cry-wolf private sector would
bounce back — no matter how much his policies threatened it — and would almost
magically continue to make so much money that an ever-growing government could
redistribute ever more of it.
Yet now Romney is echoing Obama’s exact arguments: Yes,
the chief executive is responsible for things like 43 months of 8 percent–plus
unemployment, $5 trillion in new debt, and anemic GDP growth; and, yes, if
things do not improve after four years, then it is time to change the
president.
Obama established a wink-and-nod type of negative attack.
As he called in sonorous tones for hope and change and a new civility, he
negatively stereotyped a stunning cross-section of Americans: The white working
class became “clingers,” the police “stereotype” minorities and act “stupidly,”
small-business owners “didn’t build” their own businesses, doctors lop off
limbs and yank out tonsils, bankers are “fat cats” — apparently on the premise
that such groups would never take all this invective seriously. At various
times Mitt Romney has been reduced to a dastardly financial pirate, a killer of
innocent cancer victims, a veritable racist, and now a misogynist. After the
class-warfare card and the race card, we await only Obama’s use of the Mormon
card. Yet the polls remain roughly even, and Obama is about to be the target of
a no-holds-barred assault fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars. Ethically
speaking, what possible Romney sin might Obama object to? That super-PAC ads
are unfair? That Romney has gone negative? That Romney stereotypes entire
groups? That Romney’s inner staff are ethically compromised? This, after
Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, was paid $100,000 for two
speeches in Nigeria in December 2010, to a company that was eager for influence
and whose affiliates did business with an embargoed Iran; Plouffe made the trip
to Nigeria about a month before he joined the administration as a senior
adviser. Just this month, deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter on national
television asserted something demonstrably false — that she did not know the
facts about the woman Mitt Romney supposedly caused to die of cancer.
During the Bush administration, the Left established
another caricature: the gaffe-prone, golf-playing elitist George Bush. Did they
ever imagine that they were ensuring like caricature for the leftist academic
Barack Obama, who quite unexpectedly would play golf four times more often in
four years than Bush did in eight years? Or that for every Bushism there would
be a “corpse-man”? Or that the small ranch house in Crawford, Texas, would be
trumped by First Family jaunts to Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, and Aspen?
I would like to think a slip like “57 states” is just a slip, or that golf is
valuable presidential relaxation, but I was taught by the Left that such
garbled speech is a window into a confused mind, and that presidential golf is
elite recreation that betrays class privilege.
In 2008, there was a lot of sloganeering on energy
policy. Obama assured us that we could “not drill” our way out of a spike in
gas prices. “Millions of new green jobs” was heard at almost every rally, along
with shouts about wind and solar this and that. In less guarded moments, Obama
assured us that he would pass cap-and-trade legislation, “bankrupt” coal
companies, and allow coal-based energy prices to “skyrocket.” These were the
heady days of “peak oil” and the liberal attack against “oil men in the White
House” — on the eve of the Chevy Volt and breakthrough new companies with names
like Solyndra.
At the very time when well-connected crony capitalists
were squandering hundreds of millions of dollars in federal wind and solar
subsidies, a quiet private-sector revolution in horizontal drilling and
fracking vastly expanded America’s gas and oil reserves — despite, not because
of, Obama’s energy policies. The paradox finally become so absurd that Obama
was reduced to bragging that the United States was producing more gas and oil
under his watch than ever before, apparently on the logic that oil men were so
adept that they could find vast amounts of new sources of energy on private
lands without worrying about the Obama administration’s efforts to virtually
cut off all new leasing on federal lands. The result is that our first green
president is facing $4-a-gallon gas while he brags that what he tried to stop
proved unstoppable.
Nemesis, remember, is not just karma, but payback with an
absurd twist.
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