By Victor Davis Hanson
Monday, November 05, 2012
In these last days of the race, Obama counts on the news
of Sandy turning attention away from Romney’s October momentum, to photo-ops of
himself in a monogrammed bomber jacket trying to look presidential. The more
Benghazi creeps into the news, the stranger the silence from the Obama
administration. But the real story is that almost all of the hope of 2008 has
ended in the fear and loathing of 2012.
Obama has made no real attempt to defend much of what he
has done in the last four years. It is as if his first term never existed — no
70 percent approval rating, no Democratic House, no Democratic Senate. Instead
we are back to the future as a young Lincolnesque senator, with a clean slate,
has come to save us from George W. Bush’s recession, which, we now learn, was
caused by plutocrat Mitt Romney all along. Obama is the perpetual challenger,
once more running against Bobby Rush, Alan Keyes, Hillary Clinton, and John
McCain on all the wonderful things he would do if only he were elected.
On energy, suddenly the president has dropped all mention
of “wind, solar, and 5 million new green jobs.” Under the radar, he may be
pursuing cap-and-trade and shutting down coal plants by executive orders, but
officially Obama is bragging that the oil and gas industry ignored him, drilled
like crazy on private lands, and — in spite of him, not because of him — have
vastly upped U.S. fossil-fuel production. And suddenly that is a good thing.
His new energy message seems to have been reduced to something like, “Vote for
me, because I failed to stop private energy companies, and so we are much
better off.” It is as if cap-and-trade, the Chevy Volt, and Solyndra never
existed.
There is the same disconnect on the economy. The recent
dismal jobs report fell on deaf ears. The media do not care that the
unemployment rate is worse now — after over $5 trillion borrowed and wasted —
than when Obama took office four years ago. Old Democratic slogans like “It’s
the economy, stupid,” and “jobless recovery” apply only when the GDP growth rate
is over 3 percent, not hovering closer to 1 percent, and when unemployment is
well below 6 percent, not nearly 8 percent. There is not much defense of
Obamacare, or the stimulus — whose expenditures to this day cannot be defined,
much less defended. Van Jones and “green jobs” are ancient history. Food-stamp
statistics, new disability filings, and plunging per capita income are
irrelevant and supposedly just right-wing talking points.
Instead, Obama is running as the challenger, using the
hypothetical “I would” or the future-tense “I will” — as if it is Romney who
has a record of failed presidential leadership. In short, Obama’s economic
message is that we can reduce our defense budget — given sudden world
tranquillity — and, at last, nation-build in America through radically new
ideas of spending trillions of dollars in borrowed money.
The Obama notion on race, promulgated always by
surrogates, is that a pro-Obama good 2008 vote proved that America in theory
might not be racist, but a bad 2012 vote would confirm that it still is. No
mention was ever made that Obama received more white votes than had any
Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter. So the Reverend Joseph
Lowery — who, with the exit of the president’s old pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah
Wright, gave the benediction at Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 with
soaring platitudes of racial healing and in turn received the Medal of Freedom
from him — just announced, “I don’t know what kind of a n—– wouldn’t vote with
a black man running.” He then went on to declare that he once again believed,
as he had insisted as a youth, that white people were “going to Hell.” When
criticized, the Medal of Freedom winner said this was meant as a joke, but one
may question how appropriate such a joke is in this new age of racial healing.
Jesse Jackson has likewise dropped all the pretense of
his rainbow coalition. This last week he branded tea-partiers as racists of a
“Fort Sumter Tea Party” who wished to “overthrow our government, engage in
secession, sedition, segregation, and slavery.” This is reminiscent of Joe
Biden’s “put y’all back in chains.” These are the logical wages of four years
of Skip Gates editorializing, “punish our enemies,” the son who would have
looked like Trayvon Martin, a nation of “cowards,” and “my people.”
As far as foreign affairs go, there are no longer any
boasts about the Middle East and the Arab Spring, no longer any leaks about a
possible Syrian “humanitarian” intervention. We hear nothing of a
soon-to-be-nuclear Iran — other than a desperate eleventh-hour Iranian attempt
to affect the election by false promises to reduce enrichment, a measure that
the theocracy scoffed at for four years. The world’s rogues — Putin, Chávez,
Castro — have weighed in on the election, in the manner that school bullies
each day smile at the freshman with pockets full of change.
U.S. foreign policy has been reduced to one boast, “I
killed Osama bin Laden, and that is all ye need to know.” As in the case of
Watergate, Benghazi and the murder of an ambassador and three other Americans
will be in the news after the election, given that even the Obama White House
and a toadyish media cannot suppress a lie of this magnitude. But for now Obama
makes no effort to defend his reset foreign policy; it just exists as a sort of
nothingness.
The same is true of the new civility. If Obama should
win, he will, after the election, return to his sermons about negative
advertising and promulgate his fables on bipartisanship. But for now, the
crudity continues: Romney is a bullsh**ter. Take “revenge” by voting against
Romney — reminding us that “get in their face” and “bring a gun to a knife
fight” were characteristic, not aberrant. A gross ad is aired, comparing a vote
for Obama with one’s first attempt at sexual intercourse. Child choruses sing
of Romney the villain, the polluter, the monster. David Axelrod says that for
the middle class, Paul Ryan’s proposed budget is “like a choice between a punch
to the nose and a knee to the groin.” In an ad produced by Michael Moore,
nursing-home dwellers talk of burning down America and punching Mitt Romney in
the groin, replete with the usual four-letter words. Obama is supposedly
oblivious to all this, as he counts on its stirring up his base. Indeed, no
doubt he has already written his victory speech for November 7 — “It’s time to
stop this negative infighting. There is no red, no blue America.” Blah, blah,
blah . . .
What then is Obama’s strategy in this campaign — other
than retention of the perks and power of office — given that he runs on
hypotheticals as a virtual challenger? In fact, there are just two implicit
themes: First, America is a different country now, and “they” (fill in the
blanks — backward white people, privileged males, wealthy people, business people,
misogynists, racists, xenophobes, homophobes, etc.) will put you into
figurative chains without Obama to stop them. So we have Washington Post
columnist Colbert King warning that Mitt Romney is the new Andrew Johnson, who,
following a Christ-like Lincoln-Obama figure, would once again turn over the
country to the states-rights racists. Of course, Mr. King keeps mum on the
recent Joseph Lowery racist diatribes and Jesse Jackson invective. We are
living in the age of a new brooding, petulant Nixon, who seeks power by talking
of unity while constantly creating fissures of disunity.
Second, all the vast increases in disability insurance,
unemployment insurance, and food stamps, the “free” health care, the government
takeovers of money-losing companies, and the borrowed stimulus for state
pensions and benefits — all that is preferable to a jobs-creating, free-market
prosperous economy that enriches too few and empowers too many. In contrast,
the new dependency can continue and expand only under Obama, who has the
courage to make “them” (see above) pay their fair share for it.
Those messages are the gist of the Obama campaign — as if
$5 trillion in new debt, Benghazi, permanently high unemployment, and an EU
economy in America simply never existed.
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