America's Obama Obsession About To End?

Victor Davis Hanson: Fewer And Fewer Americans Now Believe That Obama Is A Uniter

(National Review Online)  Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. He writes the Campaign Spot for National Review.

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For 30 months the nation has been in the grip of a certain Obama obsession, immune to countervailing facts, unwilling to face reality, and loath to break the spell. But like all trances, the fit is passing, and we the patient are beginning to appreciate how the stupor came upon us, why it lifted, and what its consequences have been.

How Obama Won

Barack Obama was elected rather easily because, in perfect-storm fashion, five separate trends coalesced last autumn.

1) Obama was eloquent, young, charismatic - and African-American. He thus offered voters a sense of personal and collective redemption, as well as appealing to the longing for another JFK New Frontier figure. An image, not necessarily reality, trumped all.

2) After the normal weariness with eight years of an incumbent party and the particular unhappiness with Bush, the public was amenable to an antithesis. Bush was to be scapegoat, and Obama the beginning of the catharsis.

3) Obama ran as both a Clintonite centrist and a no-red-state/no-blue-state healer who had transcended bitter partisanship. That assurance allowed voters to believe that his occasional talk of big change was more cosmetic than radical.

4) John McCain ran a weak campaign that neither energized his base nor appealed to crossover independents. McCain turned off conservatives; many failed to give money, and some even stayed home on Election Day. Meanwhile, the media and centrists who used to idolize McCain's non-conservative, maverick status found Obama the more endearing non-conservative maverick.

5) The September 2008 financial panic turned voters off Wall Street and the wealthy, and allowed them to connect unemployment and their depleted home equity and 401(k) retirement plans with incumbent Republicans. In contrast, they assumed that Obama, as the anti-Bush, would not do more bailouts, more stimuli, and more big borrowing.

Take away any one of those factors, and Obama might well have lost. Imagine what might have happened had Obama been a dreary old white guy like John Kerry; or had Bush's approvals been over 50 percent; or had Obama run on the platform he is now governing on; or had McCain crafted a dynamic campaign; or had the panic occurred in January 2009 rather than September 2008. Then the trance would have passed, and Obama, the Chicago community organizer and three-year veteran of the U.S. Senate, would have probably lost his chance at remaking America.

Obama's Assumptions

I note all this at length because Obama seems to act as if this right-center country - one that polls oppositely to his positions on most of the major issues (deficits, spending, nationalized health care, homeland security, Guantanamo, cap-and-trade, etc.) - has given him a mandate for a degree of change not seen in nearly 80 years.

Apparently, Team Obama figured that with sizable majorities in both the House and the Senate, Obama would snap his fingers, Congress daily would pass bills redefining America, and Obama would stay in perpetual campaign mode to hope and change the country to accept his agenda. Governing would be like campaigning, as audiences fainted hearing the details of a 1,500-page health-care bill or of ever more sins from America's past.

But, after just a few months in office, that proved not to be the case. Just as a number of planets had to line up precisely to allow an inexperienced hard-left ideologue to be elected president, so there would have had to be a similar configuration to allow him to govern successfully.

Bitter Truths

1) Obama had to match his unity rhetoric with brotherly action. In fact, he has done the opposite.

At one time or another, Obama and his supporters have, rather scurrilously, insulted doctors, insurers, the police, tea-partiers and town-hallers, opponents of his health-care plan, non-compliant members of the media, and a host of other groups as either greedy, dishonest, treasonous, unpatriotic, mob-like, racist, or in general worthy of disrespect.

Fewer and fewer Americans now believe that Obama - after just nine months of governance - is a uniter. In Obama's world, doctors carve out children's tonsils for profit, racist morons rant at legislators about losing their private health care, and trillions in borrowed money must be paid back by the greedy rich whose capital was unearned in the first place.

When his base supporters lambaste him for softness, they are lamenting his inability to become an effective partisan - not a lack of partisanship in general. In surreal fashion, liberals demand that the ideologue Obama become more ideological precisely at the time his ideologically driven agenda is souring millions of non-ideological Americans.

2) His opposition is no longer ossified, but decentralized and grass roots. One of the oddest proofs of that statement is the sudden leftist furor at tea parties, town halls, the media, dissent, and free speech. As long as Obama was opposed by calcified Republicans in Congress, there was no real danger to him. But once the opposition proved populist, panicked liberal elites started demonizing populism - and Obama now finds himself opposed to the popular grievance-mongering that was once the mother's milk of our Chicago organizer's existence.

3) Obama campaigned on the notion that even if voters might not like his policies, they most assuredly would like him. Even that spell is now lifting. The more the American public gets to know Barack Obama, the less they find him appealing.

On matters racial, their campaign-season unease with his connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his toss-offs like “typical white person,” and his stereotyping of rural Pennsylvanians has not been allayed; rather, it has been amplified by Eric Holder's Justice Department, Obama's own statement that the Cambridge police acted “stupidly” in arresting Professor Gates, and the use of the race card by prominent Democrats from the likes of Rep. Charles Rangel to Gov. David Paterson of New York.

Much of the newly stirred public suddenly assumes two things from the Obama administration: that the president himself will periodically say something racially insensitive or unwise; and that his supporters will call opponents of his policies racist. If we have wearied of all that in nine months, think what four years of it will do to the public mood.

In just nine months the phrase “Chicago style” has gone from something old-time that evokes Al Capone or Mayor Daley to something very real, contemporary, and scary - as David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett, and others try to strong-arm the opposition, demonize the media, and manipulate government largesse to either penalize or reward recipients on the basis of their degree of support for Obama.

Could the most imaginative right-wing political operative have invented the idea of a National Endowment for the Arts official gleefully considering quid pro quo grants, administration officials trying to persuade other media outlets that a network critical of Obama is “not a news organization,” or an administration communications director bragging about how her team sandbagged the American media and took them to the cleaners? We can believe there might be one statement like Van Jones's slander of “white people,” or Sonia Sotomayor's “wise Latina” boast, or Anita Dunn's lengthy praise of the mass-murdering Mao, but not an entire series of them. At some point, the American public snaps out of it, and sighs, “Wow, these people really are nuts!”

4) “Bush Did it” was the IV drip of the Obama campaign, always there to infuse a fresh life-saving excuse into every Obama fainting spell. But the problem now is that it has been more than nine months since Bush left office, and Obama's “mop up” metaphors are getting stale. Worse still, the reasons the public soured on Bush are precisely the reasons it may well sour more on Obama, inasmuch as he took Bush's problems like deficits, soaring federal spending, bailouts, and unemployment and made them far worse.

Yet Obama has given no credit for the good that Bush did, and therefore must remain mum about the other “Bush Did It”s, like quiet in Iraq; the homeland-security protocols, from renditions and tribunals to wiretaps and intercepts; AIDS relief for Africa; friendly governments in Britain, France, Germany, India, and Italy; and domestic safety since 9/11. If Bush is at least partly responsible for all these things as well, were they therefore bad?

Now What?

Obama very soon is going to have to make a tough choice, far tougher than his current “present” votes on the option of sending additional troops to Afghanistan.

As the midterm elections near, and his popularity bobs up and down around 50 percent, Obama can do one of two things.

He could imitate Bill Clinton's 1995 Dick Morris remake. In Obama's case, that would mean, abroad, cutting out the now laughable apologies for his country, ceasing to court thugs like Ahmadinejad, Chávez, and Putin, keeping some distance from the U.N., and paying closer attention to our allies like Britain and Israel. At home, he could declare victory on his sidetracked agenda and then start over by holding spending in line, curbing the deficit, stopping the lunatic Van Jones-style czar appointments, courting the opposition, and tabling cap-and-trade. I think there is very little chance of any of the above, whatever voters may have thought during the campaign.

Or, instead, Obama could hold the pedal to the floor on the theory that, as a proven ideologue, he must move the country far left before the voters catch on and stop him in his tracks in November 2010. That would mean more of the “gorge the beast” effort to spend and borrow so much that taxes have to soar, and thus redistribution of income will be institutionalized for a generation. He would push liberal proposals no matter how narrow the margin in the Senate. He would keep demonizing Fox News. In Nixonian fashion he might continue to hit the stump, ratcheting up his current “they're lying” message and energizing his left-wing base by catering to the unions, gays, minorities - and liberal Wall Street special interests.

If he chooses the former, he might well be a more successful version of Bill Clinton given that his appetites are far more in check.

But if, as is likely, he chooses the latter, he will polarize the country in a way not seen since 1968, set back racial relations to the 1960s, do to the reputation of big government what LBJ did from 1964 to 1968, and, in the manner of what Jimmy Carter wrought, turn voters off liberal foreign policy for a generation.

[Babalu99]

If he walks like a duck, talks like a duck, he's a duck.

BO is totally out of touch with current or future American Values. BO comes off as a racist and his sense of fairness is broken. His true believers evidently can't see the writing on the wall. BO is spending them into the poor house and setting back race relations 20 years. He is a virtual Jimmy Carter look alike. Smart as the dickens and as incompetent as anything but a peanut farmer. I'm sure he's a nice guy to his friends, but he clearly is not a visionary pointing the way to a better tomorrow. And he surrounds himself with buffoons. Just listen to Romer for 5 minutes and you will clearly hear the incompetence. Or Geithner. Or Franks. Or Dodd. Or Waters. Or Meeks. It's as if all the adults left the building and the kindergartners who don't know how to share or tell the truth took over.

Bush may not have been able to string 2 sentences together, but you could trust what he said. I don't trust BO at all and I hear him every stinking day. He apparent untruths and strongarm tactics against anyone who opposes his policies is National Socialistic in approach.

BO has got to go.
BO has got to go.
BO has got to go.

[askagain]

Saturday's Washington Post reported that the government's program to help homeowners refinance their mortgages has reached fewer than 3% of those targeted. That means that 97% of eligible borrowers have not received help from the government. This program was started 7 months ago. This program was started under the Obama administration. Do we really want to trust a government that can't help homeowners control our health care? Before deciding that, we should evaluate what is happening with with other government programs. For example, we are told that much of the government's health care initiatives will be funded with saving in Medicare derived from wasteful spending, fraud, inefficiencies, etc. If this can be done, why hasn't it been done over the last 40 years by one administration or another? This is just one example. If the government had a great track record, why would programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae be in financial trouble? It doesn't matter who we blame--previous administrations or congresses, there is little reason to believe it is going to get better. Whether you support President Obama or not, you need to think about these things before we let the government create more of the same. Posters can drown out my post with all kinds of off the cuff remarks. Perhaps they should really try to take an in-depth look at the history of government programs first.

[Constitionalist]

Nice to see there are some people with a brain here. If our government had to follow the same financial rules we do, they would be bankrupt. Their credit score would be in the crapper and would be refused loans by everyone. Instead our government magically has the best possible credit rating and can borrow as much as it likes. Take one moment and think about who is going to pay for this. To borrow from the dems whining about Bush 'If your not pi$$ed off, your not paying attention'.

[Stevenapoli7]

Very well thought article. Thanks

[auntc3]

McCain is wrong ....the only way to go on healthcare is the public option. It is the only way you are going to get a hold on insurance premiums. Seniors and low income AMERICANS, VETS, cannot afford these premiums as they stand now. The only way to get any form on the Insurance Company is the "public option". If you dont put in the public option, this problem we are having will NOT be resolved. It will get a lot worse when boomers retire. Majority of Boomers have been living on low incomes and credit cards. When they retire, they will not have pensions for the most part, may have 401Ks, but they will end up using that to pay off their bills. They will be cancelling their credit cards, or filing bankrupsy. They will not be able to afford the insurance premiums as they stand. If you ignore this situation, its NOT going to go away....the only way to control the premiums is through the PUBLIC OPTION. John McCain is wrong about the Public Option. I know what I am talking about. I worked for insurance companies ....their BOTTOM LINE IS "profits". The guys on the top make outregeous salaries, perks, and bonuses......the system is another wall street.

[White_Duck]

I can sum up this article in a few words. America is waking up from its' dream. The truth of it all is that "a dream" was woven during the election. Now, the bitter trurh of reality is creeping back in. I knew no one man could undo all the wrongs affecting us right now. And the dream that one could is fading fast.

[auntc3]

You are so WRONG

[sjc_1]

President Obama will have to make a few "quick wins" in the next few months to show something for the effort. Whether it is getting TARP executives to do their part on compensation or any other issue, the people may need to see something tangible in the short run. Most of the issues are large and long term, so doing something constructive to increase jobs would go a long way towards having support for other programs.

[j_mcdonald-2009]

How about reason #1 that *I* voted for Obama in the primaries and general -- he was almost alone in opposing the idiotic run-up to the Iragi fiasco, as opposed to people such as HRC who were too willing to pander to the right-wing for fear of their personal political future.

Integrity and intelligence. I'll thank that over gullibility and ass-covering any day,.

[skyk-2009]

Agreed!!

[smac761]

In light of the record, you would have more Hope for Change rooting for the Kent State Zips Football Team becoming National Champions.

[jascarm]

I feel like I should close the blinds while reading this article. I am afraid big brother is watching.

[auntc3]

Get a LIFE......Big Brother was BUSH

[kandi456]

Republicans approval rate is in the 20's. Everyone is ashamed of the "Party of No" that offers no solutions to our country's woes. The moment Obama won, Republicans wanted him to fail. Sarah Palin, the darling of the Republican Party quit her job as Governor to prepare for 2012. I have advice for all of you: Stand by our President instead of against him. Then maybe we can see results and America will be restored to greatness. Obama is an intelligent, thoughtful President and is doing a fantastic job.

[80evo]

Who cares what the other guy did. This jerk who is doing nothing but campaigning and fighting with a party who can't stop a vote is all smoke and mirrors

[auntc3]

REPUBLICANS are washed up. No one will trust them again.

[kandi456]

Hanson - Do you work for Faux News? Are you a paid Limbaugh drone? Your criticisms are unwarranted and unfair. Eric Holder and Valerie Jarrett are racists? How so? Stop assuming that if someone is black, they are racist. The one who is racist is you. Did you polarize and criticize Bush the way you have done Obama? I live in ultraconservative Texas and everyone supports and applauds Obama. He has fought valiently for the middle class and lower class unlike any of his predecessors. He won the Noble Prize because he is a uniter. For a moment I taught I was reading a Rush Limbaugh rant and not something from CBS News.

[80evo]

Great uniter! foooool, America hasn't been this divided since the civil war. I know Bush did this Bush did that Bush, Bush, Bush. You would think he ran against obomo and lost. He didn.t. Like my mom said if little Timmy jumped of the cliff would you?

[auntc3]

Could not have said that better....Republicans are using their old tatics, trouble is .....everyone knows what they are doing and no body really cares what they think

[voxpopulus]

National Review. What else did you expect?

[wrexall9]

I was commenting on the presidebt...