Express Train To Plains
With a stop in Crawford. Washington Post oped :
Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president’s approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to “accomplish too much,” and 57 percent think the country is on the “wrong track.”
Sounds like change! But what about the Hope? With a capital H. Despite its great start, the best thing about this scathing critique of Obama’s blundering and plummeting numbers is the lede, and the description of Obama’s rhetoric as “magical realism.” Because Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie of Reason want Obama to get on the Hope train.
Decrying the Carterism, they want Obama to be more like Clinton, free market-wise … failing to observe that the second Clinton term they are touting was a bubble that popped ugly and was ineffectual against both terrorism and WMD containment in the Middle East and Korea, though they do note that Obama’s eager to recreate Clinton’s health-care failure.
They point out Obama got where he is off Bush-bashing and bash him for being Bush-like, but fail to observe that his best hope for any success at all on his current course is to the extent he is building on Bush’s GWOT successes … in Iraq, in Afghanistan and not least, in the United States, where the constitution and civil rights are not only intact, but where the follow-on attacks that Welch and Gillespie accuse Bush of “crisis-mongering” have been consistently thwarted. In foreign policy in general, he’d do a lot better to follow the course of second-term Bush, when the post-9/11 and Iraq crises were by force of arms, will and brainpower brought under control, when Arabs were brought together with Israelis in an unprecedented mass peace convention, when the Europeans were of one mind with the Americans on dealing with Iran, rather than standing to the right of the Americans as they seem to be now. After all, if the domestic scene is a disaster area exascerbated by Obama’s caving to Congress on porkulism and excessive bailouts, where he dramatically upped the Bush bailout ante, the world scene was a better place when he inherited it, thanks to Bush.
The greatest irony in this extended oped snark may be this one:
… contrary to the dreams of dystopians and paranoiacs everywhere, there simply is no outside threat to the American way of life. No country can challenge us militarily; no economic system stands to dislodge capitalism; no terrorist group can do anything more than land the occasional (if horrendous) blow. And as history has shown, the U.S. economy is resilient enough to overcome the worst-laid plans from the White House.
It isn’t exactly wrong except to the extent it isn’t right. Because the greatest threat to the American way of life isn’t from some guy in a cave in Waziristan so much as from some guy in an executive mansion in D.C. Osama is just a threat to our physical security, except to the extent that some parties have sought to try to find out what he and others hate us, and try to do better … exemplified by Obama’s foreign policy. But Obama is a threat to the economic underpinnings of our society that directly related to our notions of individual freedom and free enterprise, and in policy and legal arenas, despite his allies’ criticism that he isn’t moving fast enough, shows signs of a desire to oneup Clinton in turning society on its ear. The threat to the American way of life is from people who want to re-engineer society, the economy and the health care and energy systems in bizarre and dangerous ways, load up future taxpayers with massive debt loads, and surrender our values to some strange notion of geopolitical expediency abroad, all in the midst of both domestic and foreign crises.
Welch and Gillespie miss that part, that the incompetence, pandering and agenda-pushing doesn’t just lead Obama to his personal, political Plains, Ga., but threatens takes all of us there with him. We were a very different country in 2008 than we were in 2000, largely due to the state of war that no longer was avoidable but which was firmly in hand … American values, freedoms and power stressed but intact … by the time Obama picked it up. We stand to be a very different country again in 2012, in part because of the response to an economic crisis, but not least because Obama has insisted on pushing agenda items that didn’t make sense even in good times, and because he insists on surrendering our responsibilities and moral standing abroad.
But in fairness, what Welch and Gillespie may be doing here is just hoping for the best. Rather than a Carteresque trainwreck, a Clintonesque pileup that will be easier for someone else to clean up. Becuase if all that was in danger was Obama’s own political fortunes, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. And whether Obama is headed to Plains or Hope, one term is better than two.
Ha! Balloon-Juice objects to the Carter disparagement.
Speaking of magical realism, HotAir with O’s latest promise. He won’t sign a health care bill that adds to the deficit.
Malkin, meanwhile, bravely dives into the Obamacare bureaucracy.
Protein Wisdom celebrates the monoculturalism!
This is just fun. Via Surber, Pravda corrects Obama on the nomenclature. The czar is the boss. The lieutenants are the commissars. I dunno, that sounds like they’re mixing and matching their autocratic political systems.
Topics: Obama
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:31 am on Sunday, July 19, 2009
5 Responses to “Express Train To Plains”
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July 19th, 2009 at 10:36 am
[...] Obama truly becoming Jimmy Carter? Jules Crittenden [...]
July 19th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Thanks, Jules.
I was puzzling over their observation of running on crisis when Bush was able to get what he thought was most important when the war was going badly and even more so, long after he’d been declared a lame duck.
July 19th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
At risk of being accused of racism, I believe Obama’s central beliefs were formed from the black ghettos of 1970’s inner cities. American collectivism was, if not borne, at least exascarbated
July 19th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
by the Democrats’ expedient use of identity politics.
Sorry, was looking up the proper spelling for exarcerbated, and got ahead of myself
July 20th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
The WaPo is obvious a virulent racist organization looking for any excuse at all to hate on the black guy.