George Will is typically a cool and reflective editorialist, given to serious analysis rather than partisan rhetoric, but as this year’s presidential campaign ends, Will really unloads on Obama, linking the worthless emptiness of his reelection campaign to the worthless emptiness of his presidency.
Energetic in body but indolent in mind, Barack Obama in his frenetic campaigning for a second term is promising to replicate his first term, although simply apologizing would be appropriate. His long campaign’s bilious tone — scurrilities about Mitt Romney as a monster of, at best, callous indifference; adolescent japes about “Romnesia†— is discordant coming from someone who has favorably compared his achievements to those of “any president†since Lincoln, with the “possible†exceptions of Lincoln, LBJ and FDR. Obama’s oceanic self-esteem — no deficit there — may explain why he seems to smolder with resentment that he must actually ask for a second term.
Roger L. Simon observes that the Benghazi scandal will continue long past election day and will hang, like an albatross, around the neck of a second Obama presidency.
One way or the other, Obama will pay. And as he pays, through the relentless accusations of an impeachment, inevitable or otherwise, his party will be constantly on the defensive, the reputations of their leadership incalculably besmirched. Though they do not realize or choose to ignore it now, the Democrats will be lucky if Obama loses on November 6.
If he wins, not even the mainstream media will save him. Although a few will try, the walls are already crumbling.
He’s quite right. If Obama loses, the Republicans will most likely accept his electoral rejection as sufficient punishment for Benghazi and the subsequent cover-up. If he wins, they will pursue him like the Furies, and the truth will inevitably come out to destroy him.
The SF Chronicle reports that in the bluest quarters of the bluest state panic is setting in.
There’s no shortage of their kind in the politically bluest parts of California. Liberals so freaked out about the prospect of President Obama losing his re-election bid that they can’t sleep at night. Can’t talk about anything else. Can’t stop parsing the latest polls.
David Plouffe, one of President Obama’s top campaign strategists, has a word for supporters he feels are needlessly fretful: bed wetters.
“Oh, I think I’m worse than that,” Kay Edelman said.
For the past several weeks, the 60-year-old San Francisco resident has frequently bolted awake in the middle of the night, in “a panic attack,” she said. She darts for her computer and checks the latest polls. Some days she’s so distraught that she can’t exercise.
Every morning, she gets e-mails from friends who’ve been just as sleepless. Most are so tense, they can croak out only a few words. “Very anxious.” “Worried.”
“Nothing more needs to be said,” said Edelman, a retired educational administrator.
Emotional role reversal
In this most unpredictable of campaigns, an emotional role reversal is happening in California. Republicans, who hold no statewide offices and are only 30 percent of registered voters, are more upbeat and enthusiastic.
Liberals, on the other hand, keep checking the polls.
It’s unlikely that even Republican Mitt Romney’s immediate family members think he’ll win California. But a Public Policy Institute of California survey released last week shows that while Obama holds a 12-point lead among likely California voters, 70 percent of Republican voters in the state were more enthusiastic than usual about voting – a greater proportion than the 61 percent of Democrats who were more enthused.
For liberals, part of the problem is that neither of the presidential campaigns is active in California, conceding the state to Obama. That means liberals have little to do other than reinforce each other’s fears about the voting predilections of a voting species seldom seen in the Bay Area – non-Democrats.
“We’re seeing these polls and reading about all these ads, and hearing about all of these undecided voters that are in other states, but we feel that we can’t do anything about it,” said Pat Reilly, a longtime press spokeswoman for national and California organizations and politicians who lives in Berkeley. “You feel like you’re part of a fight, but you can’t see your opponent.”
A lot of people have been puzzled by the Obama Campaign’s reliance on trivia and refusal to move toward the center. How can a president presiding over this economy hope to win, especially with a polarizing campaign calculated to turn off centrists?
Stanley Kurtz seems to have found the blueprint for Obama’s strategy (and its raison d’être) in an article in last June’s New York Magazine by John Heileman.
Obama’s strategy, says Heileman, is built around the idea that he can win with a coalition of the “demographically ascendent,†African Americans, Hispanics, women, and young people. To a degree, the bad economy has pushed Obama toward this approach. The obvious hope is that economic weakness can be countered by appeals to socially liberal women and young people on cultural issues. But don’t underestimate the extent to which this strategy is a deliberate decision that could have gone otherwise, as the behind-the-scenes opposition of some Democrats indicates. Obama is clearly willing to abandon centrist voters and place his own likeability at risk for the sake of creating a socially and economically liberal Democratic coalition that would allow him
to govern securely from the left. …
The president is going for broke. He wants to govern from the left and ignore the center. His top strategists promised a campaign that would permit this, and that’s the campaign Obama has delivered. Noticed that Obama has actually doubled down on this strategy when he still might have tried a last-minute pivot to the middle. That’s how badly Obama wants to abandon the center and take this country to the left.
In 2008, the junior senator from Illinois won in a landslide by fashioning a potent “coalition of the ascendant,†as Teixeira and Halpin call it, in which the components were minorities (especially Latinos), socially liberal college-educated whites (especially women), and young voters. This time around, Obama will seek to do the same thing again, only more so. The growth of those segments of the electorate and the president’s strength with them have his team brimming with confidence that Âdemographics will trump economics in November—and in the process create a template for Democratic dominance at the presidential level for years to come.
It’s your fault, you see, that “sick people just die and oil fills the sea. … We haven’t killed all the polar bears, but it’s not for lack of trying. Big Bird is sacked. The Earth is cracked, and the atmosphere is frying. … Find a park that is still open, and take a breath of poison air. They foreclosed your place to build a weapon in space, but you can write off your au pair.”
This one wins the Pavel Morozov Award for excellence in brainwashing children.
Let’s get this one clear: I have no problem at all with the principle of leadership of society by an educated elite. I just think that this particular educated elite isn’t qualified to tell anybody anything, particularly how to live.
