Thursday, February 16, 2012
The history of my disappointment
This post has stood up quite well, as either one of the most prescient I have written, or one of my most naive. Be sure to click through the underlying links before you complete your assessment, which you should feel free to discuss in the comments.
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Thu Feb 16, 10:00:00 AM:
Congress did not move this President left. I don't think this was one of your more prescient posts. The establishment Republicans reached out to this guy many times giving him plenty of room to triangulate like Clinton did and stay in the center. No doing from Obama. His failures are his own. They stem from him pushing the envelope to transform America into his socially engineered utopia. Just my .02
By 
MTF, at
Thu Feb 16, 10:02:00 AM:
I'm still stuck on Kate Upton, which means our country is finally healing from the Bush/Obama disaster. If we weren't healing I would jump to the chance of describing my disdain for the left. But, Upton is Upton...
Ok, I'm back. The fault line in your original post is the underlying premise that a president, any president really, would rather govern from the center regardless of how he or she got elected, because (after all) that's where the votes are. One of your commenters touches on this point, and asks you what evidence is there that President Obama is any sort of a centrist. Why should we not believe him to be a fully committed leftist?
A weak president is of course going to be sucked to the strongest power in Congress. That's obvious, and it's also obvious that with strong working majorities in both houses the left-most wing of the Democrats (not a big stretch from right to left in that party, but still) was at the time the prevailing strongman. Was the leftist president pulled there, or did he lead there?
To answer that question we need only look at today's politics. The Repubs have a majority of the house and a strong minority in the Senate. A weak President would be awfully tempted to find working majorities in the center, across party lines. This President has not done that, choosing at every point confrontation and contemptuous disdain for GOP over work.
Obama is a strong leftist president. He is a committed socialist and class oriented politician. You can look at big things, like his budget, or at small things, like his embarrassing choice of stupid confrontational politics over something so minor as paying for birth control pills.
Obama is a disaster of the first order for this country, and if he gets reelected we will see him in all his glory, appointing judges, institutionalizing his policies in bureaucratic cement and realigning our foreign policy in his almost haphazard way for years to come.
Either way, we will be paying the price for his election decades into the future, but reelecting a strong leader like President Obama is a truly frightening thing.
By PD Quig, at
Fri Feb 17, 04:26:00 PM:
Let's get it over with and re-elect Obama. The electorate is the problem, not Obama. Let him administer the coup de grace over the next four years and screw things up so badly that the imprint is indelibly etched in every last man, woman, and child's brain--just like the Great Depression was for our parent's generation.
Obama is the natural outgrowth of all the cultural pathology that has incrementally gripped this country over the past 40-50 years (including our host's support for a massive social engineering experiment called 'gay marriage'). As Ruth Ginsberg just told the Egyptians, don't look to our ratty old 230 year-old constitution for guidance. Evidently there's a brave, new world awaiting us--without consequences for fucking with the basic tenets of our American social order. Self-reliance, self-restraint, frugality, common sense, private charity, and liberty need not apply. Life is a grand experiment and traditions are just foolish consistencies, the hallmark of a small mind.
Let's see how well this all works out for us. I suspect not at all well.
