by:
Daniel Greenfield
Obama's approval ratings and MSNBC's viewer ratings are in a close race
to the bottom of Death Valley. It's only a question of which set of
obnoxious hipsters with a head full of bad policy ideas and no real life
experience will be fired first;
the Maddow crew or the White House staff.
The progressive pajama boy era is over. The asexual messenger bag toting wonk has met
an ISIS Jihadist and run home to its non-traditional family. Liberalism isn't over, but its contenders are trying to butch up their act.
The second coming of Hillary is accompanied by bellicose rhetoric
about Putin and Syria. Leon Panetta, her gnomish errand boy, is sneering
at
Obama as an egghead too busy dithering about what not to do to be able to actually do anything about ISIS.
Democrats are adjusting to a new reality of less nuance and more centrist politics. So is MSNBC.
If Obama loses the Senate, then his leftist backers also lose their death grip on the Democratic Party. And that's why they're panicking so badly.
Progressives proved that money
and media bias could let them get away with anything. But then they
lost in 2010, barely hung on in 2012, and are heading for a beating in
2014.
If they can't buy the Senate now, the Democratic Party will have to correct its course.
A sober analysis of the Big Billionaire Left shows that they were
good at getting Obama elected, but not much else. Like the USSR, they
could pour a lot of energy and capital into inefficiently getting one
big thing done, but they aren't much good at doing a lot of little
things. Their hijacking of democracy ran into trouble the moment they
tried to push past the White House. It was only the White House's
hijacking of democracy by trying to function as a unilateral
dictatorship of pen and phone that extended their influence beyond their initial defeat in 2010. And that came with its own price in popularity.
Obama's arrogance isolated him politically. He insisted on running
everything and is stuck with the bill. In countless speeches he demanded
more power and authority; his sinking approval ratings reflect the
growing willingness of even his own supporters to hold him responsible
for his unilateral policymaking.
As the election approaches, everything that could have gone wrong has
gone wrong. Not only did Obama's aggressive efforts to stoke racial
unrest on the border
and in Ferguson
to turn out the minority voters who generally sit out midterm elections
backfire, but the resulting messes deepened the popular impression that
he was in over his head. Now instead of pivoting
from Global Warming
to a minimum wage to some offensive thing that some local Republican
somewhere said, the media is stuck in an Ebola-ISIS cycle that reminds
Americans on a daily basis that everything really is out of control.
The critiques from even friendly media outlets keep throwing around
words and terms like "detached," "in over his head," "flailing," and
"too smart for his own good." That word salad adds up to the same
message as the one being peddled by Leon Panetta; America needs strong
experienced leadership.
And Obama isn't it.
Obama is already receding into the imagination of liberals as the
youthful folly of a political Age of Aquarius when millennials tried to
levitate the Pentagon by electing a brash, inexperienced community
organizer to fix the world. They are writing him off as an act of
political naiveté by a war-traumatized generation still unaware of the
practical limits of the real world.
And that infuriates and terrifies the left worse than anything else.
The left can thrive on hostility, but it hates being dismissed by its
fellow travelers as naive idealists who don't understand the real
world.
But that's the historical revisionism that had been prepped and waiting
in the wings all along for Obama. What the right does wrong is always
attributed to malice, while the left's worst atrocities from the Gulags
to the killing fields are put down to idealism gone wrong. Obama takes
his place somewhere between Mao and Eugene McCarthy as the Democratic
Party rushes to reinvent itself as the adult party of serious
experienced
political leaders like Hillary Clinton.
Its message is that it's time for the Obama pajama boys to grow up and
compromise on their progressive politics by voting for Hillary in 2016.
The left has few options left. Money can only buy so many votes. If
Obama's base stays home, then the magical turnout operation starts
looking like a lot of political consultants taking credit for the Oprah
tilt of black women coming out to vote for Obama. And there is no
obvious replacement for Obama.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio was supposed to inaugurate a
new era of progressive politics by pushing so far to the left as to make
Obama look like Bob Dole. Instead Bill de Blasio has been tagged by the
same progressive incompetent moniker as Obama. The analogy is being
drawn explicitly by liberals even in left-of-center publications like
the New York Times and the Daily News.
Bill de Blasio didn't extend the progressive lifespan. He was elected
just in time for everyone to be primed to expect the Obama progressive
cycle of self-righteous cover-ups, thin-skinned media wars and grandiose
policy announcements that go nowhere. The political future of the
progressive mayor has been Obamanized off the scene. And that leaves few
great hopes for the progressive cause.
Elizabeth Warren still fakes left,
but she seems to know her limitations. 2018's midterm election without a
president on the ballot and a different demographic makeup for the
electorate could easily topple her. If she tried for the big chair, she
would be run over by harder Democrat candidates faking centrist. And
without Warren, all that's left are clown acts like Bernie Sanders and
Seattle Socialist Kshama Sawant.
The progressive resurgence was powered by leftist billionaires and
non-profits chasing power. They have the money and the organization, but
they don't have the candidates. Six years of Obama produced compelling
conservative figures like
Ted Cruz,
Trey Gowdy, and
Mike Lee. There's no equivalent to them on the left. It's why
liberal billionaire election
spending is characterized more by the candidates that they are against
rather than the ones that they are for. They have spent so much time and
money battling the Tea Party that they have failed to build a
post-Obama political future for their movement.
The left isn't going anywhere, but its current incarnation as the
party of diversely wimpy progressives who compensate for their lack of
experience with their enthusiasm and their political connections is.
Obama has done a great deal for the political agendas of the left while
doing a great deal of damage to the political ambitions of the
Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party won't forget that.
Obama was thinking about transforming America, but the Democratic Party is thinking about the next four years.
The liberal verdict on the age of Obama has been written. It may
change with history, but for now the Hope and Change period will be
praised for its idealism and its innovative political organizing, but
dismissed for its policy incompetence and its inability to listen to
voices outside its bubble. It was an elitist phenomenon whose diversity
was faked with media imagery and the party will now work to try and
recapture its lost position among the rest of the country, particularly
among white Democrats.
The progressive will continue to haunt American politics, but his current hipster incarnation is headed for extinction.
Source
Rob
is a bold new leader with a
record of success, courage, loyalty, and strength. He's a conservative, a
U.S. military vet, and, as testified by his many supporters that I met
in
one heck of a campaign rally, he's one of us!
Rob
is running a campaign like I did
in my first race -- in his truck, visiting every corner of the state,
talking with voters, and communicating a positive message of
conservative
solutions. And, like I was, he's being massively outspent by the career
politicians.
