The Left Starts to Dump Obama

[Geee]

American Thinker:

It appears that the left is washing its hands of Obama. In recent days we've seen a number of left-wing spokesmen ranging from Bill Maher to Frank Rich dismissing Obama as a disappointment -- too centrist, too moderate, not at all the American Lenin they'd ordered. Even Mark Halperin, who would fracture his nose if any Democratic politician ever stopped short, dismissed the messiah as a "dick" on MSNBC.

On the face of it, this is nonsense. Barack Obama stands as the most left-wing president on record. No other president comes close to matching him. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a pragmatist, willing to try anything that worked, even when it didn't. He was also pliable enough to be manipulated by people like Adolf Berle and Rexford Tugwell, authors of the NRA and AAA, and both pure leftists. (In the Goldbergian sense -- they both admired fascism just as much as they did communism). Lyndon B. Johnson exhibited a political split personality in combining a domestic leftism with an international anti-communism that made no political sense and finally wound up destroying him. As for Jimmy Carter, he probably matched Obama for left-of-center tendencies, but he was so ineffectual that it went nowhere. Bill Clinton, under the direction of Dick Morris, governed as a moderate conservative, whatever his personal proclivities.

Which leaves Obama standing alone in the far-left twilight. The seizure of GM and Chrysler, ObamaCare -- the most blatant left-wing attack on individual rights in my lifetime -- the endless efforts to push carbon regulations, the college-kid Keyesianism, and the bitter contempt for American exceptionalism, leave no room for argument.

Not so, say Frank Rich and Bill Maher. (Aren't this pair an example of the collapse of the liberal intellect all by themselves? A half-century ago it was people of actual intellectual accomplishment like Lionel Trilling and Reinhold Neibhur. Now the best they can do is a stand-up comic and a washed-up drama critic.) ObamaCare, insists Maher, is "a pro-business very Republican healthcare plan," which of course explains why the GOP has sworn repeatedly to overturn it. Darling Frank, for his part, believes that Obama's fatal flaw lies in his failure to carry out a "legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers" involved in the financial crisis, overlooking the fact that this would send half the Democratic Party to the jug. (All the same, I was deeply impressed by his New York magazine piece -- close to 5,000 words and not once did Frank leap up and start bellowing "there's no business like show business"

The explanation for this is quite simple: Obama has failed, but the ideology must go on. Obama's biggest achievement was kicking off the Tea Parties, possibly the most serious threat to left-liberalism of the past thirty years. Movement conservatism has always been limited by its connection with Northeastern elitists, while the Neocons, though much more effective, appealed to an urban university-oriented following. But here we have an actual middle-class, middle-American movement, enlightened, informed, and outraged -- the darkest nightmare of any thinking leftist. And who created it? Obama and none other. It would take a lot of accomplishments to outweigh that single error, and Obama can't show any. His gimcrack auto company scheme worked only with aid of bogus paperwork. His "health-care reform" will not outlast judicial testing. His attempt to revive the New Deal as a solution to 21st-century problems is a sour joke to millions of unemployed. He is racing for the exits in Afghanistan, the leftist "good war," like a scalded rat. And now his deeply corrupt Justice Department is blowing up in his face. I've said all along that he would spend his last two years overwhelmed by the problems he created in his first two, and it is coming to pass in detail.

[Argyle58]

Obama has failed, but the ideology must go on. Obama's biggest achievement was kicking off the Tea Parties, possibly the most serious threat to left-liberalism of the past thirty years.

 

To be honest, the "o" didn't do this by himself. He was but one part part of the triumvirate including Pelosi and Reid. But, it is true that the realization of the big ticket items on the liberal agenda were directly responsible for the grass roots movement known as The Tea Party.

 

I do have to laugh when I see the Dems denigrating the Tea Party movement, seemingly ignorant of the fact that they are alienating what polls say represent 60% of the voting public.