The Real Sleeping Giant

[Geee]

American Spectator:

During the heady days of the 2009 protests against the "Porkulus" bill, Obamacare, and big government in general, many people spoke of the rise of the Tea Party movement as the result of Presidents Obama and Bush having "woken the sleeping giant" of pro-liberty America.
But that giant may turn out to be a pygmy when compared to what Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Occupy Wall Street have awoken with their incessant and intensifying class warfare.

Americans who consider themselves Tea Partiers are a minority of the country, even if a significant and motivated one. The real majority, one which Democrats are foolishly antagonizing, are those of us who refuse to accept the left's claims that Americans of one economic class are the enemy of those in another economic class.

A recent poll by Gallup shows that the efforts of Obama and the Occupiers may be backfiring against the beggar-thy-neighbor Alinskyite left.
To be clear, while the poll shows that "Americans' views of their own position as 'haves' or 'have nots' have been remarkably stable," the percentage of Americans who believe that the nation is divided along those lines has plunged since the last similar poll, done just prior to President Obama's election in 2008.

During the Bush years, people were beginning to think that lower-income Americans were in a form of conflict with the elite, now called "the 1 percent," or were perhaps even their victims. Those views became particularly intense during the depth of the 2008 financial crisis when politicians of both parties, parroted by media everywhere, blamed the real estate crash and ensuing stock market plunge on Wall Street bankers who fooled unsuspecting borrowers into buying houses they couldn't afford and then securitized "toxic" derivatives and sold them to unsuspecting investors.

The mess was far more a failure of government than of markets, something which one might think would be difficult for the American people to learn, especially since politicians of both parties have a lot to answer for when it comes to pushing "affordable housing" aka "vote buying" on the nation.

But Barack Obama has given the nation a tremendous object lesson by posing the federal government as the solution to all problems -- and then proving that it isn't. When the president said that spending a trillion dollars of our children's future earnings would keep unemployment below 8 percent only to see us spend the last two and a half years with only three months below 9 percent unemployment -- and none below 8.5 percent -- the public begins to see the economic emperor as wearing no clothes.