When your own tribe turns on you, you’re in serious trouble. Barack Obama was never going to convert Republican irreconcilables. Many US conservatives had convinced themselves before the election that Obama would be an interfering socialist. Fair enough: he was never really after their support. Far more worrying for the forty-fourth president is the way in which he has been abandoned by his own. Here is Maureen Dowd in the New York Times:
We’ve known that the Left was mad at Obama, but now we know Obama is mad at the Left. Obama and Gibbs [the White House press secretary] are upset that the Lefties won’t recognize the necessity of compromise. The Left is snapping back: What necessity? You won 365 electoral votes. You have both houses of Congress…
Lefties came to the defense of the centrist Clinton during impeachment. Now that Obama is under attack, however, they are not coming to his defense, even though he has given more to the liberal cause than the scandal-stunted Clinton ultimately achieved.
Most damagingly of all, Obama has disappointed those in the middle: voters who initially gave him the benefit of the doubt, but who have been stunned by the rapidity and thoroughness with which he has expanded the federal government. Out-of-control borrowing, state healthcare, government daycare, re-federalisation of welfare, eco-statism, regulation of private-sector remuneration, seizure of industries, alienation of old allies – can this really be the presidential candidate who presented himself as being beyond partisanship and who promised tax cuts?
No one denies that Obama took over in difficult circumstances: the bail-outs and pork barrel stimulus packages were launched during the last days of the Bush administration. But he has proved smaller than events. He couldn’t bring himself to abandon schemes, such as the nationalisation of healthcare, devised during the growth years. Having campaigned on the slogan “Yes we can!” he was unwilling to tell a bankrupt nation: “No – we can’t!”
Americans, like most people, are wiser than their leaders. They know perfectly well that the money has run out. They understand that recovery depends on rediscovering the ideas of independence, enterprise and devolution encoded at Philadelphia. My guess is that, come November, they will vote accordingly.
