“Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. The very idea of losing is hateful to an American.” — Gen. George Patton
America is a center-right nation but we will, under the right conditions, vote for a liberal — even an extreme liberal. We might vote for a lush, a Lothario, perhaps even a lunatic.
But there is one thing Americans will not abide: A loser. That’s the one “L” word President Barack Obama cannot overcome.
And he’s dangerously close to a full-on “L7” face plant.
Forget all the talk about the Tea Party’s big win on the debt ceiling debate (which it was, by the way). Focus instead on the fact that, as a minority faction of the minority party that holds just one house of Congress, they opened a can of whoop ass on the “Leader of the Free World.”
Less than 1,000 days after Obama’s election swept progressives into power and conservatives into late-night gigs on Fox News, the Tea Party movement has beaten Barack back into borderline irrelevance.
Obama, aka “The Smartest President Ever” insisted for months that the debt ceiling be a “clean bill,” aka “no restrictions,” then abandoned that position for “balanced approach,” aka “tax hikes.”
In the end, Obama was forced to face the cameras Sunday night and endorse a plan that doesn’t include any — none — of the president’s original demands. Heck, it’s such a lousy deal for his liberal “friends” that he’s forced to brag about how well he works with his foes.
“It is a balanced compromise reflective of a divided government,” White House flak Jay Carney said yesterday.
In fact, it was a GOP proposal reflective of Obama’s plunge in popularity among independents. His support from these swing voters is down to a pathetic 34 percent. (In May ‘09 it was at 63 percent.)
Why has Obama lost the independents? Because he lost the debate. On spending, stimulus, Obamacare, taxes — this Ivy-League intellectual has lost every single argument to the “extremists” of the Tea Party.
Losing the ideological debate in 2009 led directly to his self-described “shellacking” in the 2010 elections. With Obama supporters losing big in every state that hadn’t recently elected a Kennedy, Obama lost the House and is very likely to lose the Senate next year.
And since losing that election, Obama has lost, well, everything.
The debt-ceiling debacle looks even worse when you recall that this entire “crisis” started as a GOP trap set by Team Obama. They believed that talking about financial collapse and cutting off Granny’s Social Security check would force the GOP into supporting tax hikes or, at the very least, something that looked enough like higher taxes to water down the issue in 2012.
Bill Clinton would have handed the GOP its head and bragged about it at the next intern sleepover. George W. Bush would have gritted his teeth and held his ground until he got something.
But Barack Obama, as Peggy Noonon pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, found a way to lose a fight “in which he had superior forces.” His foes have given him “too much mystique,” Noonan says. “He is not a devil, an alien, a socialist. He is a loser. And this is America, where nobody loves a loser.”
