We’re going to have to come up with a generic name for this type of editorializing. The basic characteristics are always the same. Despite winning two landslide elections in a row and winning the presidency with a black man from Chicago named ‘Barack Hussein Obama’, the public has no thirst for Democratic/liberal/progressive legislation. In this case, the author insists that we are not witnessing a hunger for liberalism, but merely a backlash against a failure to keep order (similar to what sank LBJ/Humphrey in 1968).
No majority is everlasting, and Democrats must know that. But if they use their time in the sun carefully, they’ll have a good run.
Obama’s every other word was “change.” Good luck in effecting it, but remember this: The change a lot of voters wanted was a change back to what they had.
If the American people merely wanted a change back to what they had, they would have elected Hillary Clinton in a walk. And that was always the most likely outcome of this election. During the Clinton years, we mostly had it good. Why not just go back to that?
For most people, that would have been sufficient, but a small group of left-wing activists were insistent that the problems of the last eight years were pregnant in the late Clinton years. The Clinton’s foreign policy in Iraq had failed, it’s banking deregulation led to our current fiasco, it’s stewardship of the party had been a disaster, and DLC-style politics were ill-suited to the times. Add in Bill Clinton’s personal foibles and all that drama, and the country needed something completely new. Clintonism worked for a while, but it ultimately led directly to Bushism.
The country is facing a total failure of its elite institutions. The Congress and the administration have never been more unpopular. Our regulatory agencies have failed. Our government can’t perform basic tasks. Corruption is rampant. The media is in complete ill-repute.
The people don’t necessarily want liberalism. But it’s hard to define what the people want without acknowledging that it is largely in-line with orthodox liberal thought. If the Obama administration runs the government half as well as they ran their campaign, the people will be thrilled. And when you look at both how and why the Obama campaign was successful, you’ll find that it embodied a lot of liberal ideals. Maybe you needed to visit an Obama Headquarters and get involved to really understand how those ideals work in action. But there is nothing conservative about them.
I think these types of articles will fade away sometime soon. We are all about to realize that we don’t live in Bush’s world anymore. We don’t live in the Clintons’ world. We live in Obama’s world, and it just ain’t going to work the same way as we’ve fatalistically learned to expect.
