I consider Charles Krauthammer to be a very intelligent man. I think he is intelligent, but I also think he is quite devious in the sense that he cannot be relied upon to say what he really thinks. He’s a manipulator. His arguments don’t roll off the top of his head but are prepared meticulously to have the desired psychological impact. If you take him too literally, you’ll conclude that he is either not very bright or that he’s simply crazy. As a result, he can sometimes be hard to gauge.
There is certainly a degree of scare-mongering in his column today. There’s the boilerplate about how Obama is turning America into a typical European socialist state filled with people who can’t tie their shoes without some assistance from a bureaucrat. We all know that is food for the sheep. But maybe he actually believes that Obama represents a real threat to the Reagan Revolution.
Reaganism’s ascendancy was confirmed when the other guys came to power and their leader, Bill Clinton, declared (in his 1996 State of the Union address) that “the era of big government is over” — and then abolished welfare, the centerpiece “relief” program of modern liberalism.
In Britain, the same phenomenon: Tony Blair did to Thatcherism what Clinton did to Reaganism. He made it the norm.
Obama’s intention has always been to re-normalize, to reverse ideological course, to be the anti-Reagan — the author of a new liberal ascendancy. Nor did he hide his ambition. In his February 2009 address to Congress he declared his intention to transform America. This was no abstraction. He would do it in three areas: health care, education and energy.
To be more clear about it, Krauthammer also made this statement: “Reagan was an ideological inflection point, ending a 50-year liberal ascendancy and beginning a 30-year conservative ascendancy.” I agree with that statement, but it seems clear that Krauthammer sees next Tuesday’s election as the potential endpoint of the conservative ascendancy. I’d like to believe that he is correct. As for the next part, I believe he is correct:
If Obama loses, however, his presidency becomes a historical parenthesis, a passing interlude of overreaching hyper-liberalism, rejected by a center-right country that is 80 percent non liberal.
When you put it that way, I guess this election in kind of important.
What say you?
