Archives
Tuesday, June 05, 2012
Pssssssssssssssst!
Election Already Over.
CHANGED
UP MY MIND. I've been thinking. A bad habit of mine which
tends to make me skate past the 24/7 news cycle, polls, punditry,
and the like. What is the real
narrative of this campaign? It is surely this: The Democrat Party
cannot afford a second Obama term and therefore doesn't want it.
Romney will win, probably big, because of this simple fact. I can
explain.Election Already Over.
The Democrat Party and the hard left are not the same thing. Just as conservatives and the Republican Party are not the same thing. Conservatives have occasionally taken over the Republican Party, with mixed results. Goldwater was a disaster, Reagan a triumph. The difference was not the ideology. It was the political competence. Reagan, perhaps more than any other in our history, was a natural at being president. Unfortunately, not even getting elected to the office is proof of such talent. Ideologues everywhere hope that their candidates have it, whatever it is, but it's impossible to know until the candidate becomes the president. At the party level, the power level, the level of careers for all the professional politicians who are the party's point of the spear, ideology is a distant second to successful results. By this measure Obama has been an utter, total, compleat disaster for the Democrat Party. The powers that be don't necessarily disagree with Obama's ideology. But they're terrified of his incompetence, which is incredibly real to professional politicians. More about this later.
Don't be fooled by the MSM. They ARE ideologues first and foremost. They have not only compromised but thrown away their professional principles in order to sustain a failed president and connive at his reelection. Why the real narrative is still a dirty secret to most. The MSM doesn't care about the long-term consequences of a second Obama term. Why the horse race aspect of the election still seems closer than it should. The difference between Obama and Carter is that the press turned on Carter, whom they despised for his mushy southern accent, his born-again Christian self-righteousness, his obsessive myopia, and his incredibly dull and offputting personality. This press will not turn on Obama, but they no longer have the power they once did. People are onto them. The NYT and WAPO are plunging toward financial ruin, the alphabet network TV news organizations are reaching mostly old folks who don't know how to cruise for other fare on cable or the internet, and ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE KNOWS they're in the tank for Obama.
If you're a Democrat in Congress, Romney is a better career bet than Obama. Think about it. Obama took office with a commanding majority in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. What would Reagan or Clinton have done with such a stacked deck? Pause. Yeah. The mind boggles. What did Obama do with it? Nothing. Yes, he got legislation passed, including a health care bill that finally had to be rammed through to passage with dirty parliamentary tricks that left the Speaker of the House so far out on a limb that she finally immortalized her own humiliation by saying, "We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it." Really? Then came the slaughter of the 2010 congressional elections. Democrat careers ended by the dozens. Quick quiz! How many photos can you remember offhand of Pelosi or Reid or Schumer, etc, chatting in the Oval Office with President Obama? Any? None? The president does not engage in the legislative process. They're just his bitch, even the leaders of his own Democratic caucus. When it's convenient, they're as much a scapegoat as the Republicans. Don't think Dem congressional leadership hasn't noticed. You think they don't know it takes presidential leadership to keep Congress from blowing its own brains out with pork-laden spending bills that don't actually help the country but only parochial constituencies consisting of congressional campaign contributors? Unruly kids do expect Daddy to lower the boom from time to time. They know they need the president to help them look good. At the least, they expect guidance and discipline, if not the occasional necessary spanking. You know. Politics. With their own approval ratings hovering somewhere between Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer even though they've dutifully done what was asked, they recognize better than you and I do that Obama has (inevitably?) become the opaque absentee father he idolized for no particular reason in his first autobiography. Second-generation politician Romney, on the other hand, has a reputation as a "flip-flopper." Which they understand in different terms than you or I do. To a politician it means he's a man you can negotiate with, make a deal with. And he's affable, approachable. Hell, he was a Republican governor of Massachusetts. His whole political career is about working with an entrenched liberal opposition. Cool. COOL! He is not a man who is going to make you his bitch. In the right signing ceremony, a house rep could become a senate candidate, a senator could become a presidential candidate, and (ironically) Romney's success could become a Dem politician's ticket to career success. Which ain't ever gonna happen with the Obamessiah.
On the other other hand, a second Obama term could be the end of the Democrat Party for a generation. Look at it as a Democrat who actually believes in (most of) Obama's policies. The economic mess is not his fault. Europe is imploding, China and India are rising. Which means the U.S. economy is screwed for the foreseeable future. But a better president would have attacked the economy first and relentlessly and he'd have known the difference between "shovel ready" and shovelful of bullshit. How FDR got away with it for so long. Not by blaming, but by generating incredibly optimistic new initiatives one after another. He wouldn't have progressively retreated from press conferences to golf courses, and his wife wouldn't have been parading around the world on opulent vacations while formerly middle class Americans were subsiding into the 21st century equivalent of Hooverville. There's no reason to think that a second term would bring Obama off the Mt. Olympus of his frightened ego and get his hands dirty with anything that could help, even cosmetically. Four more years of an imperial, isolated, messianic incompetent will make everything worse and no one will ever vote for a Democratic presidential candidate again. How much better -- if the economy is so doomed that even Keynesian solutions don't work -- to let a Republican preside over the next four years. Let him suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, while the loyal opposition does everything it can to help alleviate the plight of the suffering. Then Hillary can be summoned to the rescue. TA DA! Yes, there's some risk if Romney should prove, accidentally, to have it and succeed, but let's face it, most presidents don't have it. Even if he does, a single Obama term can be survived the way a single Carter term was. It's only a three-term hit: two Romney and one successor term. As opposed to a Lost Decade of Democrat Disaster that will keep Republicans in the Oval Office for four, five, or even six terms.
How might you tell if I'm right? You'd see what you're seeing now. The historically tight Democrat discipline on campaign talking points seems suddenly undisciplined. Clinton. Booker. Patrick. Rendell. Manchin. Shrum. Etc. Etc.
Funny, but the last ones to know what's going on will be the MSM. Something I can share with you from my advanced age that you can look deliciously forward to. Election Night 1980. Gallup still had Carter ahead. But when the polls closed it was already over. Reagan in a landslide. And the shocked, doleful, disbelieving agony of the MSM anchors was the single funniest thing I have ever seen on this earth.
This one's already over, too. Don't tell anyone. It will be our secret. That's how the Election Night Funny gets so hilarious. All those crestfallen A'holes...
