An atmosphere of euphoria swirled around Barack Obama last
January. A year later, the hoopla looks even more ludicrous, as
liberals find themselves peering down forlornly at a few
remaining crumbs on their cracked commemorative plates.
The cocky, gibbering hosts on MSNBC, who had chortled over
the “end of an error” last January, were reduced on Tuesday night
to hesitant silence, though Rachel Maddow did summon the energy
to furrow her brow censoriously at Scott Brown’s “weird” remark
about the “availability” of his daughters that he made during his
victory speech.
Scott Brown had feminists and avant-garde liberals so
turned around that their idea of a late hit was to talk about his
improper photo spread decades ago in a magazine they have long
championed. That they had helped to create and spread the
Cosmo culture didn’t seem to faze them or figure into
their analysis of why voters didn’t care. A female anchor on CNN
mumbled something about “double standards,” though it would be
safe to guess that a copy of Cosmopolitan still arrives
in her mailbox.
MSNBC, doing its part to help get out the vote for Coakley,
ran a streaming headline at the bottom of the screen on election
day which said that Brown supports “waterboarding.” Apparently,
ignorant viewers were supposed to see that, gasp, and then rush
to the polls.
It didn’t seem to occur to MSNBC’s hosts that what they
considered grim warnings about Brown — if he wins, ObamaCare
dies, they said repeatedly — would serve instead as open
invitations to vote for him. The lunges at him were a measure of
their extremism, not his: If a moderate Republican like Brown
qualifies as a “reactionary” in the eyes of MSNBC anchors, then
the entire nation is out of touch with their superior
wisdom.
Obama’s campaigning for Coakley seemed notable only for its
fecklessness and ambivalence. He couldn’t be bothered to wear a
tie at her campaign event; he acted like he didn’t know the name
of her opponent.
It would appear that Brown’s victory isn’t just a
referendum on the radicalism of Obama’s administration but also
reflects a distaste and exhaustion with its overall emptiness and
narcissism.
In his Inaugural address, Obama spoke of the dawn of a new
“era of responsibility.” He was going to make Americans believe
in politicians and government again. A year
later, disgust for both is higher than ever.
His administration has proven to be as ordinary, corrupt,
and unimaginative as any other, if not more so. The hype has
amounted to a cavalcade of nothingness: a stimulus package that
hasn’t stimulated the economy, bailouts for corrupt unions,
frivolous programs for clunkers and caulkers, bribes to pliable
pols, global warming dilettantism preached to Americans in a
jobless torpor, a Justice Department that looks like an annex of
the ACLU, a rhetoric of transparency coupled with a reality of
secrecy, and a partying and porous White House that enjoys the
trappings of power while not accomplishing anything to justify
them.
White House officials dismiss Coakley as a charmless and
complacent loser. But their own complacency contributed to her
defeat. They were on vacation in December too, as the attempted
Christmas bombing fiasco underscores. And if the White House’s
crack political team had possessed a functioning antenna, they
wouldn’t have waited so long to campaign for her.
They fulminate over her gaffes, but some of them were just
clear statements of liberal policy and priorities. Democratic
political consultant Bob Shrum complained that she talked too
much about “choice.” That’s a novel gripe from a former Ted
Kennedy adviser.
And then there was plenty of grousing about her comment
that religious freedom does not apply to nurses and doctors in
emergency rooms. But that comment simply reflects the
straightforward secularism of the Democratic Party. Apparently,
Coakley was too transparent for the White House’s taste. In any
case, if a rising tide, as JFK said, lifts all boats, then
Obama’s claimed one should have helped Coakley’s wobbly vessel
get to shore.
