WASHINGTON — With Scott Brown’s election to the senatorial
seat held by Edward Kennedy for 47 years, a few
things are suddenly clear. Americans in large numbers fear a
further government encroachment on our private healthcare system.
There are other means of reforming it. Americans do not want to
bear higher tax burdens, more profligate government spending, and
crushing deficits to be borne by future generations. One other
thing is clear. For the most part, the American press is not very
informative.
When Bill Clinton went up to Massachusetts to campaign for
the Democratic candidate, not one mainstream news organization
reported what is a matter of cold fact, to wit, when Bill Clinton
campaigns for others they lose. In fact when Clinton was
president the Democratic Party mostly lost. In 2004, as I
reported in my 2007 book on Clinton in retirement, of the 14
Democrats Clinton campaigned for 12 lost. He was not even able to
campaign successfully for his pal, Terry McAuliffe’s
gubernatorial bid in Virginia last year. Equally unhelpful is
outside campaigning from the Prophet Obama. He was no help for
Democratic candidates in the recent midterm elections in New
Jersey and Virginia. Right now Obama’s presidency is
a failed presidency. Nowhere in the mainstream media is that
reported in their one-year assessments of his presidency. Yet it
is now thunderously clear.
There are still wisenheimers out there who will say that
this very clever president will now recalculate and change
course. He will steal to the center. His Democrats will follow.
Truth be known, the Democrats led by Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and
Harry Reid, are no more likely to change course than the
artistes of the Grateful Dead were ever likely to take
up aerobics, join Alcoholics Anonymous, and resort to golf before
they all died years short of the average longevity for an adult
American male. The Democrats vote the way they do because they
are captives of a culture, the youth culture of the 1960s, a
culture that has endured, aged, but never smartened up.
This week in a very funny segment of his radio show Rush
Limbaugh made a very pertinent point. He did so after playing
what he called “patriotic music,” in this case the Venezuelan
national anthem, which sounded as though it were being performed
by a large orchestra of kazoos. Then Rush referred to the “1960s
hippies who govern us.” Given to amusing hyperbole as he is, El
Rushbo was not far off. Most of the real 1960s hippies are either
doddering around in early retirement (retirement from life spent
on a park bench) or long ago they served as crepe suzettes for
the worms. Sure one or two of the left-wing Democrats in Congress
might have once been hippies — one can envisage a long-haired
Henry Waxman shuffling through Haight Ashbury in
bell bottoms and Jesus sandals — but today’s dominant Democrats
in Congress, for a certitude, were hippie fellow-travelers since
their troubled youths in the 1960s and early 1970s. They have
ever since lived in a closed society, closed to the realities of
the Reagan and post-Reagan years.
The Prophet Obama may be a bit too young to have joined
what in the late 1960s and early 1970s was called the New Left,
but his mentors, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the late Saul
Alinsky, were true believers. They saw America as a failed state
years ago, and the president agrees. Remember his extraordinary
statement last April to 2,000 Europeans at his Strasbourg Town
Hall: “In America, there’s a failure to appreciate Europe’s
leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic
union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges,
there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been
dismissive, even derisive.” This is vintage 1960s left-wingery.
Just as Jimmy Carter was the first former president to speak ill
of a sitting president while on foreign soil. Obama has now
surpassed him. He is the first sitting president to speak ill of
America while on foreign soil, and he has done so
repeatedly.
Most probably the president sees nothing wrong with this
sort of diminishment of his country. Most probably the Democratic
leadership sees nothing wrong with it either. Liberals like them
get elected not because they understand Americans but because
they understand American journalists, who also are part of their
1960s culture. Yet it is a culture from an America of long ago.
As even Massachusetts demonstrated this week, most Americans
believe Americans know how to solve their problems through
initiative, limited government, and hard work, not through the
nanny state.
