President Obama told students in India that the 2010 election
“requires me to make some midcourse corrections and adjustments,”
but Americans are wondering whether he really understands that
voters rejected his policies in the early-November midterm
elections. Instead of acknowledging that his policies are behind
the defeat, the president blames “faulty communication,” as though
the election massacre were just a public relations miscue. Even
Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post scoffed at the
president’s claim that the public “failed to grasp” the reasons for
his actions because he didn’t explain “clearly enough.” Other
Democrats question the president’s “act of contrition” and
acknowledge that the hard part will be to actually change direction
and move to the center. Many Democrats believe such changes are
impossible because the president has alienated many of his closest
political allies. “He’s isolated himself from virtually every group
that matters in American politics,” reported Politico.
Those close enough to receive White House invitations complain that
those prestigious, and formerly personal, visits are now nothing
more than campaign events where guests are kept behind the ropes or
never even see the president.
As the saying goes, with friends like these, who needs
enemies? Even Congressional Democrats blame the president for the
“shellacking” the party suffered in losing the House to the GOP.
They see a “tone deaf” and “distant” president who is “inattentive”
and runs a “hapless political operation.” Some Democrats get highly
personal in describing their president’s “holier-than-thou”
attitudes and posturing. On November 8, Politico
reported, “Many Democrats privately say they are skeptical that
Obama is self-aware enough to make the sort of dramatic changes
they feel are needed — in his relations with other Democrats or in
his very approach to the job.” This view is supported by House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) refusal to step aside for new
leadership and her public assertions of pride at their “historic
achievements.”
In short, few people see a humbled Obama; instead, they
see a man who “learned the wrong lessons.”
The Obama administration’s inability to cope with the
grave implications of the Democrats’ “stinging defeat” at the
ballot box was summed up by two who survived the onslaught, Reps.
Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Peter DeFazio of Oregon. As reported by ABC’s “The
Note,” they wrote: “Following the loss of our majority, we should
fully understand the causes of our historic losses before we begin
the process of rebuilding. If we do not to learn from our losses we
will remain in the minority until we do learn.”
More and more observers are concluding that the president
is incapable of understanding the reasons for the public
repudiation of his policies; further, they think he is unable to
learn the lessons of 2010.
In an
editorial closely scrutinizing President Obama’s trip to India,
the Washington Times characterized the trip as an
announcement of “the decline of the United States as an economic
power.” Mr. Obama, according to the Washington Times,
“ignores the fact that it was American invention, innovation and
competitive spirit that gave the country its economic pre-eminence
in the first place. Rather than lecturing Americans to get in the
game, he would do better to reverse the anti-business political
climate he has helped foster.” Further, the Times wrote,
the president “has never been comfortable with American global
pre-eminence.” The Times summarized their
analysis:
In place of liberty, [Mr. Obama] substitutes
redistributionist notions of social justice. Rather than a single
American nation, he institutionalizes differences for political
gain. Instead of patriotism and pride, he promotes internationalism
and guilt. America’s decline is not the result of historical forces
out of our control, but of condemning the history that brought the
United States to its position of leadership. America will only
resurge when it recaptures the moral image of the country as a land
of individualism, opportunity and patriotism. That is an America
Mr. Obama would rather do without.
Ben Shapiro, in a
Creator’s Syndicate article, describes recent photos of
President Obama as alarming, “They depict a man boiling over with
rage. Have we ever witnessed a U.S. President so pugnacious, so
incensed and inflamed by his own people?” Answering his own
question, Shapiro declares that we are not the president’s
people; instead he sees Obama following his mother’s isolation. His
mother, according to Shapiro, “reinforced and celebrated their
misfit status” and did not socialize with other Americans in
Indonesia when Barack was a boy because “they are not my
people.” In addition to all of the non-American, “hate-America”
people who had influence on the president during his formative
years, Shapiro also notes the socialists and other “hate-America”
mentors that the president chose as his friends and associates
later in life. America’s supposed decline, Shapiro believes, is for
our president — in accordance with all he was taught by his
hate-mongering pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright — a matter of the
“chickens coming home to roost.”
Clearly, the election of 2010 was a rejection of Mr.
Obama’s ideology and agenda — a matter of the president’s chickens
coming home to roost. The Obama presidency — with its
anti-exceptionalism, anti-capitalist, anti-freedom emphases — is a
wake-up call for America. The president’s rhetoric may continue to
resonate with those who want big-government solutions to all of
their wants and needs, but if we have learned nothing else, we now
know that our nation will survive and thrive only with a fully
informed and actively engaged electorate who can tell the
difference between truthful analyses of the challenges facing
America today and mere demagoguery about “enemies” and divisive
appeals to emotion.
