Early in the week, the press spoke of Barack Obama’s willingness
to extend “an olive branch” to Republicans. By the middle of the
week, his “olive branch” looked more like a thorn bush.
A politician who promised a glorious new era of civility
and concord was referring to his Republican opponents as hostake
takers on the issue of tax cuts. “It’s tempting not to negotiate
with hostage takers unless the hostage gets harmed,” he said. It
doesn’t occur to him that he qualifies more as the captor in the
analogy. After all, he is the one who was threatening to take
action against the people by raising tax rates on job-creating
business owners.
Obama can only hope that the American people will be
seduced by a political version of the Stockholm Syndrome, a term
that was popularized after Swedish robbers took hostages at a bank
in 1973. During the five-day ordeal, the hostages, instead of
resenting their captors, grew emotionally attached to them and made
excuses for them after it ended.
Obama thinks the American people should feel gratitude to
him for offering to release them from a tax-hike crisis into which
he had thrown them. He casts himself as the passive negotiator in
the struggle, but he is one who has been controlling Washington for
two years.
His stance as a proponent of tax cuts for the middle class
is as plausible as his stance during the healthcare debate as a
champion of the Hyde Amendment. Had Obama been in Congress during
the Reagan era, he would never have voted for middle-class tax cuts
or a ban on government funding of abortion. But whenever a
conservative policy drifts to the middle of a debate, he acts like
he came up with it. He suddenly becomes an “angry” advocate for a
policy he doesn’t like but has to take, or appear to take, out of
political necessity.
The Democratic Party counts on a political version of the
Stockholm Syndrome on most issues, for almost all of the debates in
Washington revolve around “saving” the people from crises
Democratic policies exposed them to in the first place. The way it
usually works is that the Democrats create a program the federal
government shouldn’t have established at all, the program
inevitably fails, and then they rush in to “reform” it. Obama has
talked about “education reform” in this way, as if his party had
nothing to do with the failed policies and programs under
discussion, as if he favors releasing children from unionized
public schools with vouchers in hand.
Obama could put on a smile back in 2008 when he spoke of
moving to “the middle,” because he didn’t think he would actually
have to do so. But now that political pressures force him to the
middle on a few issues, his smile has turned into a snarl. Real
moves to the middle tax his ego badly. He regards the left’s lack
of docility and the right’s resistance as a personal affront, and
to build himself back up he has to play the victim and tear America
down. “This country was founded on compromise. I couldn’t go
through the front door in this country’s founding. And if we were
really thinking about ideal positions, we wouldn’t have a union,”
he spouted bitterly at Tuesday’s press conference.
The media was very impressed by his “passion.” But it was
more like pouting that he had to give up yet another cheap,
ill-considered campaign promise. That he knew his liberal base
would be reading his stitched-up lips and hearing “no new taxes” on
job creators made him feel very uncomfortable and defensive. So
while ostensibly rebuking liberals he promised to practice class
warfare at a more opportune time in the coming years.
In his post-defeat November press conference, he said that
the American people failed to view his socialism as only temporary.
But as his promise of class warfare at a later date shows, it’s
only his minor suspensions of socialism that are temporary. It
pains him to let the productive keep their own money, and he
expects his spared victims to feel grateful for not having been
mistreated more.
