The left and Obama: is breaking up getting easier to do?
I’ve often described the left’s relationship with Obama as akin to romantic love. It’s been evident for quite some time (see this, for example) that the early flush of intense infatuation is over. But a more quiet and realistically cynical love remained.
Now I wonder if that has ended, as well. One indication of that possibility is this editorial in today’s NY Times, which for the first time (at least as best I can recall) breaks quite strongly with one of Obama’s hypocritical policies. The issue is Libya and the War Powers Act. These are pretty strong words for the usually Obama-enabling Times to use:
…Mr. Obama cannot evade his responsibility, under the War Powers Act, to seek Congressional approval to continue the operation. The White House’s argument for not doing so borders on sophistry…No word games can get him off the hook.
The Times goes on to blame the Republicans for partisan maneuvering. But the editors come back at the very end to calling on Obama to comply with the law:
Partisan brinkmanship or not, Mr. Obama doesn’t have a choice. He needs to go to Congress and make his case.
Another sign of discontent is this sort of thing (the article even uses the metaphor of a romantic breakup). Progressives are not very happy with Obama, and they’re saying so. They perceive him as a squishy middle-of-the-road kind of guy. But this is hardly new. The real question is what they’ll do at the polls–stay home, or hold their noses and vote for him?
This trend shows us the real work is that there is nearly half a nation who wants to be coddled, washed and fed; a half of a nation to the left of Obama; a half of a nation who needs to move to Europe; a half of a nation who. . . oh good grief, I’m depressing myself and it’s Friday!
So . . . if the left wants to help us defeat Obama, sure, we’ll take it.
Indeed, it still baffles and scares me a bit that there are those who think Obama isn’t leftist *enough*. And that there seem to be a lot of those people.
They’ll vote for him not because it’s progressive but for the same reason as they did last time. Not to vote for him is RAAAAACIST!
Besides they’ve got no place else to go and Obama knows it. Look for a lot of domestic abuse of the progressives followed by a kiss from Obama to make it all BETTA!
Most Obama supporters think a leftist is just someone who gives handouts and favors from wealth redistribution. It never dawned on them that a real leftist like Obama incites world wide aggression resulting in a big giant cluster ****.
The left is now very consistently seeing their mask drop. The internet is guaranteeing that the silent majority bears witness to what the left really is and was all along and the leftists are losing ideological and political battles because of that.
The leftists now begin to suffer from “sanctimonious liberal self-victimization” syndrome. That is, “we are so much better than the conservatives and we have all worked so hard to create our utopia, but you [Barack Obama] are not cooperating beause you are less than the liberal we thought you were. Our feelings are hurt and it’s your [Obama’s] fault.”
They perceive him as a squishy middle-of-the-road kind of guy.
So who’s their ideal President? Joe Stalin?
T:
There’s a gigantic swath of Americans who aren’t paying attention. I bet you’d be surprised how many people believe the Democrat Party continues to be dominated by people with values like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Scoop Jackson. I really hope you’re right and more people are seeing the mask fall, but I don’t have much hope that is true.
When 22% of those polled believe the healthcare law has already been repealed, and another 26% aren’t sure, then it seems to me we are living in an era where people are willfully ignorant about politics.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/02/25/nearly-half-americans-dont-know-health-law-repealed-poll-shows/
Scott,
Let me be more distinct. The left is losing battles, it’s not losing ALL the battles. They still continue to pettifog issues and, as we are finding out with Obama, sometimes just outright lie. But the %-age of the silent majority that receives the message continues to grow. This ideological war will be won by conservatives in inches, not miles. For now, IMO, the battle is moving in a good direction.
The Democratic Party not only isn’t dominated by Scoop Jacksonians, it has no room for them at all. I finally stopped calling myself a Democrat when I realized that insisting I was a member of the Lieberman wing of the party no longer made any sense.
But it’s amusing in an odd way to see the left fussing about Obama; this is absolutely the best they’re going to do, and if the Republicans put up a decent candidate it’s going to be a decade or so before the electorate even thinks about trusting the left with power again.
Oh, they will vote for him. And they will vote several times!
They don’t have to hold there noses–they are used to the smell.
Oops, please replace “there” with “their”–third glass of wine….
The left is sincerely angry with Obama – at least, many of the leftists I know are – but, to the point of neo’s post, they know they’re ultimately stuck with each other. And that’s that.
I always try to tell them that they should be much more pleased with their guy than they seem to be – he made huge leaps toward institutionalizing corporatist governance, has slanted the Justice Department as far as possible toward discrimination against WASPs and in favor of race-mongers and Islamists, has put every piece necessary for a single-payer health care system into law, has decimated Clinton-era welfare reform, has effectively alienated every ally we’ve ever had and bowed (literally and figuratively) to America-and-Israel hating dictators, and has borrowed and spent enough to make national bankruptcy a dream nearly achieved.
That is impressive. And Obama’s done it all behind a certain veneer that allows around half the country to still approve of the job he’s doing.
I guess the left doesn’t know how to take “yes” for an answer. I ask them what they would have had Obama do, and they just say they’d have him DO all the things he’s merely laid the groundwork for. I tell them that’s a pipe dream, and they just repeat like parrots that “the American people wanted it.”
They believe that. In the sense that, as Rousseau put it, our true wants may not be our expressed wants. The left knows what we “really want,” and Obama didn’t force us to be free as much as they would have liked, so they throw temper tantrums. And that’s all it is. Temper tantrums.
On Lieberman, as a person I know he’d be likeable. But as a politician, he’s not worth much except for being a sparrow hawk in foreign policy.
This is a lover’s spat, and will soon blow over.
Liberals have invested all their personal status in being liberal. They have defined conservatives as low-status. To not be liberal would be to lower themselves. At best they might not campaign as enthusiastically for Obama.
If anything, I’m expecting the liberals to become even more fanatical than last time.
There may be some fallout. Some who would have volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008 may not do so in 2012. Some who voted enthusiastically in 2008 may stay home. I would estimate these to be no more than 5-10% of the Obama voter in 2008, or 2.5-5% of the electorate. I would tend to support the lower end of the estimate.
I agree with what Trimegistus said about liberals viewing conservatives as low-status, which stops them from leaving the liberal fold.
To hell with the left, what will the indies do? My unscientific sample (for local residents in a deep blue state) betrays a few trends among the non-loons:
* He’s a train wreck on the economy; and
* We voted for him once — thus punching our “voted for the black president” ticket — and won’t do so again
Of course, this is all said sotto voce, so as not to be called a raaaaaasist. But I’ve heard very little support. Seems to only surface right after one of those potboiler speeches.
A comment I made a few days ago at It’s About Liberty:
I think the big drag for BHO in 2012 will be the under 30 voters, and the hispanic and perhaps even the black voters. For the younger set the luster is gone. The messiah multiplied the fish and loaves and gave them to Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, AIG, and GE. The young ones face student loans that must be repaid and a job market that is in the toilet. Hispanics who vote democrat have not seen progress on universal amnesty, all they have received is lip service. Blacks are suffering in the recession/depression more than any other group. The pride of a black president for some will have come & gone. These are the ones who will tend to ‘stay home’ come 11/6/12.
Take away from his 2008 tally 20% of the youth vote, 5% of the Hispanic vote, and 5% of the black vote and it gets dicey for his holiness.
“If anything, I’m expecting the liberals to become even more fanatical than last time.”
Yep, foaming at the mouth fanatical. If BHO is defeated the rage will be intense…. think Vancouver after the Stanley Cup.
Just remember, though, one doesn’t need to convince 50% of the electorate.Obama won against McCain by 6% (53% – 47%). Does anyone really believe thst any of the 47% who didn’t vote for Obama in 2008 have changed their mind based upon his performance? IMO, that, and the McCain states (electoral college votes) are the baseline for the next election under current conditions. I suspect Florida, North Carolina and Ohio are already red states and will stay that way barring somekind of miracle. PA is leaning red.
That said, it’s also important to never underestimate the Obama team, but his options do seem to be narrowing.
Would it help to remind them he didn’t close Gitmo? On the Radio the other day I heard some clip of Obama , back around the time of the last election, saying that if the economy wasn’t better (or fixed?) -don’t remember exact words-in three years he was a one term President…that video ought to be played over and over…
Would it help to remind them he didn’t close Gitmo?
Strange thing NEO- originally it didn’t appear my comment at 12:24 AM had posted nor the second attempt at 12:25- now they are both here…
Of course none of these leftists will actually vote *against* BO. But turnout/enthusiasm will be critical in a close election.
Wretchard is being bleakly funny tonight:
“What do you do when government can’t save itself? When there are no taxes left to impose, no subsidies left to get? No more mergers left unmerged? Why, you run for a 5th term. You campaign. You protest. You demand an end to the crisis.
“What this indicates (to me at least) is that people are, like trained monkeys, going to hit the same buttons that once produced a banana over and over again, long after the button has been disconnected or the bananas have run out.
“I’m not sure that, after a lifetime to punching those same buttons and watching bananas deposited on their plate, the politicians are capable of anything else. They’ve been selected for that behavior by the system. That is the total limit of their intelligence. What if, like Brecht’s Atlantean slavers, there is nothing else to their repertoire?”
The perfect metaphor.
As far as Obummer is concerned, they’ll vote for him again, because no matter how much they are P O’ed at him, they hate our guts that much more.
The independents are largely ignorant of Kolnai’s summation of all the damage the jackass has done. Because the “Ministry of Truth” has covered for him so completely. For example, a friend of mine who’s in her 40s and a Democrat, but not a raving Stalinist, had no idea that Wiener had done anything more than “send some flirtatious emails” to a few women after he was married. (I send her a link to Bill Maher and Jane Lynch reading one of the communications out loud: that blew the blockage out of her pipes!)
Point being, the MiniTru folks soft-pedal or completely ignore everything damaging to their little god or to their team. And they’ve very effectively ghettoized the rest of us: it’s social ruin to be caught listening to talk radio or looking at Drudge on your lunch break.
Breitbart says we need to cross the “Coulter pain threshold,” get used to being vilified, but keep standing our ground and telling the truth. Really speaking truth to power.
Tesh Says:
“Indeed, it still baffles and scares me a bit that there are those who think Obama isn’t leftist *enough*. And that there seem to be a lot of those people”
He didn’t ‘stop’ Fox news and/or shut down talk radio (he did put a finger in the wind though with that ‘local programming’ bs from his first year), pass hate speech laws to shut us down (since all non lefty thought is reactionary hate talk… of course…), et cetera. He did do some other things that are pretty bad (gunwalker in tandem with raising US guns rights considering how ‘our’ guns are causing problems in Mexico… there was Honduras… and other things)… but he could be worse. Which is what I imagine progressive socialists would consider ‘better’ and ‘more like them’….
Alex Bensky Says:
“and if the Republicans put up a decent candidate it’s going to be a decade or so before the electorate even thinks about trusting the left with power again.”
The left’s new bright idea seems to be raising taxes… not that a 100% tax on income for the rich would even cover our budgets anymore… but thats the drum they seem to beating. Considering how the public seems to be tired of the class warfare stuff; we might be looked at 15 years….
geran Says:
“Oops, please replace “there” with “their”—third glass of wine….”
I do that sober… then again, I had an extended period of poor oxygen saturation in my blood a few years back…
“”Liberals have invested all their personal status in being liberal.””
Trimegistus
I’d rephrase that to “liberals have invested all their personal status into not being conservative”.
SteveH
I agree. It’s a social signifier, and the audience to read the signifier includes themselves.
It’s obvious by the various nasty stereotypes applied to conservatives–bitter clingers being one of the milder ones–and the irrational arguments made against what are, in the real world, facts. Not arguments, facts.
Good article on PJM by a guy named Duboff about why he and his friends hated Reagan. By extension, that would mean conservatives and conservatism.
It’s one thing to express the ways you got it wrong. It would be another to think about what awful things you supported. One of the major issues Duboff mentions is that it was based on arrogance. Not facts.
SURprise.
Does anyone doubt that there will be a reconciliation before the election? The Left has nowhere else to go; and I am sure that Barack Hussein Obama’s political people are quietly telling the Lefty organizations to bide their time. “All will be well once the election is past.”
I read that the bureaucracy; e.g. EPA, is reviewing various draconian regulatory actions. Sure, they are; until mid-November 2012. I hope no one is fooled.
The one hope is that the rank and file among the Left’s foot soldiers are discouraged enough not to make the effort to vote. Of course, that is why they invented vote by mail, vote by ESP, etc.
When McCain was running, a number of conservative bloggers and commenters were so disgusted by the RINO, the idea that reaching across the aisle was nothing but a scheme to give the dems cover and get media adoration, that they said they were going to stay home. Not sure they made up the difference in the popular vote, but it could have swung a couple of electoral college votes. Maybe even….
Well, whatever, I hope they learned their lesson. It cost us all enough that it should have made some impression.
The opposite side of that would be libs and lefties staying home. Is there any indication the dynamics would be different?
They claimed, for example, to have been practically at the point of giving up their citizenship due to Gitmo. Don’t seem to care, any longer. They counted civilian casualties with multipliers. Apparently no civilians are being killed. They counted dead US soldiers loudly. You’d think none have been killed since Jan 20, 2009. They hated the Bush deficits…?
But, since that awful January, none of this seems to interest them. From which it seems pretty certain they were lying about their concerns, hoping to get some of the rest of us on board with their moral urgency. Which, they correctly thought, would actually affect normal people, while being themselves completely morally empty in those areas.
So, imo, what will get them out and not have them staying home is whatever it is they think zero is really going to give them and the foregoing “concerns” are obviously not part of it. From which one wonders what it is they think zero is really going to give them.
I was told by an extreme left, Jewish co-worker that Obama is conservative and that she was really mad with him for appeasing the right. She said she will vote for him because there is no one else, but that he hasn’t done enough… enough of what I didn’t want to know.
He will never loose his base, the best we can hope for is they stay home on election day, at least that’s what I’m encouraging them to do.
NJcon,
I agree that he will keep his base, but we now have their criticisms of him to use in our own campaign ads. If the Republicans can hold together after the primary, we can put up a pretty good team to campaign against Obama: Rubio and Jed Bush to shake up the Hispanic vote, Alan West and Herman Cain to woo the disenchanted blacks, Mitt to appeal to the business types, and anyone at all to convince the unemployed 20 somethings to stay home. Rick Santorum is making some headway with his attacks on energy (he wants to use PA schale). I’m pretty sure Sarah will return to the same theme. There is a lot of potential to make the voters avoid pulling the Obama lever without making them say mea culpa.
Marx is the name. Karl Marx.
No, wait, he’s too middle of the road, too. Doesn’t really, really understand the poor unwashed masses, being of a wealthy, middle-class upbringing.
I vote we make the effort to see if it helps.
I believe it helps to apply some more subtle wit than “Obummer”. They see/hear that and they tune you out.
I like to refer to him in print as “The Big 0”
Hint: That’s not a capital ‘O’. ;-D
But I do concur with you, you can’t worry about how they’ll think. I’ve seen that a lot more people than many realize are at least open to alternative ideas. The left IS self-marginalizing.
Obama picked up the Perot voters as well as the groups that were excited about him. The former thought they were voting for a unifying centrist who would work with both sides of the aisle to solve America’s problems. That was the image projected by the Obama campaign and its handmaiden, the mainstream media. They may not have been infatuated with Obama, but they bought the Obama campaign’s message. The McCain campaign barely had a message, but that is another story.
Today, the Perot voters know they were sold a bill of goods. My brother-in-law, a small business owner, voted Perot and Obama. Now he listens to Glenn Beck, tracks politics, and is madder than hell. He feels betrayed by the media.
Obama has a lot of political problems. The low-turn-out groups that turned out for him in 2008 won’t be there in 2012. The hard-left is bitterly disappointed that Obama has continued so many of Bush’s war policies. Democrats in states like West Virginia and Louisiana will turn on Obama for his energy policies. The Perot voters will desert him because he lied to them.
But all is not lost for Obama’s remaining fans. The GOP has already betrayed the voters who gave them a landslide victory in 2010. The GOP establishment hates the people who gave them that victory, the Tea Party Patriots, and Sarah Palin. In Ohio, the GOP spent millions to elect John Husted instead of the Tea Party preferred candidate. The GOP will do all it can to foist a business-as-usual GOP elitist upon the party and expect to win.
Here’s the reaction that will cause: The people who delivered 2010 will focus on the House and Senate, and work against the GOP establishment in every primary. Their focus will be on destroying the GOP establishment and neutering Obama. It sure won’t be focused on electing another its-my-turn RINO. It won’t even take a third-party challenge. The GOP primary fights precipitated by the selection of yet-another-RINO will give Obama a Pyrrhic victory in 2012.
Yeah, since they were a hell of a lot more sensible than the “Can’t We All Jus’ Get Along?” policies The Big 0 campaigned on.
What I wouldn’t give for a listing of these people. I have some land I want to sell. And a bridge. Yeah… a bridge. Thaaat’s the ticket.
About freakin’ time… 😉
I believe the fight for the soul of the GOP will fall to the Tea Party before long, and THAT will change things. In the meantime, I fully expect a more capable gubernatorial candidate with a track record of going against the flow and managing to accomplish things despite opposition is almost certain to win the nom. At this point, I believe it’s Christie’s to refuse, offhand, but there are others to take it up if he rejects it. And Christie can beat The Big 0.