Krauthammer's Take On One Year Out: President Obama's Fall :: Political News and commentaries

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January 15, 2010

Krauthammer's Take On One Year Out: President Obama's Fall

As Charles Krauthammer notes at the Washington Post, it was just a year ago that Barack Obama was king of the world, but now, according to CBS, his approval rating has dropped to 46 percent -- and his disapproval rating is the highest ever recorded by Gallup at the beginning of an (elected) president's second year. So what happened?

In what should be your must-read for today, Krauthammer writes that while liberals try to attribute Obama's political decline to matters of style, they're missing the big picture - it has to do with much more than that - it has to do with substance. The fact is, Barack Obama is far too left and he vastly over-read his mandate:

[...] Liberals try to attribute Obama's political decline to matters of style. He's too cool, detached, uninvolved. He's not tough, angry or aggressive enough with opponents. He's contracted out too much of his agenda to Congress.

These stylistic and tactical complaints may be true, but they miss the major point: The reason for today's vast discontent, presaged by spontaneous national Tea Party opposition, is not that Obama is too cool or compliant but that he's too left.

It's not about style; it's about substance. About which Obama has been admirably candid. This out-of-nowhere, least-known of presidents dropped the veil most dramatically in the single most important political event of 2009, his Feb. 24 first address to Congress. With remarkable political honesty and courage, Obama unveiled the most radical (in American terms) ideological agenda since the New Deal: the fundamental restructuring of three pillars of American society -- health care, education and energy.

Then began the descent -- when, more amazingly still, Obama devoted himself to turning these statist visions into legislative reality. First energy, with cap-and-trade, an unprecedented federal intrusion into American industry and commerce. It got through the House, with its Democratic majority and Supreme Soviet-style rules. But it will never get out of the Senate.

Then, the keystone: a health-care revolution in which the federal government will regulate in crushing detail one-sixth of the U.S. economy.

By essentially abolishing medical underwriting (actuarially based risk assessment) and replacing it with government fiat, Obamacare turns the health insurance companies into utilities, their every significant move dictated by government regulators. The public option was a sideshow. As many on the right have long been arguing, and as the more astute on the left (such as The New Yorker's James Surowiecki) understand, Obamacare is government health care by proxy, single-payer through a facade of nominally "private" insurers.

Take the time to read it all ...

As though we needed further evidence after the stinging election losses in Virginia and New Jersey, and yes, even Copenhagen, where Obama failed to win the 2016 Olympics for his hometown of Chicago, that Krauthammer's take is on target and that Obama's far left agenda is being rejected by the American people, we need only to look at what's happening in the Massachusetts race for the U.S. Senate where Republican Scott Brown, from out of nowhere, over 20 points down, and running against Obamacare and the Democrat's big spending agenda, has surged ahead of Democrat Martha Coakley. Little wonder that Obama is staying away from Massachusetts in what is looking more and more like a devastating afront to his agenda. Even if Brown losses, a tight race against a Democrat in Massachusetts, one of the bluest of blue states, amounts to a huge referendum against the Obama agenda that will send shock waves to Democrats throughout the country.

Clearly, America wants nothing to do with the far-left socialist agenda that Barack Obama is trying to force down their throats.

Posted by Richard at January 15, 2010 9:59 AM

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