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July 28, 2010

Victor Davis Hanson on Obama's real problem

Victor Davis Hanson discusses why the president's poll numbers have declined:

[...] According to a popular myth, President Obama's declining poll numbers are a consequence of his failure to be liberal enough. On race, in the wake of the Shirley Sherrod mess, we are told he needs to appoint more African Americans and bring in more advisers from the black community. On the economy, liberal economists decry his unwillingness to borrow and stimulate more.

This is lunatic in political terms.

Obama's poll numbers are falling for three reasons clear to any amateur student of politics.

First, the voters in 2008 did not vote for liberal change, but for change from the costly and lengthy Bush wars, deficits, spending policies, and immigration proposals. Obama voters were also motivated by a desire to elect our first African-American president, fear over the September 2008 financial meltdown, a lackluster McCain campaign, and the strange perception that Obama was a centrist.

Since his election, Obama has outdone the average Bush deficits by a factor of four or five. His brief "stimulus" became the prelude to a gorge-the-beast reordering of American society. Meanwhile, after demagoguing as a candidate everything from Guantanamo to Iraq, Obama in office has kept in place almost every major security protocol that Bush had established. He has broken his promises to close Guantanamo, try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York, and pull out of Iraq. This has meant alienating his shrinking base while being exposed as a hypocrite to suddenly wiser and less forgiving independents.

Second, after ramming through his health-care bill without either bipartisan support or public approval, Obama is polling badly on just about every hot-button issue. The electorate simply does not want cap-and-trade, amnesty, more deficits, and higher taxes. Rather, it prefers to produce more oil and gas, and more hydroelectric and nuclear power; it wants to follow the Arizona immigration model; it wants to cut spending; and it wants to balance the budget.

The Left may be disheartened that Obama has not borrowed more for green-energy subsidies, has not yet rammed through an amnesty for illegal immigrants, and has not spent more money trying to stimulate the economy. But these are not the reasons that Obama is sinking in the polls. Indeed, a good way for Democrats to lose both the House and the Senate would be to use the health-care model to push through amnesty and cap-and-trade legislation before November.

Third, the problem is not that Obama is insufficiently attuned to race, but that he is perceived (fairly or unfairly) to be obsessed with it. Since 2008, both Barack and Michelle Obama have committed a series of gaffes that appeared to reflect an attachment to identity politics. Taken together, these divisive musings have fostered the impression that the first couple is excessively concerned with racial issues.

In terms of Obama's appointees, no one forced Van Jones to brag of his earlier Communist sympathies; to get involved, even tangentially, with the 9/11 "truthers"; or to say that white teens are more likely than black teens to be mass murderers, and white adults more likely to be polluters. The Left may see Jones as a sacrificial lamb, perhaps deserving of an Ivy League sinecure; but the public was glad to see him go, and even more relieved to see him stay away. Beyond Jones, the comments made by Anita Dunn, NASA chief Charles Bolden, "documented or not" Hilda Solis, and Donald Berwick certainly have not made the case that Obama needs to bring in more hard-core liberal ideologues.

In other words, Obama's problem is his radical, far-left, IDEOLOGY. As Hanson goes on to point out, Obama has planted throughout his administration a number of far-left time bombs, and on any given day, any one of them could go off. And "a dozen or more may very well implode before the November elections."

As Hanson suggests in his piece, Obama can either choose to be a successful triangulating president like Clinton (highly unlikely), or he can insist on being a failed ideological president like Carter (more likely). As the November election draws closer - now just 14 weeks away, these two bad and worse choices will indeed "become even clearer to the president and his liberal supporters," but given that we've seen nothing but an ideology-based presidency up to now, who really doubts that we'll continue to see more of the same and that Obama's ideology "problem" is unlikely to change between now and 2012. Leopards don't change their spots, and far-left ideologues don't suddenly become centrist-like triangulators.

Related: Dan Riehl talks about Obama's "G" problem - too much glitz and not enough gravitas.

Posted by Richard at July 28, 2010 1:36 PM

• Victor Davis Hanson on Obama's real problem - Jul 28, 2010