Considering that he had control of the Senate and House as well as the popular culture, 90% of the media, academia, and Hollywood – blaming his failures on conspiracies is a bit lame. His policies failed because he tried to take a center-right nation way over to the Left. In a way I hope that Obama does not learn the lessons from 2010 so there can be no excuse for people not knowing how left-wing he is in 2012. However we need to run a candidate with an impressive resume in both government and private industry that has appeal to Independents and disaffected ethnic and “Blue Dog” Democrats, someone who can point to a solid record of job creation and cannot be labled as a flake. What happened on November 2, 2010 was that our side won a Battle of Cannae – yet Obama is still a formidable foe with lots of legions to call upon to replace those that were destroyed. We should have won two or three more Senate seats and at least 75 – 80 House seats. Obama has substantial reserves (like Republican Rome had after Hannibal’s victory at Cannae on August 2, 216 B.C.) that he can call upon – unions, Democratic political machines, the media, etc. Anyone who thinks he will be an easy opponent to defeat two years from now with a “You betcha” candidate is smoking some heavy weed. Any slight economic improvement no matter how small is going to trumpeted (falsely) as a major economic turning point. We have a lot of work ahead of us before we can be assured that the moving vans will be pulling up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in January 2013. Hannibal Barca won a smashing victory at Cannae but was not able to finish Rome off. We need to finish Obama off for good!!!
by Michael Gerson
Following two years of poor economic performance and electoral repudiation, liberalism is casting around for narratives to explain its failure – narratives that don’t involve the admission of inadequacies in liberalism itself.
For some, the solution is to lay the blame on President Obama. He hasn’t been liberal enough. He can’t communicate. “I cannot recall a president,” Robert Kuttner says in the Huffington Post, “who generated so much excitement as a candidate but who turned out to be such a political dud as a chief executive.” Obama is “fast becoming more albatross than ally.”
This is an ideological movement at its most cynical, attempting to throw overboard its once-revered leader to avoid the taint of his problems.
But there is an alternative narrative, developed by those who can’t shake their reverence for Obama. If a president of this quality and insight has failed, it must be because his opponents are uniquely evil, coordinated and effective. The problem is not Obama but the ruthless conspiracy against him.
So Matt Yglesias warns the White House to be prepared for “deliberate economic sabotage” from the GOP – as though Chamber of Commerce SWAT teams, no doubt funded by foreigners, are preparing attacks on the electrical grid. Paul Krugman contends that “Republicans want the economy to stay weak as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House.” Steve Benen explains, “We’re talking about a major political party . . . possibly undermining the strength of the country – on purpose, in public, without apology or shame – for no other reason than to give themselves a campaign advantage in 2012.” Benen’s posting was titled “None Dare Call it Sabotage.”
So what is the proof of this charge? It seems to have something to do with Republicans criticizing quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve. And opposing federal spending. And, according to Benen, creating “massive economic uncertainty by vowing to gut the national health care system.”
One is tempted to respond that it is $1 trillion in new debt, the prospect of higher taxes and a complicated, disruptive health-reform law that have created “massive economic uncertainty.” For the purposes of this argument, however, it is sufficient to say that all these economic policy debates have two sides.
Yet this is precisely what the sabotage theorists must deny. They must assert that the case for liberal policies is so self-evident that all opposition is malevolent. But given the recent record of liberal economics, policies that seem self-evident to them now seem questionable to many. Objective conditions call for alternatives. And Republicans are advocating the conservative alternatives – monetary restraint, lower spending, lower taxes – they have embraced for 30 years.
It is difficult to overstate how offensive elected Republicans find the sabotage accusation, which Obama himself has come very close to making. During the run-up to the midterm election, the president said at a town hall meeting in Racine, Wis.: “Before I was even inaugurated, there were leaders on the other side of the aisle who got together and they made the calculation that if Obama fails, then we win.” Some Republican leaders naturally took this as an attack on their motives. Was the president really contending that Republican representatives want their constituents to be unemployed in order to gain a political benefit for themselves? No charge from the campaign more effectively undermined the possibility of future cooperation.
[….]
Read the rest: Liberals resort to conspiracy theories to explain Obama’s problems
