I cannot be happy until the moving vans arrive at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the Obama’s. Yet compare the gloom and doom that was conservatism last year at this time with now. The magic has worn off, the emperor has no clothes, and we did pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Obama could save himself and his legacy with a tactical and cynical shift to the center but the problem for him is that he is a hard core ideologue with a malignant narcissistic personality. When tawdry white liberals like Andrea Mitchell start trudging out the racist card -you know they are getting their butts handed to them. It also is obvious to me that Obama and his Gambino like Family crew are not very comfortable with average Americans and hold them in a mixture of fear, curiosity and contempt.
Isn’t it great to have a Republican senator from Massachusetts? It’s also good to have the First Amendment reaffirmed by the United States Supreme Court — even if our liberal friends are shocked and appalled at the notion of corporations sticking up for themselves.
As delicious as last week’s good news was for conservatives, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. We do not mean that every week will bring new conservative successes. Not at all. It is just that every month will bring fresh anguish for President Obama and his supporters.
There’s the sinking spell in the equity markets last week. It might be from worrying about the president’s anti-banker populism. Or more likely, it is telling us that we are not out of the woods yet on the economy. I suspect disappointing news on fourth-quarter GDP on January 29.
Indeed, it’s pretty clear after 2009, the year the locusts ate, that President Obama and his liberal supporters are facing an annus horribilis. And they know it. Here’s Jon Jeter of The Root telling his readers to be afraid, very afraid. He sees “a perfect, gathering storm of economics, politics and tribalism[.]”
Trilbalism? I’m afraid so. Racism is rearing its ugly head again. Jeter quotes Andrea Mitchell, who sees anger out there — the worst since the days of George Wallace. And guess who will be taking the part of George Wallace this time around: Sarah Palin.
Palin is the latest in a long line of demagogues -from post-Reconstruction governors in the Deep South to Father Coughlin in the ’30s, from Reagan to Lou Dobbs-who’ve emerged to redeem, or reclaim, the land from Northern carpetbaggers and uppity Negroes.
It still takes me by surprise when the liberals reaches for the racist redneck line. Yet it makes complete sense. If you are writing the narrative of a progressive vanguard leading the world into a highly evolved future, then your story needs an antagonist. The redneck, racist truck-driver with a rifle in the back window fits the part to a T.
Presumably President Obama is trying to preempt the right-wing racists by getting the first dagger into the backs of the bankers. After all, it was the bankers who sent the Okies to California.
Here’s my prediction. The president’s banker gambit will fall as flat as his stimulus plan, his cap-and-trade bill, and his ObamaCare fiasco. But that will be the least of his problems. There will be continuing high unemployment right through 2010, which I predicted a couple of weeks ago. There’s the housing market that still hasn’t turned. There’s the huge monetary stimulus that must be unwound. There’s the budget crisis in the states. There is the tax increase coming in 2011 when the Bush tax cuts expire. Oh, and did I mention the budget deficit and runaway federal spending, or everyone’s favorite, Fannie and Freddie?
It is becoming more and more clear that neither Obama nor Axelrod nor Emanuel really understands ordinary, suburban, private-sector, Joe the Plumber America. Urban America they know. But not suburban Massachusetts.
