Ever since 1992, the year Dan Quayle attacked Murphy Brown and Pat Buchanan gave the disastrous Culture War speech at the Republican National Convention, the suburbs have been leaning Democratic. They were turned off with the attack on popular culture and the whole values agenda. Their main concern is economic and up until 1992, they were part of the political coalition that elected Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan. Bill Clinton’s Presidency, which he governed fiscally and economically conservative after 1994, gave the Democrats credibility in the Suburbs. This new Democratic coalition helped Al Gore win the popular vote, nearly elected John Kerry and fueled Obama’s victory in 2008. But there is a new shift.
Barack Obama’s radical Progressive economic/fiscal policies have pissed away the credibility Bill Clinton won for the Democrats in the suburbs. The rise of Tea Party Republicanism, which is a return to economic/fiscal Conservatism, has attracted suburban voters. In 2010 the GOP made gains in the Suburbs and have undone the damage that Quayle and Buchanan did in 1992. Seeing this trend, Obama is now set to support anti-Suburban policies led by Building One America. The group seeks to do away with suburbs and even supports creating regional taxing authorities to redistribute the wealth from suburbs to cities.
President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.
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The Obama administration, stocked with “regionalist” appointees, has been advancing this ambitious plan quietly for the past four years. Efforts to discourage driving and to press development into densely packed cities are justified by reference to fears of global warming. Leaders of the crusade against “sprawl” very consciously use environmental concerns as a cover for their redistributive schemes.
The centerpiece of the Obama administration’s anti-suburban plans is a little-known and seemingly modest program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative. The “regional planning grants” funded under this initiative — many of them in battleground states like Florida, Virginia, and Ohio — are set to recommend redistributive policies, as well as transportation and development plans, designed to undercut America’s suburbs. Few have noticed this because the program’s goals are muffled in the impenetrable jargon of “sustainability,” while its recommendations are to be unveiled only in a possible second Obama term.
Obama sees that if the suburbs continue their drift away from the Democrats the Republicans will dominate Presidential politics like they did 1952-1992. If he survives in November he will do it through EO and regulations push to end suburbs and fold them into cities. The god-king, like the Pharaohs of old, feels it is his right to change society. He didn’t lie when he said he would transform America.
