The deal Obama thought he had, was that “the group” was going to make sure he never got any critical scrutiny, that everything he did succeeded, and that a Democratic majority was a done deal through at least 2020 or so. Two terms seemed a certainty when the Democrats got the Presidency and had clear control of both chambers of Congress. They were talking about Democratic control for a generation or more. The Republicans were lost in the wilderness.
This control and comfortable status was supposed to be handed to him. He wanted a sinecure, not a Presidency. His role in the whole was to stand there and smile, look and sound Presidential from time to time–with his actual words fed to him by professionals–and all he otherwise had to do was mostly nothing. Golf, trips, meeting foreign heads of state, nice meals, and of course guaranteed speaking gigs, and lucrative book deals once he got out. “Just show up”, he was told, “and we will take care of the rest. You have a great smile. Use it a lot, and don’t go off-script unless it can’t be avoided. And then say as little as possible. You got an E ticket to a great ride. We’re going to remake the future, and you will be an integral part of it.”
What is happening now, though? The Democrats are literally fighting a street battle for their political survival. Not only are they now not advancing their agenda, they are getting ROLLED BACK from where they started in 2008. Nobody was questioning public sector unions back in 2008. Most of us would have found it hard to conceive that people making a third more than the rest of us, with cushy retirement plans–all funded with taxpayer money, or money borrowed from our children–would NEED a union. Andy Stern and the rest of the cronies in the White House have made sure that we get it now. Ordinary Americans get it. We are being screwed over by a power elite that uses taxpayer money to fund their own campaigns, in a feast of corruption that would not have been out of place in Tammany Hall.
These street battles are defensive, not offensive. They are desperate, and likely to turn both Wisconsin and national voters strongly and lastingly against the people waging them. Look at these cowardly Democratic congressmen from Wisconsin. Be men, I think most Americans want to say. Take your lumps, then try to make good in the next election. Don’t run.
What they are doing is simply betraying the spirit of America, which rests on the self restraint of knowing that as the will of the people changes, they must be respected, and that regardless of personal feelings. Do you think George Bush wanted to hand the Office of the President over to Barack Obama? Of course not. But he did, because THAT IS THE WAY IT WORKS.
For his part, Obama is utterly in over his head. What is needed now, to protect the leftist agenda he thought was going to be furthered mainly FOR him, not BY him, is skill and leadership. He possesses neither. He was not selected for talent. He was selected because he was photogenic, polled well, and his mixed race enabled his propagandists to tap into the white guilt that has been inculcated carefully in our schoolchildren for at least 20 years.
As I see it, the leftist agenda is increasingly a rudderless ship lost on a stormy ocean. Within their ranks, plainly they have skill, but the skill is in the shadows. Their figurehead–their public face–is not equal to the task of getting them out of the shoals they have been driven in to.
Self evidently, this is far from the death knell of leftism, though. No competent stragegist confuses momentary advantages with victory. You know in what victory will consist? It will not be a political event. It will not be driving our opponents into the sea. As long as this creed, this cult, serves a needed purpose, it will rise again and again.
Leftism will end when as a group they are able find an actually optimistic understanding of human life and their place in it. In its current form, their outward utopianism is a mask for their collective failure to find better reasons to live. Behind it, one readily perceives actual despair, and a driving need to relinquish the hope of personal responsibility, the possibility of individual moral growth, and ultimately autonomy outright.
In my considered view a serious, mainstream investigation into the nature of death and life will be of great virtue in that pursuit. If we live forever, if our sins and selfless acts follow us, then that changes things, doesn’t it? To accept this creed it is not necessary to accept ANY historical religion. This is science, not theology. It falsifies as a credible creed the absurdism and pessimism of modern thinkers like Samual Beckett, Foucault and Sartre. The most important part of the doctrine of atheism recedes into irrelevance.
Speaking gibberish is only necessary when you are unable to face truths you cannot accept. For this reason, finding a more palatable truth ought to work simultaneously to reenergize the effective and sincere use of reason.
Our problems can be solved. I cannot say this too often. I myself propose solutions constantly, and nothing delights me more than to see my ideas improved upon, or even discarded outright in favor of things I haven’t even thought of. That’s the beauty of the self organizing system that is a free people.