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Obama Plans to Rule America Outside the White House
Barack Obama has two faces. After Trump’s victory and Hillary’s defeat, the public Obama has been gracious and diplomatic. His lectures to Trump, directly and indirectly, are couched in praise. He echoed the feeling of millions on both sides when he said, “We are now all rooting for his success”.
That’s a lie. Or rather a disguise.
Obama and his aides had, in one insider narrative, decided to don the “mask of decorum”. The contempt for Trump still seeps through the mask. And the mask hides Obama’s next big move.
President Obama is over. He knows that. There are still some things that he can do before he leaves office, but everything except the most destructive, can be undone by his successor. The next phase of his campaign will not be fought from the White House. It will be fought against the White House .
The other Obama is emerging in conference calls with his supporters. “One of the challenges that I’ve discovered being president is I’d like to be organizer-in-chief, but it’s hard,” he said in one call.
Obama can no longer be commander-in-chief. Instead he’s plotting to become organizer-in-chief.
The infrastructure for the organization was put into place long before anyone thought that Hillary might lose. Organizing for Action gave him his own organizing hub. If Hillary had won, it would have been a pressure group. Now that Trump won, it’s an axis to build a personal counterrevolution around.
In his post-election conference call with his OFA troops, Obama told them, “I’m giving you like a week and a half to get over it”. Then it would be time to “move forward not only to protect what we’ve accomplished, but also to see this as an opportunity”. What opportunity could there be in Trump’s win?
Obama is now the only major national figure still standing among the Democrats. After Hillary’s defeat, he’s worked hard to attribute the loss to her shortcomings, not his policies and decisions. That’s not just to soothe his ego. If he’s going to dictate the future of his party, he can’t afford to be blamed for its latest disaster. And Obama is still determined to dictate the future of the party and the country.
In conventional politics, Obama is done. There’s no way back into the White House. And Hillary’s fate won’t leave much enthusiasm for nominating the uncharismatic spouse of a charismatic ex-president.
But Obama is not a conventional politician. He’s an organizer and a campaigner at the vanguard of a radical movement that seeks to control traditional institutions, but doesn’t feel bound by them. Unlike Bill Clinton, his plans don’t begin and end with the White House. As an organizer, Obama is equipped to build bases of power outside traditional institutions. And that is exactly what he is doing.
The demoralization of the Democrats is, as Obama put it, an opportunity. Social chaos is a time for the left to overthrow and undermine traditional institutions. Fear, anger and despair are radicalizing. The left has always operated by throwing bombs and then profiting from the fallout. That’s Obama’s agenda. Having wrecked the country and the Democrats, he sees that not as a setback, but as an opportunity.
“The network that you represent, you’re perfectly poised to do that,” Obama told his OFAers. “In other words, now is the time for some organizing.”
While the leftist rioters in the streets are garnering the most attention, the real threat comes from the network of staffers dubbed Obama Anonymous which are beginning to organize and coordinate. OFA is Obama’s equivalent of the Clinton Foundation. The Clintons built Clintonworld around staffers, but its goal was harvesting money. Obama Inc. is being built around organizing and activism. Like Clintonworld, it will be a network encompassing a variety of political and non-profit institutions. Unlike them, it will be much less focused on directing money to its bosses in preparation for an election. Instead it will function like a traditional leftist movement, merging influence operations with crowdsourced mobilization.
OFA will be far more dangerous in the wild than the Clinton Foundation ever was. The Clintons hoped to ride back to power on a giant wave of money. Obama is taking a much more radical course.
The staffers exiting government are being wired into Obama Inc. whether or not they take jobs directly working for him. The OFA alumni are building networks across organizations while taking their marching orders from him. They expect Obama to lead them back from the wilderness and into the halls of power.
He’s told them so.
“I’m going to be constrained in what I do with all of you until I am again a private citizen. But that’s not so far off,” he assured them. “I’m still fired up and I’m still ready to go.” His next comments promised that radical political change could and would take place.
Obama isn’t going to retire. He’s not going to spend years puttering around with a presidential library. He’s not even going to set up a Clintonesque slush fund and try to make his wife president. Instead he wants to force radical change from outside the White House by using the network he’s built.
While the public Obama wraps up business at the White House, concludes yet another world tour, alternating between praising Trump and offering him condescending advice, the other Obama is preparing to deploy a network that will dominate the Dems and set the agenda on the left.
If Obama succeeds, then he will get another shot at picking his White House successor. But beyond that, he’s been handed the keys to an organizing machine that will allow him to set even more of the agenda for his party than ever before. And he has a cause that is sending the party reeling back into his arms.
Obama believes that he can rule America from outside the White House. And he might be right.
Political norms and old rules have been falling faster than leaves in an autumn wind. If Obama sets out to move the center of power outside the White House and into an organization that will control national politics through the left, it would be dangerous to assume that he can’t and won’t succeed.
The Democrats didn’t respond to their defeat, one of a sequence, by trying to move to the center. Instead there is every sign that they are moving further to the left. Keith Ellison, a radical leftist with an anti-Semitic past, is tipped to head the DNC. Schumer still has the Senate, but Elizabeth Warren may have it before too long. Combine that with Obama as the president-in-exile and the Dems will be more radical and extremist than they were even when Obama was sitting in the White House.
The Democrats are ceasing to be a national party. Instead they are becoming a nationalizing party. They are losing their presence in much of the country, from state legislature to state legislature, and becoming the party of major cities and the national government. Their agenda is to move power from local areas to central ones, from the villages and the suburbs to the cities, from states to D.C. and from locally elected legislators in D.C. to the satellite bureaucracies of the Federal government.
Obama sees Hillary’s defeat as an opportunity to burn the Dem’s last bridges with the larger country and its “bitter clingers”, to double down on nationalizing power and to define the political narrative around the agendas of urban elites. The left crippled the Democrats. Now it wants to utterly consume them.
Barack Obama is still being vague and coy about his plans. He informs reporters that he will attack Trump when it comes to “core questions about our values and ideals”. But the “faithful” are getting much clearer signals. “You’re going to see me early next year, and we’re going to be in a position where we can start cooking up all kinds of great stuff to do.”
The election was a catastrophic disaster for the Democrats, but it opened all sorts of doors for Obama.
Hillary’s defeat removes the Clintons, his only real internal rivals, off the stage. Trump’s triumph in working class areas cuts more ties with the traditional Dem base and transforms it into a party of left-wing urban elites and their radical agendas. And the popular figures on the left, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Keith Ellison, lack his national stature, speaking skills and organization.
Obama will move to consolidate the left. And then the Democrats. He will function as a president-in-exile heading up the opposition to Trump. When it comes to verbally challenging Trump, Obama will be more likely to be interviewed and heard than Ellison or Schumer. And his people will coordinate responses across the left from street level organizing to think tanks and policy moves.
Some of it is ego.
Obama believes that he can find the key to beating Trump in the traditional tactics of the left. But most is ideology and power. Obama is not done transforming America. And America isn’t done with him yet.
Courtesy of Daniel Greenfield
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Obama vs. the Brass: Benghazi Cover-up, Agenda to Gut Military?
Written by William F. Jasper
An awful lot of America’s top military brass have been taking hits lately. Is it just a coincidence that several four-star generals and a two-star admiral get the axe or resign in disgrace within the space of less than a month? Do any of these have anything to do with the administration’s Benghazigate scandal? Or are they, as some military observers suspect, only the first installment of the Obama agenda to decimate the military services?
General David Petraeus, of course, has been at the center of a media storm since his resignation as CIA director on November 9, amid revelations of an extramarital affair with Paula Broadwell, his biographer.
Here is a timeline of recent casualties in the highest echelons of the U.S. military services:
- • General Carter Ham — On October 18, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that Gen. Ham was being replaced as the commander of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). Panetta gave no explanation for Gen. Ham’s removal.
- • Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette — On October 28, the commander of the John C. Stennis carrier strike group in the Middle East, was abruptly removed from command and returned to the U.S.
- • General David Petraeus — On November 9, General Petraeus, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, resigned as head of the Central Intelligence Agency.
- • General John Allen — On November 13, news stories reported that Gen. Allen, who was Gen. Petraeus’s successor in Afghanistan and a top nominee for NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, was embroiled in a potential scandal involving emails with Jill Kelley, a socialite at McDill Air Force base. Allen has insisted that there was no improper relationship between himself and Mrs. Kelley, but his career path to the top NATO post has been scotched, and the ongoing investigation could potentially lead to his resignation.
- • General William “Kip” Ward — On November 13, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta demoted Gen. Ward, the former head of U.S. AFRICOM, stripping him of his fourth star, following a lengthy DOD Inspector General probe that found Ward guilty of lavish spending and extravagant travel.
The removal of General Ham and the resignation of General Petraeus have particularly stirred widespread concern that both cases may be driven by White House efforts to smother exposure of the administration’s handling of the deadly September 11, 2012 “consulate” debacle in Benghazi, Libya, in which U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed (see here and here).
The timing of the resignations, removals, revelations and demotions were bound to spark suspicions of a Benghazi connection, particularly in the case of Gen. Petraeus, who was scheduled to testify this week in congressional inquiries into the deadly Libyan attacks. His resignation put his appearance before the committees in doubt. However, members of Congress have let it be known they expect him to testify.
In a November 12 interview with NBC News, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the Obama administration is behaving in an “unacceptable” manner and she is ready to subpoena information it is denying her committee.
“I believe that Director Petraeus made a trip to [Libya] shortly before this became public,” Feinstein said. “I believe that there is a trip report. We have asked to see the trip report. One person tells me has read it. And then we try to get it, and they tell me it hasn’t been done. That’s unacceptable. We are entitled to this trip report, and if we have to go to the floor of the Senate on a subpoena, we will do just that.”
Director Petraeus went to Capitol Hill on September 14 for a closed-door, classified briefing of legislators. During that briefing, it has been reported, he upheld the now-debunked false story that the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi had resulted in response to popular outrage over an anti-muslim Internet video.
However, it has also been reported that Petraeus privately stated to one member of Congress, “Do you want the official line or do you want the real truth?”
Today Senator Feinstein announced that Petraeus will be “talking to the committee,” but was unclear as to whether that meant he would be testifying publicly and under oath or just briefing committee members in closed session. “He is very willing and interested in talking to the committee,” Feinstein told reporters today. “It’s just on Benghazi. Our hearings are on Benghazi and the intelligence that preceded Benghazi and the intelligence that determined the security.”
Another big question that has not yet been answered is whether Gen. Carter Ham will be testifying. In defending the administration’s decision not to send aid to the besieged “consulate,” Secretary Panetta claimed that Ham had “very strongly” backed Panetta’s assessment that since the situation on the ground in Benghazi was so uncertain, no attempt should be made to send military assistance to the American personnel who were under attack. However, according to unconfirmed reports, Ham, instead of backing the Obama/Panetta order to “stand down” and let Americans die, had decided to go ahead and launch a rescue effort. Reportedly, he was immediately arrested by his second in command and prevented from initiating the rescue.
If this account is true, then obviously that would be a huge story, with enormous ramifications. Gen. Ham should definitely be called to testify publicly and placed under oath to determine precisely what did transpire the night of September 11-12.
Spiking Benghazi: The Media Fix
There is little doubt that Team Obama was fully aware that the Benghazi disaster could blow up in their faces just as the neck-and-neck presidential was headed into the closing stretch. A CBS News national telephone poll of likely voters conducted October 25-28 did not portend well for Obama. Locked in a dead heat with Mitt Romney, and with the economy in shambles and sliding toward a fiscal cliff, the Obama White House could ill afford a late-inning foreign policy disaster, especially when Obama propagandists were touting foreign policy and national security as their candidate’s great strength.
According to the CBS poll, only 38 percent of voters approved of President Obama’s handling of the September 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi. Over half of all voters (51 percent) disapproved. And an even higher 57 percent of the crucial independent voters disapproved of his handling of Benghazi. And those negatives had developed with all of the major media faithfully retailing the White House talking points on Benghazi and steadfastly censoring any reports that challenged the crumbling administration narrative. Genuine journalistic digging and real news reporting would have been a game changer in the tight presidential race.
The Media Research Center (MRC) reported on November 1:
- For the sixth night in a row, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News refused to give one single second of coverage to a Fox News report that the Obama Administration denied help to those attacked and killed by terrorists at the US consulate in Benghazi on September 11. According to a Media Research Center analysis, ABC, CBS, and NBC have failed to cover this devastating story — not to confirm it, not to knock it down, and never mind do their own investigation. The story broke last Friday, long before Hurricane Sandy swamped the news cycle.
- Further, neither The Washington Post nor The New York Times has committed a single inch of their newspapers to a news story about this report.
- According to Fox News, “sources claim officers at the nearby CIA annex in Benghazi were twice told to stand down when they requested to help those at the consulate. They later ignored those orders. Fox News was also told that a subsequent request for back-up when the annex came under attack was denied as well.”
“The liberal ‘news’ media’s refusal to cover this story exposes how corrupt they have become,” declared Media Research Center President Brent Bozell. “Four Americans died in Libya in a coordinated terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11. The Obama Administration has been caught in a maze of falsehoods. This reeks of a cover-up. This scandal could and would derail the Obama re-election efforts. ABC, CBS, NBC, The Washington Post, and the New York Times are so vested in the re-election of Barack Obama that they are deliberately spiking this huge story. It’s sickening.”
Mr. Bozell continued:
- The Obama administration’s cover-up of their deceitful response to the Benghazi terrorist attack is without a doubt the biggest political news story of 2012. The American people have a right to know what really happened before they cast their ballots on Election Day.
- If ABC, CBS, NBC, The Washington Post, and the New York Times refuse to ask the tough questions, then they no longer serve any purpose. And if they’re sitting on evidence to help Obama win re-election, they’re as guilty in this cover-up as is the administration.
As the Media Research Center pointed out in a previous analysis, while the major media were spiking the Benghazi story, they were lavishing friendly coverage on President Obama and swamping viewers with celebrity gossip and buzz on the latest consumer gizmos and Hollywood releases.
And, of course, one of the most blatant examples of the media covering for Obama was the spectacle put on by CNN’s Candy Crowley in the second Presidential debate, where she shamelessly dropped her supposedly neutral role as moderator to take over and respond to Mitt Romney’s challenges to Obama regarding Benghazi.
Decimating the Military: Obama’s “Night of the Long Knives”?
While the cashiering of CIA Director General Petraeus and AFRICOM commander General Ham certainly suggest a connection to the administration’s ongoing heavy-handed effort to keep the Benghazi disaster from developing into a post-election crisis for the White House, the other aforementioned military resignations and demotions may be signaling something even bigger.
A number of political and military analysts interviewed by The New American believe the Obama administration is in the process of “purging” the U.S. Armed Services, and that we will see a much larger number of line officers removed for various scandals, especially those deemed “politically incorrect,” or those who may be occupying a post that the Obama administration wants to open up for a more “progressive” candidate.
Some are predicting that the bloodletting in the ranks thus far is but the opening salvo in Obama’s “Night of the Long Knives,” a reference to Adolph Hitler’s murderous purge of Ernst Rohm and other Nazis, as well as non-Nazi political opponents whom he saw as obstacles to his consolidation of dictatorial power.
New Zealand researcher Trevor Loudon, author of Barack Obama and the Enemies Within, and editor of the highly acclaimed New Zeal blog at TrevorLoudon.com, told this writer during an interview two weeks before the election:
-
It’s very clear that President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and many of those around them absolutely “loathe the military,” as Hillary once put it. [Defense Secretary] Panetta, while he was a congressman, was very heavily involved with the Institute for Policy Studies, a very radical Marxist think tank, which supported the Soviet objective of subverting and eviscerating the U.S. military services. Panetta, together with David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, and others in the administration, really do see the U.S. military, as it currently is, as the enemy.
Former Navy SEAL Steve Elson echoes that assessment. “President Obama and the people running his administration really do hate the military,” Elson told The New American. “It’s not just that they ‘don’t understand the military culture,’ [as some critics claim]; they really just don’t like us. In fact they hate us.” Elson continued:
They’re fine with using us, sending us all over the world whenever it works to score political points for them. They don’t mind getting us killed, sending us out with treasonous ROEs [rules of engagement], as in Iraq and Afghanistan, where soldiers and marines were ordered stand guard, go into hostile zones without loaded weapons. Or, as in Benghazi, they cowardly sit in the Pentagon and the White House watching and doing nothing while brave men die.
- Too many of the top brass are playing the political correctness game when they should be refusing to carry out these immoral and traitorous orders. In the end, it didn’t help Petraeus either. He played their games and went along with their political correctness, and look where it got him. Fine, he deserved it, as far as I’m concerned. But the guys that are out there with their lives on the line don’t [deserve it]. As you can see, I’m anything but politically correct, but I’m only saying out loud what most active duty soldiers will tell you privately. Obama and those running his administration will destroy the U.S. military, if the American people let him, if they don’t wake up to what he is doing.
Related articles:
Petraeus Resignation Suggests Possible White House Cover-Up
The Other Petraeus Scandal: Accelerated Militarization of the CIA
Benghazi Backfire: Was Obama Arming Jihadists?
Did Obama Watch in “Real Time” as Benghazi Attack Unfolded?
The Trouble With Leon Panetta
Leon Panetta and the Institute for Policy Studies
Book Review: Barack Obama and the Enemies Within
Related articles
- Feinstein: Petraeus to testify on Benghazi attacks (newsobserver.com)
- Feinstein: Petraeus to testify on Benghazi attacks (kansascity.com)
Law of the Sea Treaty = The Rape of America … J. D. Longstreet
The Obama Administration has dragged the Law of the Sea Treaty back before the US Senate this week.
The treaty, if approved by the Senate will amount to the rape of America.
Here’s what the Center for Security Policy has to say about the Law Of The Sea Treaty: “If, on the other hand, the members of the U.S. Senate trouble themselves to study, or at least read, the text of the Law of the Sea Treaty, they would immediately see it for what it really is: a diplomatic dinosaur, a throwback to a bygone era when UN negotiations were dominated by communists of the Soviet Union and their fellow-travelers in the Third World.
These adversaries’ agenda was transparent and wholly inimical to American equities. They sought to: establish control over 70% of the world’s surface; create an international governing institution that would serve as a model for bringing nation states like ours to heel; and redistribute the planet’s wealth and technology from the developed world to themselves. LOST codifies such arrangements – and would subject us to mandatory dispute resolution to enforce them via stacked-deck adjudication panels.”
SOURCE:
Still, many, if not MOST, Americans have never heard of it — the Law Of The Sea Treaty.
So why is it important?
OK, lets look at some reasons why the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) is important to you as an American and to all inhabitants of the earth:
Why We Lose if LOST Wins
By asserting UN authority over seven-tenths of the Earth’s surface, LOST would be the largest territorial conquest in history.
In principle, the treaty would assert UN jurisdiction over U.S. territorial waters, and eventually over waterways within our country.
It would create a huge bureaucratic entity called the “Enterprise” which would regulate and tax all commercial uses of the high seas.
By taxing all efforts to develop the wealth of the seabed, the UN would be given a huge revenue stream, independent of national governments, to push its agenda for international socialism.
The treaty would require the redistribution of cutting-edge technology from the U.S. to all governments in the “developing world,” including extremely repressive governments.
Get the picture??? It’s that cussed “One World Government thing again! (Otherwise known as “Global Governance) You know… the “GLOBALISTS” at work.
Apparatchiks from the Obama Administration will trudge over to the US Senate this week to sing the praises of LOST. They will applaud it and explain to the Senators that it is the best thing since the US Constitution for America, indeed, for the whole world.
It will be a pack of lies.
So, where do we stand today on LOST? Not good, I’m afraid.
The National Center for Public Policy Research has a website providing educational resources on the Law of the Sea Treaty (also known by the acronyms LOST and UNCLOS).
“The Law of the Sea Treaty is a terrible deal for the U.S. It would threaten our sovereignty, place a significant portion of the world’s resources under the control of a U.N.-style body, and complicate our efforts to apprehend terrorists on the high seas by subjecting our actions to review by an international court unlikely to render decisions favorable to the U.S.,” said National Center Vice President David Ridenour.
“The Law of the Sea Treaty would help radical environmentalists achieve what they haven’t been able to achieve through legislation,” Ridenour added. “Greenpeace has said ‘the benefits of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea are substantial, including its basic duties for states to protect and preserve the marine environment and to conserve marine living species.’ The Natural Resources Defense Council challenged the Navy’s use of ‘intense active sonar,’ arguing that it violates the treaty by posing a danger to marine life. The Navy ultimately agreed to scale back use of this technology. The Law of the Sea Treaty has also been used by Australia and New Zealand in an attempt to shut down an experimental blue fin tuna fishing program and by Ireland in an attempt to shut down a plant on land in England”
The website, the United National Law of the Sea Treaty Information Center, contains a collection of research papers, commentaries and blog entries about LOST from a variety of think-tanks, scholars, opinion writers and bloggers. It can be accessed at: Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST or UNCLOS III).
“Although the Law of the Sea Treaty has been around for decades — the National Center for Public Policy Research first worked on it in 1982 — relatively few people know much about it,” said Amy Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. “The United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty Information Center website is designed to help correct this.”
The National Center for Public Policy Research is a non-partisan, non-profit educational foundation based in Washington, D.C.
It is more important now then ever before to contact your senators and urge them to oppose the Law of the Sea Treaty.
Look. This Law Of The Sea Treaty is serious socialist, global governance, trickery! And NOBODY IS Talking ABOUT IT! Of course, we cannot expect the so-called “Mainstream Media” in America to bring it up, being so deep in the bunker for Obama, that is. The near incestuous relationship between the MsM and Obama prevents them from actually informing their readers, listeners, and viewers, of important, pending, life-changing policy being considered in the nation’s legislature.
We urge you to educate yourself about the Law Of The Sea Treaty — and do so quickly.
In the meantime, however, we suggest that you get on the phone, or send an e-mail or fax to the offices of your US Senators and ask them to vote NO on the Law Of The Sea Treaty.
Every so often, we get a chance to use our constitutional rights for good. This is one of those times.
Related articles
- Law of the Sea Treaty: A Tool to Combat Iran, China, and Russia? or Redistribution of wealth (mb50.wordpress.com)
- Urgent Alert: Law of the Sea Treaty (askmarion.wordpress.com)
- The Creature From the Ocean’s Floor – the Law of the Sea Treaty (seeker401.wordpress.com)
- The Creature From the Ocean’s Floor – the Law of the Sea Treaty (ppjg.me)
- The Law of the Sea Treaty Moving to Senate Committee – Ceding the Seas to the Marxist U.N. (independentsentinel.com)
- US Administration Renews Push to Ratify Law of Sea Treaty (voanews.com)
- Frank J. Gaffney Jr.: Bad timing for LOST (junkscience.com)
The Public Has Rejected the Democratic Agenda
Suddenly, liberal op-ed writers are trashing — even lampooning — Barack Obama as a one-term president (“one and done”). Centrist Democrats up for reelection in 2012 openly worry about inviting a kindred president into their districts, lest the new pariah lose them votes.
Left-wing think tanks, environmentalists, and academics vent their anger against Obama for supposedly being too soft on Republicans and too ready to compromise with right-wingers. But what really has caused the left-wing falling-out, less than three years after the hope-and-change crush on Barack Obama?
For now, it’s the polls.
Obama’s popularity has plummeted to little more than 40 percent approval. Suddenly, Democrats worry that the public anger could be contagious. It might infect them as well — in the way a sinking George W. Bush hurt congressional Republicans up for reelection in 2006.
Yet the Left cannot fairly blame Obama. After all, he rammed through on a strictly partisan vote the century-old liberal dream of a federal takeover of health care — something that Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton never could do. Keynesians never dreamed that a president could actually borrow $5 trillion for domestic spending in less than three years.
The Obama administration even tried to shut down a brand-new Boeing aircraft plant on the shaky argument that the company might thereby be hiring fewer union workers somewhere else. For environmentalists, Obama kept oil producers out of new fields in Alaska, the American West, the Gulf, and other offshore sites. Hundreds of billions in borrowed federal money went to failed “wind and solar” plants in an effort to jump-start “millions of green jobs.”
The Obama revolution that occurred under the radar was even more insidious. Open-borders activists were promised that the government would not bother illegal aliens unless they were wanted for felonies. Never before has the United States joined a foreign government in suing one of its own states — in the way that the Justice Department and Mexico have either filed or joined suits seeking to overturn Arizona’s immigration law.
From January 2009 through 2010, Obama advanced the liberal dream with a passion not seen since the New Deal days of Franklin Roosevelt. He bulldozed all opposition and rammed through most of what he wanted with the help of a Democratic Congress: Obamacare, record borrowing, record spending, and hundreds of hard-left presidential appointees and judges.
Far from being namby-pamby, Obama has gone after opponents like no president since Richard Nixon. He urged Hispanics to “punish our enemies.” He called his political opponents “hostage takers.” The affluent were lumped together with the super-rich and derided as “millionaires and billionaires,” “corporate-jet owners,” and “fat cat” bankers. His supporters in unions and the Congressional Black Caucus freely blasted the Tea Party with slurs — with the unspoken assurance that the president’s constant calls for civility certainly did not apply to them.
Critics may lampoon Obama’s use of a teleprompter, but he still uses it to good effect in his near-daily speeches. Obama is a far better megaphone for left-wing policies than was the lackluster Jimmy Carter, the pompous Al Gore, or the condescending John Kerry. He easily outshines the wooden Harry Reid and the polarizing Nancy Pelosi. Compared with Obama and his smoothness, an often gaffe-prone Vice President Joe Biden can seem a liability. Obama is as charismatic as “I feel your pain” Bill Clinton — as we saw in 2008, when Obama destroyed the primary challenge of Hillary Clinton.
So the Left cannot really complain that Obama either betrayed the cause or proved particularly inept in advancing it. Instead, what Obama’s supporters are mad about is that the public is boiling over chronic 9 percent unemployment, a comatose housing market, escalating food and fuel prices, near-nonexistent economic growth, a gyrating stock market, record deficits, $16 trillion in aggregate debt, and a historic credit downgrading. And voters are not just mad, but are blaming these hard times on the liberal Obama agenda of more regulations, more federal spending, more borrowing, more talk of taxes, and more “stimulus” programs.
A mostly moderate-to-conservative public has concluded that it does not like the new liberal agenda. After three years, it believes that the big government/big borrowing medicine made the inherited illness far worse. Voters may or may not like Obama, but they surely do not like what he is still trying to do.
In response, the Left needs a sacrificial lamb. So it has nonsensically turned with a fury on Obama as if he were culpable for pushing through the Left’s own agenda. If Democrats do not blame the public’s anger on their once-beloved messenger, then they are left only with their message itself. And that is something they simply cannot accept.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of “A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.” You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
© 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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