Posted by
Bill Crawford on Wednesday, August 03, 2011 1:33:47 AM
There is bad, and there is historically tragic. Jimmy Carter was bad, but the Democrat brand survived him and in four years, we had all but forgotten him, save for his laughable diplomatic outreaches.
Richard Nixon was tragic on a Shakespearian level. He tried to have it both ways in Vietnam,, and managed to both help create what became the Khmer Rouge and terminally anger all the war opponents here. When the first OPEC oil embargo hit, he was spending his time dealing with the firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. When he finally resigned, he helped create a political riptide that became the Watergate Democrat Congress. That bunch created the Byrd Senate budget rules, cemented in place the baseline budgeting procedures that still calls slowdowns in projected spending "cuts", cut and ran from Southeast Asia in 1975 and fostered a series of Marxist massacres and allowed Senator Church to decimate the future of human intlligence at the CIA, which we are all still paying for. It takes a special talent to create a disaster on that level.
I'm watching that talent anew today. Obama came into office because Bush had already fractured a party on immigration reform. As tired of the Iraq war as the Dems were, this all led to the new Dem Congress in 2006. The last factor was the collapse in September,2008- the Presidential race was competitive up until that point.
Obama interpreted this boost as not just a mandate, but viewed himself (I think he still does) as a "transformative" figure on the level of FDR and Reagan.
He fostered a new health plan that is headed for a full blown Supreme Court challenge- half the country sued him over the Constitutionality of it's purchase mandate. His spending brought about the 2010 elections,which brought the GOP back in the House and in many states, just in time for the new census and control over redistricting- a legacy that will last a decade.
He butchered the negotiations with the debt limit increase to the point where the Tea Party faction now holds all the face cards.
Whether you agree or not with the cause of these things and his place in it, he has created a new normal in our country. A government that runs $1.5 trillion in deficit every year. 9%+ unemployment. A federal government that hired like crazy for two years and is now the most stable employer in the country. $3.70 per gallon gas prices. Anemic job growth. Businesses that are sitting on a $trillion in cash and refuse to use it. A stubborn war in Afghanistan that nobody knows why we are fighting, a new involvement in Libya that can't be explained well, either.
He clearly has some things he still wants to do, but not only does not have the power, but seems compelled to anger anybody who disagrees with him. How could somebody who walked in with a rep of being a smooth talker turn out to be so stubbornly obnoxious?
There will be hell to pay for all this. Not only is he not going to get the House back, he is making their majority easier to uphold in 2012. The Senate already had a number of fragile seats they won in '06 that were going to be an uphill battle, his efforts are going to make that worse, too.
His only hope of winning re-election is to make his opponent scary enough for him to be the only sane alternative. If said opponent isn't scary to the independent voters, then he will continue losing ground in swing states like Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania (like he has already). There is no way he can ever win without them.
He will pass to us a coalition government that will cut spending back to at least 2007 levels, which his base will interpret as the ninth circle of Dante's hell. These are all repercussions that will last for decades.
It will be easy to say ten years hence that this was all inevitable. But if you take it apart issue by issue, if he governed within the 40 yard lines instead of doing all the red zone dances he has, none of this had to happen. Reform would have happened slowly, at a speed where we could take things more slowly and chew all the bits before swallowing.
He is in the process of bringing about a conservative revolution, and the end result will be another lost decade for the urban areas of our country, who will troll about like Red Sox fans after Bill Buckner showed he couldn't take a knee. That didn't have to be.
In ten years, this man wll go from "Yes, we can" to being the image on the writer's conference room dartboard at the Daily Show. Much as I disagree with him, taking the country through all that is something I wish we could all avoid.