Friday, September 10, 2010

Cue Roy Orbison: "It's Over!"

Back in the early Sixties when I was a teenager in Britland, the weirdest thing imaginable was the wailing falsetto of Roy Orbison and the naive puppy love-songs of the Everly Brothers. For a Brit kid, it seemed to come from another world.

We now know, of course, thanks to President Obama, that those country boys came from the world of God and guns bitter-enders.

But I think that Roy Orbison may be getting the last laugh. I'm starting to think that is is time to cue up "It's Over" on President Obama and the Two Years of Folly.

Somehow, over the Labor Day Weekend the earth moved, and so the usual fluff from the MSM pundits just reads as laughable. Here is what RealClearPolitics dragged up today:

GOP Caused Economic Uncertainty - Mark Schmitt, American Prospect

Obama Needs to Fire Up His Base - Joe Conason, New York Observer

What Ever Happened to Obama's Army? - Jay Newton-Small, Time

Obama's Finally Speaking Like a Democrat - Bob Shrum, The Week

Obama Should Follow in FDR's Footsteps - Nick Taylor, Los Angeles Times

Koch Fires Back at The New Yorker - Elaine Lafferty, The Daily Beast

Do you get the feeling that these chaps are just out of it?

Meanwhile conservative pundits are smelling blood in the water.

The Nanny State Has Blown the Bank - David Warren, Ottawa Citizen

America's Public Servants Are Now Its Masters - Mort Zuckerman, FT

Dems Across the Country Running from Obama - Kimberley Strassel, WSJ

The Lost Communicator - Michael Gerson, Washington Post

Obama's Looking More Like Hoover Than FDR - Jonah Goldberg, NRO

It's Jonah's piece that I like best. He's discussing the collapse of the great liberal myth:

The creation myth of the modern Democratic party goes something like this: After years of capitalist excess, exemplified by Hoover's "market fundamentalism," Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced reasonable and pragmatic reforms that not only conquered the Great Depression but "saved democracy" itself.

When FDR & Co did this number on the American people it was a tour de force of political myth-making. And it has lasted right up to the present, because there was always a cadre of liberal opinion hegemonists available to ram it down the throats of the American people one more time.

But now it looks like the "narrative" of the current Great Recession will go rather differently. Somehow, I suspect that the Democrats will get the blame. Why? Well here's my guess.

In the Great Depression the government's stupid response with the NRA wage and price controls, the WPA the CCC was disastrous. Not to mention the Wagner Act that boosted wage rates and Social Security that created a whole new tax on labor. But people felt that it was all helping people like them. It showed, in the classic line, that government "cared about people like me."

Here's the problem with Obamanomics. People don't think it helps "people like me." The money is all going to help union construction workers and unionized government workers. Not "people like me."

Yep. Obamanomics has all been about helping the Democratic base, and screw the moderates that actually elected President Obama.

It takes a level of political stupidity far deeper than the notorious stupidity of President Bush to execute an agenda like that. But President Obama and his crew were up to the challenge.

And that's why it's time to sing "It's Over."

1 comment:

  1. Do you trust the Reps enough to see them unite to adopt a real conservative plan of action and not just get drunk after a possible victory?

    ReplyDelete