Liberals Always Go Too Far

Karl Rove thinks that President Obama will have his work cut out for him next year.  It's not going to be easy to pivot from base-pleasing class warfare to principled moderate and uniter.  Particularly as Obama is badly down with the voters that got him elected in 2008: young voters, Hispanics, and women.

In fact, says Jonah Goldberg, Obama has done the one thing he must not do.  He has awakened the sleeping bear of America's innate conservatism. "If you make no sudden moves and talk quietly, you can get a lot done. But if you wake the bear, as Democrats did in the late 1960s and early '70s, the ursine silent majority will punish you."  Of course, you could argue, Democrats still got Medicare and Medicaid passed back then, so it was worth it.

Anyway, that was then and this is now.  Peter Ferrara thinks that we are looking at a wipeout for the Democrats next year.  With the loss of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, the blowout mid-term elections, and now the loss of an historically Democratic seat in New York City, things are trending worse for Democrats than in the Carter presidency.

Let us be clear.  The Obamaification of the Democratic Party is not just Obama.  The whole Democratic Party wants to be the party that Obama has made it.  It wants ObamaCare, wants swingeing regulation of everything from banks to light-bulbs, wants "green" energy, wants bigger government.

Back to the sleeping bear.  It woke up the moment that Obama was elected and it hasn't slept a wink since then.  But what does the awakened bear want?  John Agresto has an answer.

[T]he fairest nation on earth will be the one that prattles least about “social justice”; that the most neighborly will be the one that least tries to enforce artificial community; and the most compassionate will be the one that most cultivates the qualities of freedom in the souls of its citizens.

The tragedy of the educated class is that it couldn't be satisfied with persuasion, to educate the American people to its modernist religion of equality and peace and justice.  It decided that it had to have power as well, to force the bitter clingers to do the right thing.  But the combination of religion and politics has never gone well in the modern era.

In America, of course, the combination of church and state is actually illegal.  But the educated class attempt to combine its secular religion with the powers of government is obviously worse that a crime.  It's a blunder.