by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO-The Corner
1. Barack Obama is now a toxic brand. Arrogance and incompetence are a fatal brew. If once his problem was his failed policies, now it is also his persona, especially the blame-gaming and sense of boredom on the job that borders on public petulance, as if he came into the presidency to save us, and we did not appreciate his godhead. “Make no mistake about it” and “Let me be perfectly clear” have become something like Sominex for most Americans. Let us hope that our enemies abroad in the next two years are confused by his erratic governance and at least find him as exasperating as we do.
2. Race/class/and gender baiting lost out to the dismal recovery, a foreign policy in shambles, a ruined health-care system, an alphabet soup of government corruption, and an Islamic State/Ebola/open border miasma of incompetence. The bankrupt idea that an amoral Al Sharpton was to be consulted on matters of race, while someone like a Senator Tim Scott would not be was always surreal. And the idea that a Wendy Davis or a Sandra Fluke was a model of feminist achievement in a way Joni Ernst was not was equally absurd. Character and achievement still matter. The problem with trying to get out the base with mythographies like Ferguson and winking and nodding at a blanket amnesty to come is not just the proverbial turned-off white male voter, but that minorities too either were not energized over these shrill appeals or themselves were not sure 160,000 children streaming across the border was a good thing, or that Ferguson was a clear-cut case of police brutality. All the demagoguing in the world could not change that.
3. Some polls seem to have transmogrified into pre-election partisan tools, given that a few Senate races and lots of governorships weren’t even close to supposedly scientific predictions. For example, what happened to the Rasmussen Poll? It seems not just unreliable, but predictably so in one direction, especially in terms of presidential popularity. A president supposedly always down only 5 to 8 percent in the polls would not have the cataclysmic ripple effect that we saw last night.
4. Fairly or not, the face of the Democratic party has been Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi. Not only were these three unappealing personalities prone to gratuitous slurs and strange outbursts, but their politics were demagogic and far out of the mainstream. They should and will soon disappear from the American political landscape and recede back into the mediocrity from which they somehow emerged.
5. The personalities and backgrounds of candidates matter. This time around there was an inspired screening of Republican candidates not so much on their ideological purity, but on their own biographies and sense of decorum in the manner they campaigned, especially on the Senate side. In contrast, the Democrats fielded (both incumbent and not) mostly loud nonentities picked for their dynastic names or past five minutes of notoriety, who assumed their loud identity politics would suffice in lieu of character, common sense, and past achievement. Superficial bumper-sticker identities and progressive catch-phrases finally ran out of gas.
“Loser” is an insufficient description. How about “Vandals”
To be fair, presidential approval polls are drawn from the overall population, which is a different animal than the voting population.
The problems with the polls both this year and in 2012 seems to be primarily the result of incorrect assumptions about the demographics of the voting population, in particular, incorrect assumptions about the number and nature of Democratic supporters showing up at the polls; in 2012 a lot of polls underestimated this group, and in 2014 polls tended to overestimate them.
We Republicans will be losers too if we do not capitalize on the opportunity to vastly improve the government..
If Debbie Wasserman Shlitz says something, you can count on the opposite to be true. Same with Nancy and Harry.
I don’t understand how anybody can listen to them and believe what they are saying. How in the world did they ever get in those positions of power? And Nancy being a Catholic and such a huge abortionist?? They all love abortions and who gets aborted the most? Black babies! And who votes for Democrats like Harry and Nancy? Black people!! It doesn’t make any sense at all. I sure hope the Repubs do great things for America. It really ain’t that hard.
Somehow, thank God, voters got out from under the Mesmer spell of fiat narrative that says “your spin masters ain’t jivin’ you outta nothin now work harder, slave!” And the voters voted with their … Un-hypnotized minds!
the triumvirate of Obama, Pelosi and reid just showcases what a criminal, political enterprise will do to a constitutional republic. it begins with the omission by Pelosi of vetting Obama. had she done her job–he would never have made it onto a presidential ballot as he would have been proved to be unacceptable constitutionally as he is not a natural born American citizen. his communist t ies would have been exposed as well as his various criminal acts and sealing of his past records and. his Islamic ideology
Obama is a poor Machiavellian: he is thoroughly unscrupulous – in fact the accounts of his presiding over the selection of targets for drone attacks is worthy of a James Bond villain – but he talks much too much. He should have had others who seemed to share in his – in fact nearly despotic – rule. He understands well enough the principle of using underlings to take blame, but he never did it adroitly. The reason is probably his extreme narcissism. He must always be the mover and shaker, the centre of the stage, the focus of the spotlights, the object of all the chatter, the superstar among stars. Even the idolators of Obama were jaded by 2012. Machiavelli would never have approved. To make it worse, some of his pronouncements have been memorable, and so it has been noticed that they were flat out lies.
The socialists have made progress in this country by heeding the lesson of the boiled frog analogy — that a frog in water in a pot on the stove will sit still until it boils to death if the heat is turned up slowly enough.
What Obama and his gang forgot is the first part of the story. That a frog will jump out if thrown directly into already-boiling water.
That’s what Obamacare is doing all over the country, throwing people in directly.