Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.
The Duke of Wellington said of his close-run victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo that the French “came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way.”
Something like that happened to the Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections, as they lost the Senate, a few more seats in the House, and additional governorships. They came on with the same old strategy, but this time they went down with it.
Obama and the Democrats chose not to defend the administration’s record of the last six years. On foreign policy, no Democratic chorus seconded Obama’s 2013 claim that this chaotic period in world affairs has been the most stable time in recent memory.
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. Continue reading “Losers”→
The election and reelection of Barack Obama have seemingly realized the progressive dream of transforming America from its traditional Constitutional order to one more similar to Europe’s––an activist rather than a limited federal government, one whose power and reach extend into the market economy, trump state sovereignty, and subject individuals to the ideological preferences and aims of the federal Leviathan and its managers. What is at stake today is the continuing dominance of these statist ideas.
A weak, lame-duck Barack Obama, who has now eroded a once exuberant Democratic party, will be even weaker in the next two years.
If Democratic senators who had been his stalwart supporters — voting with him over 97 percent of the time — campaigned on not wanting any connection with Obama, one can imagine what our enemies abroad think of him. If Obama adopted policies of neo-appeasement when he enjoyed a 65 percent approval rating in 2009, one can imagine his approach when his positives dip below 40 percent. But there is no need for imagination when Ali Younesi, the senior adviser to the Iranian president, bluntly dismisses Obama as “the weakest of U.S. presidents” and sums up his six years in office as “humiliating.”
Here is the problem with the old-style Obama strategy of slicing and dicing the electorate into aggrieved minorities and then gluing them back together to achieve a 51% majority. On almost every issue in this election that they should be running on, they simply cannot. And on those that they are running on, they probably should not be.
At a conference last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen recycled a shopworn Democrat talking point about the supposed crisis of income inequality and stalled economic mobility. “The extent and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concerns me,” Yellen said, going on to wonder “whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history,” especially “equality of opportunity.”
Like the mythic “war on women,” this progressive sound bite is misleading and duplicitous, based on statistical sleight of hand. Worse yet, it is a pretext for more and more government expansion and intrusion into the economy, and for more and more redistribution of income through entitlement programs. It makes one wonder what one of the most powerful government officials impacting the economy, supposedly a politically neutral technocrat, is doing recycling Democratic campaign slogans.
WIth a wave of his hand… (Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Do bothersome facts matter anymore?
Not really. This is an age when Americans were assured that the Affordable Care Act lowered our premiums. It cut deductibles. Obamacare allowed us to keep our doctors and health plans, and lowered the deficit. Those fantasies were both demonstrably untrue and did not matter, given the supposedly noble aims of health care reform.
The Islamic State is at times dubbed jayvee, a manageable problem, and a dangerous enemy — or anything the administration wishes it to be, depending on the political climate of any given week.
Hillary Clinton is center stage at a fundraiser for the UNLV Foundation, October 13, 2014. (Ethan Miller/Getty)
In early October, Barack Obama went to a $32,000-a-head fundraiser at the 20-acre estate of the aptly named billionaire Richie Richman. The day before he charmed his paying audience of liberal 1 percenters, Obama had sent out an e-mail alleging that Republicans were “in the pocket of billionaires.” Does that mean that Republicans who accept cash from billionaire supporters are always in their pockets, but that when the president does likewise, he never is? And if so, on what grounds is he exempt from his own accusations?
In mid-October, Hillary Clinton gave a short lecture at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas bewailing the crushing costs of a university education. “Higher education,” Clinton thundered, “shouldn’t be a privilege for those able to afford it.”
The recent unfortunate shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and its violent aftermath seem to have had everything and nothing to do with race. Brown was black and unarmed and the officer white; but it is equally true that the 292-pound Brown likely committed a number of crimes in the minutes before his death. He was high on drugs[1]; he robbed a store and strong-armed the clerk[2]; he was walking down the middle of a road; and he started a physical altercation with policeman Darren Wilson (who tried to question him), inflicting injuries on the officer before being fatally shot. If that were a typical day in the life of an American citizen, then civilization, as we now know it, could no longer exist.
After yesterday’s horrific shooting, our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Ottawa. We stand whole-heartedly with them in their fight against terrorism. Victor Davis Hanson gives his perspective on the Garrison Radio Show on 93.1 WIBC-FM that the Canadian Parliament shooting is yet another reminder of the threat we all face. For the full interview click:http://bit.ly/12jZmCU
by Victor Davis Hanson // 
After yesterday’s horrific shooting, our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Ottawa. We stand whole-heartedly with them in their fight against terrorism. Victor Davis Hanson gives his perspective on the Garrison Radio Show on