by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n Dream up a gargantuan backlash against Barack Obama\u2019s left-wing gospel, and you still could not invent the notion of a relatively unknown, conservative Scott Brown knocking off an Obama-endorsed, liberal, female attorney in liberal Massachusetts \u2014 in a race to fill the seat once held by Ted Kennedy.<\/p>\n If a liberal senatorial candidate can be defeated in Massachusetts, eleven months after the Obama hope-and-change blitzkrieg, it is hard to believe that any liberal seat is necessarily safe anywhere.<\/p>\n So the real story is not a populist backlash, but a growing populist backlash, whose ultimate nature and magnitude are as yet unknown. What\u2019s going on?<\/p>\n Buying Jobs?<\/strong><\/p>\n Voters are sick and tired of a terrible year of big spending and big deficits \u2014 especially the sight of Obama and his congressional allies almost daily talking breezily about spending what we do not have.<\/p>\n Voters went for the hope-and-change Obama in part because he promised fiscal sobriety after the Bush $500 billion deficit. Instead, in utterly cynical fashion, Obama trumped that red ink four times over. In the process, he developed a terrible habit of promising favored constituencies a hundred billion here, a hundred billion there as if it were all paper money \u2014 rather than real borrowed currency that will have to be confiscated in the future from the beleaguered taxpayer. It only makes it worse that the more the administration borrowed, printed, and spent, the higher unemployment rose and the lower economic activity plummeted.<\/p>\n Most have had enough of pie-in-the-sky talk of massive new healthcare entitlements, cap-and-trade taxes and regulation, more stimulus, and more takeovers of private enterprise. The country is broke and the people want to pay off, not incur more, crushing debt. What got us into the mess was too much borrowing, skyrocketing debt, and reckless spending \u2014 not too many balanced budgets and too much lean government.<\/p>\n Prophets Can\u2019t Mislead?<\/strong><\/p>\n No politician quite gets a pass for deception and prevarication. Obama in his narcissism thought his sonorous rhetoric made him exempt from a \u201cread my lips\u201d or \u201cI didn\u2019t have sex with that woman\u201d moment. It didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n People heard his serial promises about airing the healthcare debate on C-SPAN, his new-transparency\/no-lobbyist vows, and his monotonous boasts to close down Guantanamo within a year. All that is now \u201cinoperative.\u201d The problem was not just that Obama made promises that he broke, but that he made them so frequently and so vehemently \u2014 and so cavalierly broke them. That brazen campaign deception is problematic for a politician, but proves fatal for a self-appointed messiah.<\/p>\n A Cessation of Corruption<\/p>\n We went from a Republican \u201cculture of corruption\u201d to a liberal cesspool of corruption. Sen. Chris Dodd lectures Wall Street while he gets sweetheart loans and vacation-home deals. Few could make up a story that the nation\u2019s top tax lawmaker, House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel, is a tax dodger, and the nation\u2019s top tax enforcer, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, is an even more egregious tax dodger. When the Democratic Senate leadership started buying healthcare votes at $300 million a clip, our Congress became little more than the praetorian guard, auctioning off its support to any wannabe late Roman emperor. The idea of a muckraking Obama nominating Tom Daschle as his Health Secretary \u2014 the liberal populist who skips out of thousands of dollars in taxes on his free corporate limousine service \u2014 was the stuff of satire.<\/p>\n Bush Really, Really, Really Did Do It<\/strong><\/p>\n No one likes a serial whiner. It has been a year now \u2014 and Obama still blames George W. Bush\u00a0ad nauseam<\/em>. He did it in Massachusetts again \u2014 and on the eve of the election, no less. Blaming the past for the mistakes of the present gets old quickly. And when one adds in the constant\u00a0What\u2019s the Matter With Kansas?<\/em>\u00a0brand of condescension about na\u00efve yokels not knowing what\u2019s good for them, it gets even worse.<\/p>\n Yet Obama still pontificates that angry deluded voters will \u201csuddenly\u201d come to appreciate how he rammed healthcare down their otherwise ignorant throats: \u201cThe American people will suddenly learn that this bill does things they like and doesn\u2019t do things that people have been trying to say it does.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0The worst fears will prove groundless. And the American people\u2019s hope for a fair shake from their insurance companies \u2014 for quality, affordable healthcare they need \u2014 will finally be realized.\u201d<\/p>\n Good luck with that, O philosopher king!<\/p>\n Wall Street Populists<\/strong><\/p>\n Elite liberals are not good class warriors. Factor in multi-millionaire Nancy Pelosi\u2019s government mega-jet or Barack Obama\u2019s various overseas junkets or the big Wall Street money that went into Obama\u2019s near billion-dollar campaign coffers, and it is hard to take seriously Obama\u2019s constant war against \u201cthem.\u201d The voters have figured out that their president likes the elite plutocracy and the lower middle classes, but not so much the wannabe rich who aspire to cross his hated $250,000 income threshold \u2014 at which point suddenly they become unpatriotic, unwilling to pay their fair shares, and reluctant to spread the wealth around.<\/p>\n It is not particularly smart to constantly demonize the entrepreneurial classes, promise to raise income, payroll, healthcare, and inheritance taxes on them, and expand government regulations \u2014 and then wonder why they are not creating more jobs.<\/p>\n Elmer Gantry<\/strong><\/p>\n Devotees turn on false prophets with a special vengeance. Obama is beginning to grate. His flip-the-switch-on, evangelical cadences at rallies sound more like a Harvard nerd doing blues imitations than Martin Luther King Jr. Purple-state presidents don\u2019t appoint Van Joneses and Anita Dunns, or turn the NEA into aquid pro quo<\/em>\u00a0Ministry of Approved Culture. A healer doesn\u2019t start in on the \u201crich,\u201d \u201cWall Street,\u201d the \u201cbig\u201d oil companies, drug companies, insurance companies, or \u201cfat-cat bankers\u201d \u2014 especially when he has done his best to shake them all down for campaign money, hire as many of them as he can in his own administration, and arrange cut-rate loans, insider deals, bailouts, and guarantees for all of them.<\/p>\n Obama\u2019s populism is beginning to sound more like a bought boxer who belatedly has second thoughts about throwing the fight he previously contracted. In short, Obama\u2019s ideological presidency hinged on his post-racial, post-national mesmerizing presence that reassured reluctant Democrats to vote against their local constituencies.<\/p>\n If cap-and-trade or healthcare reform polled below 50 percent, a worried congressional supporter could always call in Him to charm bolting voters. But now? We have in a blink gone from Obama as the bankable 10 percent edge, to Obama as a non-factor, to Obama as a real liability. In short, why vote for an agenda as unpopular as its albatross author?<\/p>\n Liked by All, Respected by None<\/strong><\/p>\n Obama thought the antidote to \u201csmoke \u2019em out,\u201d \u201cdead or alive,\u201d and \u201cbring \u2019em on\u201d braggadocio was bowing to the Saudis, promulgating new and undiscovered great moments in Islamic history, and reaching out to Ahmadinejad as he rounded up and beat down reformers in the streets of Tehran.<\/p>\n It\u2019s one thing to accuse Bush of shredding the Constitution, quite another to adopt his anti-terrorism protocols like tribunals, renditions, Predators, intercepts, and wiretaps. Somehow Obama offended his base by such duplicity, and then his opposition by his tokenism of trashing Bush, promising the architect of 9\/11 a show trial a few blocks from the former World Trade Center, and using touchy-feely euphemisms to suggest we are not in a war against terrorism emanating from the radical Islamic world.<\/p>\n Ahmadinejad, Assad, Ch\u00e1vez, the Castro Brothers, Putin, and others for the first six months liked us as much as they had little respect for our sycophancy; now they openly show contempt. We accept that obsequiousness cannot earn respect, but it apparently cannot earn affection either.<\/p>\n The best thing that could happen to Barack Obama is more Democratic losses in hodgepodge elections that might yank away our young transfixed Narcissus from his mesmerizing reflecting pool.<\/p>\n Almost immediately after Obama showed his ideological cards last spring, I suggested in the first weeks of his presidency that the bait-and-switch president would soon face a Carter\/Clinton moment in which he could either press on with his polarizing ideology, damage his party for a generation, and eventually end up churlish and sneering at the electorate, who did not appreciate his exalted morality and genius \u2014 or triangulate and follow the Dick Morris\/Bill Clinton model of talking and acting sort of centrist.<\/p>\n Who knows after Obama\u2019s Scott Brown moment? We now may hear once again the old \u201cno more Red State\/Blue State\u201d tropes, the stale campaign promises of presidential vetoes, claims of financial sobriety, the return of a \u201cwar on terror,\u201d and smaller government<\/p>\n We\u2019re either down to all that \u2014 or Obama\u2019s more principled road to perdition.<\/p>\n \u00a92010 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What Scott Brown’s election portends for the Obama Agenda by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Dream up a gargantuan backlash against Barack Obama\u2019s left-wing gospel, and you still could not invent the notion of a relatively unknown, conservative Scott Brown knocking off an Obama-endorsed, liberal, female attorney in liberal Massachusetts \u2014 in a race […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[610],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-us","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1877,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-populist-president\/","url_meta":{"origin":1888,"position":0},"title":"Our Populist President?","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 27, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Obama and Populism I could believe President Obama\u2019s postmortem take that the same populist sentiment that propelled Scott Brown to office also earlier sent him to the White House \u2014 if we saw fresh liberal Democrats winning seats in places like Alabama against entrenched\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2010"","block_context":{"text":"January 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/january-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2850,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-politics-of-blame\/","url_meta":{"origin":1888,"position":1},"title":"The Politics of Blame","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 14, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services It should have been easy for Democrats to connect depleted 401(k) accounts and lost home equity with the buccaneers of Wall Street who supposedly prompted the panic. The public, after all, has been whipped up in furor at the masters of the universe\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "April 2009"","block_context":{"text":"April 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/april-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1482,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/pampered-populists\/","url_meta":{"origin":1888,"position":2},"title":"Pampered Populists","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 27, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner It's surreal to see President Obama play the class-warfare card against the Republicans while on his way to vacation on the tony Maine coast, and even more interesting to note that now gone are the days when the media used to caricature Bush I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2010"","block_context":{"text":"July 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/july-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1273,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-waning-obama-worship\/","url_meta":{"origin":1888,"position":3},"title":"Our Waning Obama Worship","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 10, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"We Americans know not what we do. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In just 20 months, President Obama\u2019s polls have crashed. From near 70 percent approval, they have fallen to well below 50 percent. Over 70 percent of the public disapproves of the Democratically controlled Congress. Hundreds of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "September 2010"","block_context":{"text":"September 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/september-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7960,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/plutocratic-populism-pays\/","url_meta":{"origin":1888,"position":4},"title":"Plutocratic Populism Pays","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 28, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"What\u2019s with rich liberals who blast other people for being rich? by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online 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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Mainstream Media"","block_context":{"text":"Mainstream Media","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/mainstream-media\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Hillary Clinton is center stage at a fundraiser for the UNLV Foundation, October 13, 2014. (Ethan Miller\/Getty)","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/pic_giant_newsite_102814_hillary_920-500x291.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1885,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/post-election-thoughts\/","url_meta":{"origin":1888,"position":5},"title":"Post-election Thoughts","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 23, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Says It All 1) a new poll revealing a vast majority of investors see Obama as anti-business 2) Obama declaiming on what he has done and what he will do to create jobs 3) After a year Obama still has not yet figured out\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2010"","block_context":{"text":"January 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/january-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1888"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1888"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1889,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1888\/revisions\/1889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}