by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n The Great Guessing Game<\/strong><\/p>\n Will Obama, the old ideologue from Chicago, go hard left, OR, as the repackaged moderate of the campaign, “rule” (his campaign’s word, not mine) with Augustan moderation, OR, as a cut-the-difference \u201chealer,\u201d simply vote present \u2014 even as each faction now cries for its own version of \u201cLet Obama be Obama\u201d?\u00a0<\/p>\n The wiser course would be to govern in the manner of the post-flip-flop part of the campaign (e.g. after the ‘adjustments’ on NAFTA, FISA, guns, abortion, capital punishment, Iraq, Iran, drilling, nuclear, coal, etc.): if one must raise income taxes on the top brackets, then by all means don\u2019t also lift FICA caps and de facto add on a 15.3% Medicare and Social Security additional payroll tax increase; don\u2019t go for the whole trillion-dollar entitlement enchilada at a time of massive deficits; avoid the loony left in appointments; etc. Conventional wisdom says all that is supposedly the only way to ensure a Clintonian second term, but I doubt that happens.<\/p>\n Instead, I think many advisors privately are thinking that the turn-out the vote hoopla in key states wasn\u2019t all that much more than in 2004. And for all the talk of a new realignment and the end of the old conservative regime, 2008 is more likely explained as a once in a lifetime alignment of the stars (cf. Carter in 1976): the mid-September meltdown that ruined McCain\u2019s lead; the normal weariness after eight years of incumbency; two wars; a charismatic young and path-breaking Democratic candidate, a liberal’s renouncing of public campaign financing to amass $600 million.<\/p>\n If such reasoning were true, then the sentiment might be \u2018strike now\u2019, while the House, Senate, media, and indeed the world are all on board since they may not be either six months from now, much less two years from now. And that would suggest, I think, quick action on the fairness doctrine, an end to union secret ballots, a stop on a lot of drilling (all this in the short term costs nothing), as well as hefty income and payroll tax increases \u2014 in short, the big government Euro-model at home, and the U.N.\/We-Are-The-World model abroad.<\/p>\n So maybe because the election did not show a radical and permanent shift in the electorate, it is more, not less, likely that we will see a leftward lurch, especially on structural things like unions, open borders cum amnesty, and fairness doctrine\/talk radio, etc. that would all be seen as investments in ensuring more liberal voters in the next elections.<\/p>\n So Now We Shall See<\/strong><\/p>\n For much of the last few years, and especially the last few months of the campaign, we have heard a familiar narrative. Guant\u00e1namo was a virtual stalag, where far more innocents than terrorists were unjustly incarcerated. Given that this gulag served no useful purpose, it should be summarily shut down, and the unfairly detained suspects at last returned to their families back home. The FISA laws and Patriot Act were aimed more at bogeymen than jihadists, and what little advantage they gave us was not worth the shredding of the Constitution.<\/p>\n The \u2018fly-paper\u2019 theory of Iraq \u2014 thousands of belligerents flocked to Iraq, were killed and defeated, discredited radical Islam, and, their loss of face, coupled with a constitutional Iraq, made the region and the U.S. safer \u2014 is a puerile reductive fiction. What bellicosity we experienced with supposedly rogue terrorist-sponsoring states such as Syria and Iran was largely due to George Bush\u2019s juvenile cowboy rhetoric \u2014 \u2018bring \u2018em on\u2019, \u2018smoke \u2018em out, \u2018dead or alive\u2019 \u2014 and his refusal to defuse tensions and misunderstandings through reasoned diplomacy.<\/p>\n The promotion of democracy was a neocon pipedream, in which partly through violence, partly through cultural arrogance, we tried to clumsily project our values on deeply religious, traditional, tribal \u2014 and in the end, deeply different \u2014 societies, whose own alternate politics cannot be so crudely dismissed by our rather arbitrary standards.<\/p>\n American unpopularity in the Middle East had nothing to do with globalization, westernization, age-old envy or the newfound ability via instant communications to see how much worse life was in an autocratic Arab world than in a free West, but was largely a phenomenon of George Bush\u2019s Iraq War and his neocon advisors\u2019 crude tilt toward the Zionists. \u201cThe War On Terror\u201d was largely a construct to wage perennial war, impugn the patriotism of critics, and scare the American people, through false consciousness, into voting against their real economic interests.<\/p>\n I think that is a fair enough appraisal of the opposition\u2019s view of the Bush anti-terror philosophy. And as is true of all theories, we will soon perhaps see the extent to which it proves the more accurate in the real world of the next administration.<\/p>\n So the closing of Guant\u00e1namo, repeal of the Bush anti-terrorism legislation, rapid withdrawal from Iraq (though we are already past Obama’s original target date of March 2008 for withdrawal of all combat troops), cessation of pressure to democratize and the end of hectoring against Arab authoritarianism, soothing rhetoric from a new Chief Executive, renewed diplomatic reaching out to Teheran and Damascus, more even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, and rejection of the notion we are in some sort of war, much less one of a \u201cglobal\u201d nature, should ensure greater American popularity, win-over our critics, defuse tensions with Iran and Syria, and ensure another seven years of safety from a major terrorist attack at home.<\/p>\n So come late January and beyond we shall see, and we all should genuinely wish the Obama administration well in their promised radical departure from the past, since the stakes are high for us all.<\/p>\n Post-journalism<\/strong><\/p>\n We have seen it all the last two years: Weeping journalists on election night; a journalist openly promising to help make Obama successful (“Yeah, it is my job.”); film takes of journalists cheering an Obama speech; the savaging of Sarah Palin and the hands-off treatment of Biden; soft-ball interviews and long puff-pieces on Obama as the young cool crusader; comparisons to JFK’s Camelot, and on and on.<\/p>\n In the 3rd book of his history, Thucydides has some insightful thoughts about destroying institutions in times of zealotry \u2014 and then regretting their absence when there is a need for refuge for them. The mainstream press should have learned that lesson, once they blew up their credibility in the past election by morphing into the Team Obama press agency.<\/p>\n There will come a time in the year ahead when either Obama’s unexamined past will come back to haunt him, or his inexperience and tentativeness in foreign affairs will be embarrassingly apparent, or his European-socialist agenda for domestic programs simply won’t work. And as public opinion falls, what will MSNBC, the New York Times, the editors of Newsweek, a Chris Matthews or the anchors at the major networks say?<\/p>\n Not much \u2014 since they will have one of two non-choices: (1) either they will begin scrambling to offer supposed disinterested criticism, which will be met with the public’s, “Why should we begin believing you now?” or “Why didn’t you tell this before?”, or (2), they can continue as state-sanctioned megaphones of the Obama administration in the manner that they did during the campaign. They will lose either way and remain without credibility.<\/p>\n In short, we live now in the Age of Post-Journalism. All that was before is now over, as this generation of journalists voluntarily destroyed the hallowed notion of objectivity and they will have no idea quite how to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.<\/p>\n \u00a92008 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner The Great Guessing Game Will Obama, the old ideologue from Chicago, go hard left, OR, as the repackaged moderate of the campaign, “rule” (his campaign’s word, not mine) with Augustan moderation, OR, as a cut-the-difference \u201chealer,\u201d simply vote present \u2014 even as each faction now cries for its own […]<\/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":[737],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Q0","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":726,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/romney-fights-back\/","url_meta":{"origin":3224,"position":0},"title":"Romney Fights Back","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 9, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Mitt Romney was recently derided by the Obama campaign for his appearance with Donald Trump. Trump is supposed to be radioactive because of his stubborn insistence that the Obama birth certificate is inauthentic. Romney\u2019s supporters, however, ignored the complaint and pointed instead to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1871,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-versus-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":3224,"position":1},"title":"Obama versus Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 27, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Will the real Barack Obama please stand up? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There is little need any more to offer consistent opposition to Barack Obama, since he himself is already running hard against the many previous incarnations of Barack Obama.\u00a0 The first one we met was Barack\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":3256,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-obama-enigma\/","url_meta":{"origin":3224,"position":2},"title":"The Obama Enigma","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 28, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Lame-duck Republican President Bush's dismal poll ratings have descended to those of Harry Truman's when he left office. The Democratic majority in Congress will probably widen after the election. Republican nominee John McCain has not run a dynamic campaign. Gen. Colin Powell, George\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2008"","block_context":{"text":"October 2008","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2008\/october-2008\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12574,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hanson-michelle-obama-told-dems-to-go-high-after-her-husband-tried-to-destroy-a-political-campaign\/","url_meta":{"origin":3224,"position":3},"title":"Hanson: Michelle Obama told Dems to ‘go high’ after her husband ‘tried to destroy a political campaign’","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 20, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Yael Halon \/\/ Fox News Michelle Obama\u00a0urged Democrats to take the high road\u00a0at the virtual\u00a0Democratic National Convention\u00a0Monday night amid an\u00a0ongoing investigation\u00a0into her husband's\u00a0\"corrupt\" administration,\u00a0Hoover Institution senior\u00a0fellow Victor Davis Hanson told \"Tucker Carlson Tonight\" Tuesday. \"When she\u00a0says 'We go high when they go\u00a0low,' she's talking right now when\u00a0her husband's administration has\u00a0weaponized\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7805,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-madness-of-2008\/","url_meta":{"origin":3224,"position":4},"title":"The Madness of 2008","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 26, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"A nation became unhinged by trivialities like \u201chope and change.\u201d It has now awakened. \u00a0 by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online America is suddenly angry at the laxity, incompetence, and polarizing politics of the Obama administration, the bad optics of the president putting about in his bright golf\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Obama Administration"","block_context":{"text":"Obama Administration","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"On the campaign trail, October 2008 (Joe Raedle\/Getty Images)","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/pic_giant_082614_SM_Barack-Obama-2008-G.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2386,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/whats-off-the-table-in-2012\/","url_meta":{"origin":3224,"position":5},"title":"What’s Off the Table in 2012?","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 5, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services What should we\u00a0not\u00a0expect during next summer\u2019s presidential campaign, given what was put off limits in 2008 and later? There is much talk about what some are perceiving as the fringe religiosity of Republican candidates such as Michele Bachman and Rick Perry. 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