by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n
In 2008, a mostly unknown Barack Obama ran for president on an inclusive agenda of \u201chope and change.\u201d That upbeat message was supposed to translate into millions of green jobs, fiscal sobriety, universal healthcare, a resetting of Bush foreign policy, and racial unity.<\/p>\n
Four years later, none of those promises will be themes of his 2012 reelection campaign. Gas has more than doubled in price. Billions of dollars have been wasted in insider and subsidized wind and solar projects that have produced little green energy.<\/p>\n
Unemployment rates above 8 percent appear the new norm, when 5 percent in the past was dubbed a \u201cjobless recovery.\u201d<\/p>\n
From the Middle East to the Korean peninsula, the world seems on the brink. Modern racial relations are at a new low.<\/p>\n
If borrowing $4 trillion in eight years was \u201cunpatriotic,\u201d as Obama once labeled George W. Bush, no one quite knows how to term the addition of $5 trillion in new debt in less than four years. Obamacare is unpopular with the public. Its constitutionality now rests with the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n
After four years, the claims of \u201cBush did it\u201d and \u201cit might have been worse\u201d grow stale. So reelection will rest not on a new agenda, or an explanation of what happened, but on a divide-and-conquer strategy. Translated, that means Obama will find fissures in the voting public over fairness, expand them, and then cobble together various angry partisans in hopes of achieving a bare majority. Such an us\/them strategy is not new in American history.<\/p>\n
There are suddenly new enemies called the \u201c1 percent\u201d \u2014 those who make more than $200,000 per year and who \u201cdo not pay their fair share.\u201d Apparently, in a zero-sum economy, this tiny minority has taken too much from the majority and thereby caused the four-year lethargy that followed the 2008 meltdown. Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, and Franklin D. Roosevelt all ran, with varying success, against the selfish \u201crich.\u201d<\/p>\n
Congress is also now a convenient enemy of the people. Although it was Democratically controlled in Obama\u2019s first two years, and the Senate remains so, the new theme insists that a Republican House stops the Democrats from finishing all the good things they started. When support for 16 years of the New Deal had evaporated by 1948, Harry Truman ran successfully against a \u201cdo-nothing\u201d Republican Congress that had blocked his own big-government \u201cFair Deal\u201d follow-up and thus supposedly stalled the economy.<\/p>\n
In 2009, Obama pushed through his healthcare plan by a narrow partisan margin in the House, despite constitutional questions about the individual mandate. Now, as the Supreme Court seems skeptical of the legality of Obamacare, the president seems to be running against \u201cunelected\u201d justices. That could work too. In 1968, Richard Nixon squeaked by Hubert Humphrey in a divisive campaign, in part by lambasting the activist Earl Warren Court that had done everything from outlawing school prayer to supporting school busing.<\/p>\n
Team Obama has seized on the Democrats\u2019 allegations of a \u201cwar on women,\u201d waged by both Republican and Catholic grandees against federal subsidies of birth control. For the first time since the campaign of John F. Kennedy a half-century ago, the role of the Catholic Church in politics is suddenly a landmark issue.<\/p>\n
The president faults \u201cBig Oil\u201d and tension in the Middle East \u2014 not his own failure to develop vast new gas-and-oil reserves on public lands \u2014 for high gas prices. Jimmy Carter likewise blamed greedy oil companies and the Middle East in 1980, after gasoline prices spiked and lines formed at filling stations.<\/p>\n
Suddenly, after the Trayvon Martin tragedy and what may prove to be murderous white vigilantism in Oklahoma, race again looms large. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have weighed in often on that issue. The former castigated police for acting \u201cstupidly\u201d in one incident, and more recently reminded the nation of the racial affinities between himself and Trayvon Martin. The latter blasted the nation\u2019s reluctance to discuss race as cowardly, and alleged racial bias among his own congressional overseers. Race is always an explosive wedge issue. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson ran successfully in part on the need to expand civil rights, while in 1968 Richard Nixon found traction in the backlash against racial violence.<\/p>\n
If Obama can cobble together disaffected young people, greens, women, minorities, and the poor \u2014 who all believe some nefarious \u201cthey\u201d have crushed their dreams \u2014 then massive debt and deficits, high unemployment, sluggish growth, and spiraling gas prices won\u2019t decide the election.<\/p>\n
Lots of presidential candidates have run by identifying such enemies of the people, rather than debating the general state of the nation \u2014 sometimes successfully, sometimes not.<\/p>\n
But the problem with an us\/them strategy is not just winning an election, but trying to put back together what was torn asunder.<\/p>\n
\u00a92012 Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In 2008, a mostly unknown Barack Obama ran for president on an inclusive agenda of \u201chope and change.\u201d That upbeat message was supposed to translate into millions of green jobs, fiscal sobriety, universal healthcare, a resetting of Bush foreign policy, and racial unity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[362],"tags":[12,1026,1057,321,1055,74,324,40,213,1042,1016,242,372,1052,67,156],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-do","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":900,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-surreal-campaign\/","url_meta":{"origin":830,"position":0},"title":"Obama’s Surreal Campaign","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 16, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online As the election year heats up, we seem not to have noticed the surreal nature of the campaign. One would expect Barack Obama to run on his record from 2009 to 2012, and especially during 2009\u201310, when he had a solidly Democratic Congress\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Campaign 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Campaign 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/campaign-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":742,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-face-of-things-to-come\/","url_meta":{"origin":830,"position":1},"title":"The Face of Things to Come","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 20, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Campaign Rhetoric The campaign contour is pretty clear: The Obama reelection team will not make the case for the advantages and popularity of Obamacare, for the Chuian advantages of $4-a-gallon gas, for the dynamism of a 1.7 percent GDP growth rate, for the stimulatory\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":2736,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/reelecting-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":830,"position":2},"title":"Reelecting Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 23, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online We are beginning to see the contours of the upcoming 2012 reelection campaign of Barack Obama. Whether always officially sanctioned or not, Obama\u2019s campaign will focus on three general themes: a) the 2008 meltdown of the economy on Bush\u2019s watch; b) conservative heartlessness\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Campaign 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Campaign 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/campaign-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":720,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-hypocritic-oath\/","url_meta":{"origin":830,"position":3},"title":"Obama’s Hypocritic Oath","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 17, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Barack Obama has a habit of identifying a supposed crisis in collective morality, damning straw men \u201cthem\u201d who engage in such ethical lapses, soaring with rhetorical bromides \u2014 and then, to national quiet, doing more or less the exact things he once swore\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Second Term Policies"","block_context":{"text":"Second Term Policies","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/second-term-policies\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2754,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bush-did-it-bush-didnt-do-it\/","url_meta":{"origin":830,"position":4},"title":"Bush Did It! Bush Didn’t Do It!","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 13, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online During the 2008 campaign Barack Obama ran more against lame-duck President Bush than against his Republican opponent, John McCain. The campaign is now long over, and yet President Obama still seems haunted by the ghost of his predecessor. Last week, for example, he\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "First Term Policies"","block_context":{"text":"First Term Policies","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/first-term-policies\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":454,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/let-bush-be\/","url_meta":{"origin":830,"position":5},"title":"Let Bush Be","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 19, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The theme of the president's 2012 re-election campaign is that George W. Bush left such a terrible mess that Barack Obama could hardly be expected to clean it up in four years. In other words, 43 months of unemployment rates above 8 percent,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830"}],"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=830"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":832,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830\/revisions\/832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}