Well, it’s official — the presidency of Barack Obama is over.
No, seriously, it’s over. After all, the pundits have spoken. Scott Brown, a Republican state senator from Massachusetts, which is probably the most liberal, commie pinko place on earth, was elected to the U.S. Senate last week in a special election to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s spot.
See, the people have spoken. Or, more precisely, 1,168,107 voters in Massachusetts have spoken. And what did they say? We want change!
Surprising, isn’t it?
And because the Obama presidency is over, the pundits have taken to writing up its obituary. Here lies the Obama administration, killed by a disconnection with the American people over the role of government, says Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. Here is the grave of the Democratic Party, killed off by its own hubris, New York Times columnist David Brooks contends.
Both Noonan and Brooks make the same flawed observation that’s been circulating around the op-ed pages, radio talk shows and cable-television shouting matches all week: Obama believed his own hype and never adapted to the public’s changing mood on issues like finance and health care reform.
The problem with this analysis is that it pretends the public was never invested in meaningful reform. Just one year ago, the vast majority of America was gung- ho on completely overhauling our broken health care system.
Even six months ago, a majority of Americans thought health care reform should include a public option.
In the past six months, Obama and the American people have suffered a leadership crisis.
People don’t get ticked off when an elected official doesn’t listen to their concerns. No, people get indignant when a leader doesn’t try to convince the public why he’s right. When the opposition came out and painted health care reform as a radical, un-American piece of legislation aimed at destroying the American family and who knows what else, D.C. Democrats never came out with equal fervor to recapture the public’s attention. They lost faith in their own convictions.
Even worse, all of this played out over the background of a less-than-stellar economy. A new Brookings Institute report finds that in 2008, more than 30 percent of the population fell below the poverty line. With figures like that, you simply can’t afford to appear preoccupied with what now appears to be a political fight.
Not all’s bad. President Obama is still the most trusted person in government, Democrats are consistently ranked higher than Republicans in opinion polls, and the GOP, despite its recent win in Massachusetts, is still the party of no ideas.
The president has another chance to convince the American public why his ideas are right for the country this Wednesday at his State of the Union address.
Otherwise, he’ll continue to come off like Count Rostov in Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” After giving a rousing speech, Rostov marches into battle only to see the enemy actually advancing toward him. Rostov, aloof and perplexed, wonders why the enemy keeps marching. “To kill me?” he asks, “Me, whom everyone loves so?”
There is something to say about the audacity of fighting back.
