Whining Will Get You Nowhere

The Tingle is Gone?

Many of Obama's problems are in the future.
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO’s The Corner


Aside from the rendezvous he has with mega-deficits, rallying support for Afghanistan, healthcare, selling cap-and-trade in the Senate, etc., there is a more fundamental problem with Obama's modus operandi itself. I don't think he will any longer be able to "hope and change" his way out of tomorrow's controversies with mere rhetorical flourishes, since he has already exhausted his capital of credibility, and squandered his "this is our moment" trust.

Watch the faces of the press corps and the townhall throngs when he evades, and instead starts in with the cadences: The collective expression is to roll their eyes and sigh "not this again." And yet the alternative to hope and change is off-the-teleprompter pauses, and "inflate your tires/they're taking out our tonsils" folk mythology.

When Obama said he would be fiscally prudent, we got near $2 trillion deficits. When he said the debt would grow to $7 trillion over his tenure, you should nearly double that estimate. When he said Bush shredded the Constitution, he adopted most of the Bush plan from rendition to tribunals. When he said that he wished to move on, we got investigations of the CIA and the previous administration. When he said we'd have all combat brigades out by March 2008, we knew we could not. When he said anything about healthcare — it would save money, would not alter private plans, would not go to illegal aliens, etc — we already assumed all that was mendacious. When he says anything, we know now that it is either not true or will not be true or at best will only be partially true.

And in the first seven months, there was a crass edge as well, whether measured by the jokes like ridiculing the Special Olympics or demagoguing those who go to Las Vegas or the Superbowl, or stereotyping the police who act "stupidly" and "profile."

Apparently, Obama grasped (and he hints at this in his memoirs) that his rhetorical powers, and singular heritage, allowed him to achieve things not commensurate with the facts of the matter, or prerequisite knowledge and prior experience. But on a global stage, it is not so easy to wing it with just "forget the details and what I said in the past — now just trust me, since I'm young, charismatic, and different."

Proof of all this is not just the waning polls and the grassroots anger of hoi polloi, but a strange and sudden end to last fall's elite-left puff pieces that used to run the gamut from women dreaming of seducing Barack, desire to change the law to allow him to begin governing almost immediately in November, worry over a Bush coup to abort the dreamy Obama presidency, and all sorts of personal testaments about how suddenly the world will be a utopia. That entire genre of liberal therapeutic Obama musings in print and on the screen has quite incredibly simply vanished.

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