The subject du jour is Obama’s bad fortnight, starting with the bad jobs report Monday, going on to the fact that Mitt Romney out-raised him, going on to the loss in the Wisconsin state recall election, topped off with the assertion on Friday that the private sector was doing just “fine.”
This too is fine, but it misses the much bigger story: Obama along with his friends, the left, have a disastrous three and a half years behind them, of losses (many elections), wins-that-were-losses (the health care reform bill) and misjudged forward passes (Wisconsin and Occupy), in which they missed the ball, fumbled and saw it get lost in the weeds. Let us look back at this series of blunders, and see how the story played out:
– In 2009, with the GOP comatose, resistance to his high-cost and big government programs create the Tea Party movement, which starts early in March to rally against him and gathers steam heading into the off-year elections, when two states, which had gone heavily for him, swing back to vote for Republican governors, who emerge at once as his major opponents, steering their governments against his agenda, becoming strong centers of local resistance and opponents of health care “reform.” This carries over to 2010 and the special election in Massachusetts, which goes to Scott Brown in an eye-popping upset, proving that even in blue states people hate health care, which as intended, was assumed to be doomed.
– Health care does pass, but by sleight-of-hand methods, creating a vast and enraged opposition, which rolls on full bore through the 2010 midterms, flipping the House back to the Republicans and building a red wall in the states and state houses, which begin to cut spending, curb unions and file more suits against health care reform. Some of these make it to the Supreme Court, which will decide soon if the law is illegal, a result that would thrill the American people, who by large margins want it repealed.
– Then “Occupy Wall Street” looms as the “Tea Party’s antidote,” planned to move the focus from “growth” into “fairness,” shifts the blame from Obama to Wall Street, and starts up a war on the rich. But the chance that middle class would embrace ne’er-do-wells who sleep in the parks (and pee in them) is always unlikely, and dies out completely as they became overrun by addicts and criminals, and leave the sites they inhabit awash in debris. This took its cue from “Occupy Madison,” when Democrats took over and trashed the Wisconsin state capitol, fled the state to stop voting on critical issues and launched a campaign to recall the governor, marked by vilification, hysterics and threats. Billed as a epic clash between “left” and “right” theories of governance, this story ends on June 5, when Scott Walker wins by a 7-point margin, in a state Obama had won by 14.
At the same time, Obama is losing the War against Bain — as well as the War on the “War Against Women” — having failed to convince even his party that venture capitalists are vulture or vampire capitalists, or that free contraception (paid for by Catholics) is each woman’s natural right. Unable to sell his ideas (like health care, for instance) or elect his own backers (Creigh Deeds and Jon Corzine), his world view is not being bought by the public in general, which flees from it whenever it can.
People may still like his style, and story. But will they vote for him again?
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
