Posted by
Patrick Henry on Saturday, November 13, 2010 12:41:03 PM
When we graduate from school, whether high school, college or grad school, we
enter upon a new phase of life. While teachers and administrators we have known
may never be forgotten, they no longer control us. Now we are free to do, say, think
and act as we determine best, for better or worse.
Sometimes, such emancipation even happens to presidents. While they engage
in the nomination and election process, they are indentured to their political parties
by ideology, funding considerations and national party machinery. But once in
office, they belong not only to their own party, but to all Americans, and their
policies and the results of those policies stand solely at the bar of no party, but at
one set by the total electorate. Sometimes history makes such opportunities clear.
In 1992, Bill Clinton was a president whose policies were popular only narrowly
and within his own party. Correctly perceiving that the mid-term elections in which
the opposing party came to power were a direct repudiation of those policies, Clinton
stood at a political watershed. Either he could moderate his course, risking the
animosity of the liberal base, or stand his ideological ground and lose the majority of
the electorate in a country that was (and still remains) center right. Clinton correctly
predicted that what was to be lost on the liberal fringe would more than be compensated
for by the moderate voters he would placate by meeting the opposition halfway. He
moved from left to center and was handily re-elected. What he gained, however, was
far more than a second term. It was a freedom from domination by either his own
party or the opposition -- an emancipation that liberated him to be the people's
president, to cut out the middlemen and deal more directly with those who elected
him. One can certainly argue that he squandered the opportunity through personal
moral turpitude. But that does not change the reality of the opportunity he was
afforded or the historic political genius that enabled it.
Fast forwarding to 2010, we find President Barack Hussein Obama in a similar
position, unloved by either the left or the right, beset with seemingly insoluble
problems and almost certainly headed toward a one-term calamity of a presidency.
Then come the November mid-terms, flushing Democrats from power in a virtual
Republican tsunami and serving as an unsubtle repudiation of Obama's extreme
leftist agenda. The left is furious with him over the wars, failure to close
Guantanamo Bay, failure to push through pro-gay and pro-union, pro-immigration
and pro-environmental legislation. The right is equally critical over government
invasion of the free market and personal privacy, as well as the takeover of banks,
automakers, student loans and healthcare. No one loves Barack Obama, but
therein lies his opportunity.
Elections are not won on the extremes, but in the middle. Whichever candidate
succeeds in wooing significant numbers of independent voters usually wins. But
independents who once voted for Obama, voted heavily against him in the recent
mid-terms. The secret to his re-election is winning them back, but the only way
to achieve that entails the risky gambit of throwing his liberal base under the bus.
It is oxymoronic to say that what staunch liberals want is the opposite of what
conservatives want. But with the ascendancy of progressivism (liberalism on
steroids), it is also opposite of what a majority of (centrist) independents want.
In other words, by deserting the left-wing of his party and moderating toward the
center, Obama may be able to rehabilitate his independent support and at least
disarm the more moderate conservatives. In so doing, he frees himself from the
shackles of liberal orthodoxy and flees the Democratic "plantation" to become
"the people's president." This was Clinton's gamble, and it paid the dividend of
a second chance.
Americans are now watching to see whether Obama has the intelligence and
fortitude to forge his own course, or whether he remains determined to be right
(ideologically speaking) rather than remaining president. It is clear that at this
writing a majority of voters believe not only that Obama is wrong, but that he
is dangerously so. He cannot stay his current course and win re-election.
Whether one is able to change course depends on honest assessment of the
facts, the ability to accept personal fallibility without becoming consumed and
debilitated by guilt and the courage to take destiny in one's own hands. It is
safe to say that no unabashed socialst can be electd president in America today.
Only after his election did it become clear to voters that his good-natured "spread
the wealth around" song and dance really implied an iron-fisted confiscatory
scheme in which government takes everything and doles it out to favored
constituencies first, leaving crumbs for the rest. Now they think differently, and
both the president and his party are being regularly painted with the "socialist"
brush. Unless that perception can be changed, the Democratic party alone
can simply not re-elect Obama to the presidency.
So far, there is no concession from the president that he blew it, that his policies
are ineffective or that he needs a new direction. Instead, we hear that the problem
is poor communication, that voters don't perceive his brilliance, that voters are
ignorant or scared or led astray by his opponents and that no substantive change
is in order. If he truly believes that, he is delusional and term-limited.
Plato explained knowledge and ignorance in his allegory of the cave. In it, men
were chained in a cave. Between them and the entrance to the cave was a brightly
burning fire. Between the fire and the men walked others carrying various objects.
But since the slaves were chained facing the wall, and gazing into semi-darkness,
all they could do is see the shadows on the wall of the walkers and the objects they
were carrying. To break the boredom, they began naming the shadows. One day,
one of the slaves escaped the cave, and running out into the light of day was
utrely amazed because for the first time he was not seeing shaodows, but reality.
Elated by his discovery, he felt obligated to sneak back into the cave and share
his newfound knowledge with his old friends. But when he did so they laughed
at him, mocked him and even accused him of lying, because he suggested that
the shadows that constituted their reality were only poor and vague images of
what was really out there.
Barack Obama needs to read Plato, and learn. While the mid-terms were a
strong dose of reality (what's really out there), profressives will only ridicule him
if he suggests that they are chasing shadows. So he has a choice. Does he want
to remain in the cave, go down to ignominious defeat and see his presidency
relegated to the hostorical scrap heap of failure? Or does he want to acknowldge
reality, quit chasing the shadows of utopian socialism and free himself from
allegiance to those who embrace those chains? Does he want to be the
Progressives' president, or does he want to be the people's president? And is
the man who is allegedly so smart, really smart enough to understand that he
can't have it both ways?