by Victor Davis Hanson
Adding straws of scandal — Fast and Furious, the Associated Press
monitoring, the IRS fiasco, and the NSA spying — on any presidential back
except Barack Obama’s would have long ago broken it. Watergate ruined Richard
Nixon. Iran-Contra earned a special prosecutor and nearly destroyed the Reagan
second term. Katrina’s incompetent local and state reactions, coupled with a
tardy federal effort — and the insurgency in postwar Iraq — ended the
viability of George W. Bush in his second term.
Second, well apart from scandal, the perception of presidential
lying usually ends presidential agendas. Richard Nixon resigned after never
telling the truth about the Watergate cover-up. “Read my lips: no new taxes”
cost George H.W. Bush his
reelection. “I did not have sex with that woman” made Bill Clinton’s
impeachment likely.
Yet Barack Obama on more than 20 occasions assured the American
people that they could keep their existing health care coverage and their
present doctor — and still save $2,500 a year per family. He knew those fables
were absolutely untrue when he repeated them serially in the reelection cycle
of 2012. Yet Obama has not faced any of the fallout of the sort that greeted
his predecessors, even as the wreckage of the Affordable Care Act will affect
the health of Americans in ways that transcend taxes or Oval Office sex.
Instead, the healthcare falsity — in the manner that the NSA
disclosures were just more of the same old IRS and AP scandals — joins a litany
of other untruths: the constant insistence that the Benghazi deaths were due to
a video, dissimulation about ending the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols,
the closing of Guantanamo, the “summer of recovery” after the stimulus, halving
the national debt by the and of the first term, and the promised plunge in
unemployment. Again — so what that the president does not tell the truth?
Third, the public is also indifferent to incompetence. Lying is not
just what should sink Obamacare. Instead, its premises — young people will rush
to sign up for something at higher costs that they rarely use to subsidize
those who pay less and use it a lot, along with more coverage for more people
at less cost — are contrary to basic logic.
Law? What Law?
Obamacare is the domestic bookend to the Syria foreign policy
mess, where likewise the president made serial statements about red lines and
game changers that were false, and never came clean about his own confusion.
After the invasion of Afghanistan, the growth of communism in Central
America, the fall of the shah, the oil embargoes, and the storming of the U.S.
embassy in Tehran, Jimmy Carter was entirely discredited as a world leader. Yet
those fiascos pale in comparison to a failed reset, the Libya debacle, the
Egyptian flip-flop, the Syria backdown, the latest Iranian deal, the alienation
of Israel and the Gulf states, and rising tensions in the South China Sea.
As far as the law, what law? The president has established that he
can nullify it by edict, even his own employer mandate and the statutory
timetable of Obamacare. Federal immigration law has become a sort of Defense of
Marriage Act non-statute. In comparison, George Bush’s meek “signing
statements” caused a liberal uproar and drew the ire of constitutional law
lecturer Barack Obama. Do we remember the liberal outrage back then of a Sen.
Dianne Feinstein? (In 2oo6, the San
Francisco Democrat said, “If the president is going to have the
power to nullify all or part of a statute, it should only be through veto
authority that the president has authorized and can reject — rather than
through a unilateral action taken outside the structures of our democracy.”)
So why are the Obama polls still at about a 40% approval rating?
In a word, President Obama is not to be judged by traditional criteria. At some
point as a candidate in 2008 he achieved iconic status, which has made him
immune from presidential audit.
As the first non-white president, Obama’s trajectory was not just
seen as positive for the United States, but also his potential failure was
feared as a
collective setback. Obama brilliantly threaded the racial needle,
serially reestablishing his fides as a minority candidate by weighing in unnecessarily
in the Professor Gates psychodrama and the Trayvon Martin case, while offering
soaring boilerplate about a racially blind and united America. The result was
counter-intuitive: blacks, for example, could vote in unprecedented numbers on
the basis of shared racial solidarity, while millions of whites who might be
skeptical of his preparation, experience, and competence likewise could
fixate on race: Obama’s presidency was good for the stability of the country or
at least allowed them to feel good about soothing racial tensions while having
to change little in their own lives.
Second, Obama changed the criteria of judging the presidency. Now
it was not a question of performance but of intent, not of deeds but of words,
not of a record but of an agenda. In this regard, Obama sized up the American
electorate. He saw it not just as a red/blue or Republican/Democrat divide, but
rather as an entire host of mini-antagonisms. An us/them boilerplate could be
demagogued onto each of these divides, and thereby achieve a 51% majority
consensus.
Gay marriage was not an issue in 2008, at least in the sense that
Barack Obama opposed it. By 2012, civil unions and pledges of nondiscrimination
were passé.
Suddenly whether one supported gays marrying in the exact fashion as
heterosexuals made him hip or homophobic.
Solyndra and its epigones were failures. Keystone probably would
save fuel and prevent accidents. Greater natural gas production from federal
lands would reduce air pollution. Global warming is a legitimate debate, given
the lack of planet heating in the last 15 years. No matter: “wind, solar and
millions of green jobs” sloganeering made some into Neanderthal polluters while
others could become cool greens.
Young people were decimated by the Obama agenda from massive
borrowing, static growth, and serial 7%+ unemployment. Again, so what? In this
new divide, the properly cool were more likely for abortion on demand and free
contraceptives, and were cozy with rappers and hipsters; others were bitter old
fogies.
The One Percent, the 99 Percent, and the 47 Percent
Race was another fissure. In 2008 and 2012 the word “old” flooded
the airwaves and the web in association with “white.” In this new trumped-up
war, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and good whites were opposed to the virtual
neo-confederates who clung to the vestiges of unwarranted privilege. Old was
supposed to be tantamount to “in the way.”
The one percenters were to be cut off from the 99%. It did not
matter again that America’s most affluent counties voted typically for blue
candidates, or that Obama raised more one-percenter money than any previous
candidate. In this old war between rich and poor, there was also a new Obama
wrinkle: the good rich who lived in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, who were
generous like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and the old bad rich who
trafficked in carbon fuels and ran casinos like the Koch brothers and Sheldon
Adelson. In other words, only with Obama could you be rich and good at the same
time, like a grandee of the Middle Ages who might safely maintain his keep and
bailey by purchasing his exemptions from the local Church potentate.
Obama captivated the media in a way that trumped even the old
JFK/Camelot fixation. Even their present and temporary partial disenchantment
will soon pass, given that it arises not from true anger at or a sense of
betrayal by Obama, but only from passing embarrassment that it is not wise to
continue to act as state megaphones when the president’s approval polls
temporarily hover at 40%.
With Obama for the first time since the era of FDR, the liberal
media envisioned a presidential candidate who was an ideological warrior and
yet at last had a chance to win, due to his youth, charisma, and race. For the
media, they saw an opportunity that would not be seen again in their lifetimes.
To pursue Benghazi or the IRS scandal or to investigate the text of Obamacare
in 2010 was somehow to set back race relations, the environment, the 99% and
all those who had claims against the traditional conservative hierarchy.
Finally, Mitt Romney was naïve but not wrong in invoking the 47%
barrier. Republicans keep whining about the unsustainable debt, the
out-of-control expansions of food stamps and disability insurance, the need for
tax reform, and the disaster of Obamacare.
But disaster for whom?
Do those who pay no federal income tax want the present exemption
“reformed”? Does the half on federal support worry about the cost? Will those
who receive redistributed health care object? For the half who are not paying
income taxes and are likely to received federal redistribution, “they” — the
rich, the polluters, the racists, the homophobes, the sexists, the nativists,
the old guys — will have to worry about paying the debt. Obama is a sort of
payback for our sins. And if the only way to force the privileged to pony up
what they owe is to borrow huge sums of money, then so be it and let those who
deserve to pay it back one day pay it back.
In short, judging Obama on what he achieves is about as helpful as
evaluating Miley Cyrus on her dancing ability, or Kanye West on his poetic
talent, or Kim Kardashian on her acting prowess. A totem need not be real. It
only requires a “suspension of disbelief.”
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