Is Obama Finished?

Is Obama Finished?

The conventional wisdom is in and the verdict is unanimous: The Republicans ran roughshod over President Obama in the laborious debt-ceiling/budget debate and his prospects for re-election are now looking fairly remote. In addition, the Tea Party has emerged as the most powerful force in American politics, having totally eliminated tax hikes as part of the solution to cutting the deficit while striking a devastating blow against the usefulness of government in general and the spineless Obama in particular. Plus, troops are still dying in Afghanistan and Standard & Poor’s just lowered the boom.

What’s more there’s evidence that the limpid Left may be in revolt. Among other things, the ghastly visage of Ralph Nader – the addled egomaniac that Michael Moore and other “progressives” backed in 2000 – has been spotted in the media spouting his own peculiar brand of self-serving political psychobabble and hinting at another presidential run. The lefty blogosphere (also known as the Political Amateur Hour) is moaning about how they have been let down and duped by the duplicitous Obama and now appear committed to hold their breath until they turn purple because nobody knows the troubles they’ve seen.

“What happened to the change we voted for,” they will wail incessantly like beaten seals. A boycott of the election will be called for. Having worked so hard only to be betrayed yet again by a centrist masquerading as a liberal, they will chant, “Fool us a bunch of times and shame on us.” Keith Olbermann will deliver a series of angrily narcissistic “Special Comments” on Obama’s failings to his Current TV audience of three or four dozen people. In other words, it will be just another day at the office for the increasingly irrelevant Left.

Now all of this is well and good and serves as a kind of gristle for ideological masturbation and the perverse joys of righteous self-pity. And to all those who wallow in the ooze of that particularly sticky morass, I can only urge them to knock themselves out since the only thing that really matters now is what will happen in November 2012, which I hope and pray will be Obama’s re-election. (Note: Very early in life I swore to what I call the Political Hippocratic Oath, which instructs “First, elect no Republicans,” and I see no reason to waver from that sacred vow.)

As things look now, the Republican nominee will either be Mitt Romney or Governor Rick Perry of Texas. These are the two Republicans who would have the best chance of beating Obama, and then only if the economy is in bad shape next year — which seems more likely after the debt-ceiling debacle that saw the Tea Party-led GOP succeed in insuring that economic growth over the next year will be sluggish at best.

Romney has big problems with the evangelicals (because he’s a Mormon) and the Tea-Partiers (because he’s a moderate). He also fails to generate any real enthusiasm from anyone, something Perry should be able to do with his popularity among the “Teavangelicals.” Both should have solid support within the Republican establishment and both should be able to make a decent case for themselves as being capable handlers of the economy. On paper, Perry looks like the ideal candidate because of the enthusiasm he could produce and Romney’s negatives among the right-wing GOP base, which Mitt could shore up only slightly by choosing someone like Senator Marco Rubio as his running mate. Perry, however, is unproven nationally and could fall on his face in the primaries.

No matter who the Republican candidate is, Obama’s biggest assets in 2012 will be the serious flaws in his opponent coupled with the kamikaze hubris of the Tea Party. But these factors alone will not be enough to garner a victory unless the President wiggles out of his shell and does a lot more than tell a prime-time audience to contact their congressman. Black activist/intellectual Michael Eric Dyson says that Obama can’t act too aggressively because – as an African-American male – he can’t be seen as being too threatening. Nonsense. No one will ever mistake Obama for Shaft, but he does have to at least show he has a pulse, something which was not on display during the debt-ceiling fiasco.

Whether or not Obama gets his style-and-substance act together enough to suit his harshest progressive critics, there should be absolutely no earthly reason why most traditional Dem interest groups would fail to enthusiastically support him over his Republican opponent. For those African Americans and young voters mired in hand-wringing related to buyers’ remorse, I say get over it. These constituencies need to keep in mind that with 23 out of the 33 senators up for election in 2012 being Democrats, the Senate will probably go Republican, leaving only the Executive branch standing between America and possibly eight years of right-wing Armageddon. And that’s no joke.

If senior citizens haven’t been spooked by the Republican plans to end Medicare and privatize Social Security, they need to have their wrinkled heads examined. Because no matter what MSNBC’s Ed Schultz says, making the alterations in entitlement programs that Obama has hinted he would support is NOT comparable to the GOP’s desire to nuke them. The Dems still have a mammoth edge in the voters’ minds on these issues and must take electoral advantage of that fact. That’s why it’s imperative that seniors should not let themselves be duped – by the Left or the Right – into thinking there’s no difference between the parties on entitlements and must come out in full force to thwart the R’s.

If union members haven’t been scared straight by the efforts of newly elected Republican governors to destroy collective bargaining, they might as well continue to Reagan-Democrat their way into oblivion and get it over with. They can moan all they want about “Card Check” and play footsie with voting with their feet because they feel slighted by the Dems, but unless they have a hankering for extinction, they need to flood the voting booths for Obama.

If Latinos haven’t had the bejeezus frightened out of them by the draconian efforts undertaken against them by the lynch mob masquerading as the GOP, they need to pray to Our Lady of Guadalupe for a little guidance. Unless they want to have nationalized something like the bill now being pushed by Rick Perry which, in the words of a Democratic state senator from Texas, “is open season on Latinos… the most racist, Latino bashing, anti-immigrant bill I’ve ever seen,” they better vote en masse for Obama.

And if pro-choice women haven’t been traumatized by the blizzard of legislation being put forth all over the country by Republican-governed states to shred abortion rights with an eye toward criminalizing the surgical procedure, perhaps they should dust off a copy of The Feminine Mystique. Unless they want a future in which reproductive rights are relegated to the back alley, they better stop snoozing and mobilize to elect pro-choice candidates.

For these constituencies and others this really isn’t about Obama, it’s about self-preservation. If they dither or bail or get sucked into the “I’m tired of choosing between the lesser of two evils” glory hole, they have no one to blame but themselves for the hell into which this country will plunge if Obama is defeated.

Now some on the hard Left may want this doomsday result, believing that only with total destruction will a brave new “progressive” world emerge. Let’s hope most folks aren’t that stupid.

 

Larry Durstin is an independent journalist who has covered politics and sports for a variety of publications and websites over the past 20 years. He was the founding editor of the Cleveland Tab and an associate editor at the Cleveland Free Times. Durstin has won 12 Ohio Excellence in Journalism awards, including six first places in six different writing categories. LarryDurstinATyahoo.com

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