Iraq, immigration, inversion. On all three of the issues
referred to, President Obama finds himself forced by events to do
something he dislikes -- and he's in trouble with much of his Democratic
Party base for doing so.
Obama seemed ill at ease before the
camera and teleprompter on the evening of Sept. 10. Sending troops into
Iraq and Syria is probably the last thing he expected to do when he set
out running for president in 2007.
He still insists that he
will send in "no ground troops," though it appears that hundreds of U.S.
military personnel are literally on the ground in Iraq. He seems still
not to understand that publicly ruling out an alternative means that
your enemies know your plans -- and can take advantage of them.
But
that's not enough to propitiate at least some Democrats who supported
Obama fervently because they believed he would remove U.S. troops from
the Middle East and never send them back there.
One of his
chief advantages over Hillary Clinton in 2008 was her vote for the Iraq
war resolution in 2002 and Obama's opposition to it, albeit as a state
senator from an overwhelmingly Democratic district.
In the
late 1960s, Democrats switched from being the more hawkish of our two
parties, more likely to support military interventions and commitments,
to being the more dovish. Visceral opposition to military action, and
suspicion that even the most limited such action will lead to massive
war, is deeply implanted in many Democratic voters.
You can
expect, therefore, a skittish reaction to Obama's announcement of a
military escalation from senatorial and congressional candidates in
states with dovish Democratic electorates such as Colorado and Iowa. We
may also see depressed turnout of Democratic doves all over the country
in November.
It is apparent that Obama's decision to take
military action against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, however
limited, came despite his deep-seated feelings and was forced on him by
events. American voters do not take kindly to videotaped beheadings of
Americans. It unleashes a Jacksonian impulse to wipe the people who do
these things off the face of the earth.
Obama, like his
predecessor, likes to depict Islam as a religion of peace. An unhappily
large number of Muslims, however, have other ideas. Their aggression and
immunity to appeasement have forced the president to take actions that
he, like many of his fellow Democrats, abhors.
On immigration,
Obama has found himself again forced to disappoint a core constituency.
On June 30, he met with immigration advocates -- that is to say, heads
of groups that favor legalization of large numbers of illegal
immigrants.
He let them know, and authorized his aides to let
the world know, that he intended to issue by summer's end an executive
order legalizing perhaps as many as 10 million. He did so even though
there's videotape of him telling Univision in March 2011 that such an
order would "ignore" laws passed by Congress and to "ignore those
congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as
president."
Obama's breathtaking willingness to signal an
intention to violate his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the
law drew some unfavorable but muted attention. But it gained more
attention as tens of thousands of underage (and adult) illegal migrants
from Central America started streaming across the Rio Grande.
That
vast movement undercut the argument that legalizing one group of
illegals would not create incentives for more to cross the border. Now
Obama says he won't act till after November's election, if then, leaving
legalization advocates "bitterly disappointed in the president and
Democrats."
Iraq and immigration are familiar issues.
Inversions -- merging companies seeking foreign domiciles to partially
avoid the U.S. 35 percent corporate tax -- are not. Inversions happen
because the U.S. has the world's highest corporate tax rate, a problem
even Obama has said should be fixed.
But he has made no
serious attempt at negotiating reform with the willing chairmen of the
tax-writing committees. So instead, Democrats are demagoguing
"unpatriotic" corporations and threatening to re-tax transactions going
back to 1994.
Unfortunately for them, as three Politico
reporters conclude, "the issue has turned out to be pretty much a
massive dud." The fact that Obama supporter Warren Buffett financed the
Burger King-Tim Hortons inversion didn't help.
On Iraq,
immigration and inversion, events have forced Obama into embarrassing
reversals that disillusion his base and leave others unconvinced. Hope
and change?
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