Can Obama Be Stopped?
February 28, 2013 By
Daniel Greenfield
There’s
nothing like losing a war to destroy morale. The Republican defeats in
2008 and 2012 have convinced much of its leadership that the future lies
with the left. They are not debating whether to concede defeat, but
which territories of principle to surrender.
These political Darwins are frantically rooting through the
Democratic trash cans in search of new evolutionary pathways. Amnesty is
being railroaded through in the middle of the night. Some call for
abandoning social conservatism. Others call for abandoning fiscal
conservatism. If both sides get their way, the Republican Party will end
up evolving into the Democratic Party.
The big mistake of the last election was assuming that public
dissatisfaction with Obama would be enough to remove him. Reagan’s
defeat of Carter was frequently invoked without understanding that
Reagan’s victory lay in his ability to communicate to the public why
they were worse off now and why they would be better off with a change
of government, not in some abstract national sense, but in a way that
would directly impact their wallets. Reagan focused on inflation. What
did Romney focus on?
Believing in historical inevitability is usually a leftist fallacy,
but this time around it was the Republicans who approached an election
from the standpoint of historical inevitability. While Romney talked
about the big national issues, Obama turned his entire campaign into a
targeted voter turnout operation. The messiah of 2008 morphed back into
the community organizer in 2012.
Obama’s worldview did not win. Not in 2008 or 2012. His tactics did.
The Republican Party does not have to evolve or devolve into the
Democratic Party. What it must do is learn to connect with voters.
The seeds of defeat in 2012 were planted after the midterm election.
After his midterm defeat, Obama Inc.’s goal was to make the new
Republican Congress appear useless and irrelevant. For the next two
years, Obama Inc. portrayed Republicans as useless wranglers who were
not interested in actually getting anything done that would benefit
people. That portrayal was sent up from the think-tanks, passed through
the political leadership and marinated in the media.
During the first debate, the public briefly saw a Romney who did not
fit that profile, but it was too little too late. What they had seen for
the last two years was futile argument. And that is still what they are
seeing now.
Obama understands that the ability to set the agenda is what counts.
He does not view the battle as procedural and cares very little for
process even when it is enshrined in the Constitution. As a former
community organizer, he understands that it is the power to set the
agenda in the mind of the public that counts and that once that is done,
legal procedures become a formality that can be swept aside. So long as
he can determine what the urgent task that needs doing now is, all else
becomes irrelevant.
The Republican Congress of 1994 understood that setting the public
agenda mattered more than anything else. They were eventually
outmaneuvered by Clinton, but only at the cost of making their agenda
his. Our Republican Congress is determined to pull off the opposite
maneuver; adopting Obama’s agenda and then trying to claim credit for
it. Not only are their odds of getting centrist credit for amnesty or
higher taxes utterly hopeless, but wanting credit for either one is not
a brilliant political maneuver; it’s a symptom of political decline.
Can Obama be stopped? He can, but it requires taking control of the
public agenda. In the current media environment that is extremely
difficult, but not impossible. The Tea Party won the argument on
ObamaCare by concentrating on populist protests and hammering home the
personal economic issues. The left eventually figured out how to
clumsily duplicate that effort with Occupy Wall Street.
The Republican Congress failed to define a public agenda that the
public would actually care about. While they briefly made Obama nervous
about the national debt, spending alone was not an issue that connected
with the public. And unlike Reagan, they failed to link it to family
finances in a compelling way.
Obama has a very simple playbook. 1. Create anxiety about an issue.
2. Demand action on it. 3. Hammer the Republicans for their inaction.
Every morning the news stories are largely a reflection of one of the
three phases of that strategy.
In this game, Republicans can either take the initiative or defend
their lack of action on the Obama agenda. What we are seeing lately is a
Republican Party that is constantly on the defensive, trying to explain
why they haven’t yet done what Obama wants them to do and how they
would have done it already if he didn’t keep on interrupting them.
The Republican Party does need to “evolve.” It needs to evolve into
becoming a predator, instead of its prey. What it doesn’t need to do is
adopt a Democratic agenda. That way lies one defeat after another as
every game becomes an away game played by rules that make winning all
but impossible.
The very act of “evolving” on a position is an admission of defeat.
It concedes that the other side is setting the policy priorities and the
best you can do is try to jump on their bandwagon. If you find yourself
having to evolve on a position, then you’re allowing yourself to be
drawn into the wrong argument.
Winning an argument against Obama is not impossible, but it begins
with the basics. People respond best to their own dollar-and-cent
issues. Reagan understood that vision has to be grounded in daily life.
The votes that count begin not with the big issues, but the little ones.
The politicians who can connect to the little issues are seen as
caring. Those who cannot may have the right answers and the better
vision, but they also have the uphill battle in any election.
When Bush I faced off against Clinton, he couldn’t handle a
ridiculous question about how the national debt had affected him
personally that Reagan would have finessed and that Clinton did fineness
with his infamous, “I feel your pain” line. It was a shameless moment,
but Republicans who can’t handle that question have no business even
trying out for the top spot.
Obama can be stopped and his policy agenda can be slowed down, but
doing that will require not just talking about small government, but
thinking in small government terms. Too many of the politicians who
preach small government, talk and think like big government. Small
government doesn’t begin with big plans, but with small ones. It begins
with helping people by taking on an issue that they care about.
With a Democratic Senate and a Democrat in the White House, the House
of Representatives may be crippled, but it can still forcefully advance
an agenda. Its greatest challenge is not choosing where to evolve, but
how to become relevant to a country that is searching for someone to
fight for them. If it learns to pick the right fights, then the game can
still change.
If the Republican Party wants to put its own stamp on the next two
years, it will have to pick a gut issue and turn that into the
centerpiece of an economic agenda. If it doesn’t, then Obama Inc. will
go on depicting it as useless and irrelevant.
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It’s Janet’s fault.
Illegal immigrations in a detention center in Georgia. (
Palm Beach Post)
The Obama Administration blamed Secretary of Homeland Security for the decision to
release hundreds of illegal immigrants in Texas, Louisiana and Florida.
They’re blaming Big Sis Janet Napolitano.
The Politico reported:
The White House was unaware of
Immigration Customs and Enforcement’s decision to release detainees
until the agency announced it, press secretary Jay Carney said
Wednesday.
“This was a decision made by a career officials at ICE
without any input from the White House, as a result of fiscal
uncertainty over the continuing resolution, as well as possible
sequestration,” Carney said.
- See more at:
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/02/white-house-blames-dhs-secretary-napolitano-for-releasing-waves-of-illegal-immigrants-this-week/#sthash.wNmdtCFk.dpuf
It’s Janet’s fault.
Illegal immigrations in a detention center in Georgia. (
Palm Beach Post)
The Obama Administration blamed Secretary of Homeland Security for the decision to
release hundreds of illegal immigrants in Texas, Louisiana and Florida.
They’re blaming Big Sis Janet Napolitano.
The Politico reported:
The White House was unaware of
Immigration Customs and Enforcement’s decision to release detainees
until the agency announced it, press secretary Jay Carney said
Wednesday.
“This was a decision made by a career officials at ICE
without any input from the White House, as a result of fiscal
uncertainty over the continuing resolution, as well as possible
sequestration,” Carney said.
- See
more at:
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/02/white-house-blames-dhs-secretary-napolitano-for-releasing-waves-of-illegal-immigrants-this-week/#sthash.wNmdtCFk.dpuf
