I thought Dick Morris and Charles Hurt had interesting things to say on last night’s election results. Gay marriage lost in Maine, which suggests the momentum of this judge-and-elite-driven social change may be losing steam. Republicans won the governorship of Virginia, which is an Obama swing state and the home of a long stretch of DC suburbs, by a whopping 18%. The economy and a lack of confidence in Obama’s leadership I presume were important factors.
I think this just confirms what I already suspected. While Obama excited many people, much of his support was thin, driven more by personality, the projection of hopes of improved race relations, and concern for McCain’s erratic character and politics. Further, Obama has deviated from what he promised to be: a pragmatic and moderate “uniter.”
This series of interrelated outcomes should not be terribly surprising. The media did a lot to conceal Obama’s past, including playing along with his “et tu Brute” take on his long-time minister. The media basically suppressed the Bill Ayers’ controversy. And the media hardly noticed that Obama and his staff all cut their teeth in the nihilistic world of Chicago politics, where the name of the game was ethnic spoils and power more than idealism. To the extent there was idealism in this town, it was the socialist idealism so common in Hyde Park. People outside of the University of Chicago don’t realize that it’s as liberal and conventional a university town as any other and that the conservatives and Milton Friedman types all knew each other and could fit inside the Home Room of the International House, where we occasionally met. Everyone else was your basic extreme “progressive” and books about transgenderism and “Bombing the Suburbs” and support for gun control and other un-American ideas were common fare in the ‘hood.
Obama is an extreme liberal whose agenda is increasingly unpopular and who has implemented plans–such as the stimulus–that are not working. The recent elections and next years’ congressional elections are, in effect, referenda on Obamanism and its results. The best case scenario would be his and his liberalism’s thorough discreditment, though the incoherence and unwillingess to make tough choices by the American electorate will likely give it a new lease on life regardless of what happens in 2010 or 2012. Austerity doesn’t sell for very long. If Republicans are fighting for immigration amnesty, democratizing Iraq, overly generous Medicare, and other unsustainable subsidies, it hardly bodes well for the leave-me-alone coalition.
Democracies are inherently unstable and inimical to liberty in the long run, as William Lecky observed so well over 100 years ago.
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