No panic yet, but real fear
By Wesley Pruden
PruddenPolitics.com
The 2012 presidential marathon is on, and one
mainstream pollster (Rasmussen) says a Republican
apparition is opening up a lead on President Obama.
(Any Republican 46 percent, Barack Obama 42
percent.) A growing number of Democrats figure that
whoever can keep his head in the rattle and bang of
unexpected events just doesn’t understand the
situation.
Republicans tempted to indulge in excessive
giddiness should remember this is akin to fantasy
football. A poll is a snapshot, and snapshots can
deceive. Tomorrow is another day, to quote the
estimable Mrs. Scarlett O’Hara Butler, and the
chickens of ‘12 are not nearly ready to count. But
snapshots of Mr. Obama’s landscape, taken on the eve
of the Fourth of July weekend, aren’t something he
wants to post in the family scrapbook, either.
If the president is not yet in full panic mode, he’s
right to be running scared. Class warfare is the
Democratic default mode, and Mr. Obama is looking
for the panic button earlier than incumbents usually
do. He warns darkly of many bad things—“significant
and unpredictable consequences”—unless Republicans
agree to raise the debt limit and stand by to raise
taxes.
The chickens of ‘12 are not nearly ready to count,
but the president is right to be running scared.
Mr. Obama has dropped his trademark professorial
approach to the bully pulpit, his long and
convoluted sentences that loop, twist and turn in
search of something to say. He’s serving up plainer
speech. His aides explain that he has been studying
Ronald Reagan for tips on how to better communicate,
forgetting that the good-natured Great Communicator
actually had something cheerful to communicate. This
week, chiding Congress for taking too much time off,
he employed his two daughters as stage props, saying
their approach to getting their homework done on
time could be a model for lazy congressmen working
on the budget. He sounded less like the Gipper and
more like Jimmy Carter turning to little Amy for
advice on how to deal with the threat of “nukular”
war. (We thought the president had a gentleman’s
agreement with the press to keep presidential
children—cute, feisty and able to set an example for
their elders as they may be—out of the harsh
politics of Washington.)
The president resorted to the politics of City Hall
in his Wednesday press conference, railing six times
against tax breaks for owners of corporate jet
planes, and warning of gloom and doom for “a bunch
of kids out there who are not getting college
scholarships” if tax loopholes are not closed on
corporate riders and oil companies “making money
hand over fist.” The president also appears to have
been studying the mayor who warned that “brutal”
budget economy would force him to close the
orphanage.
The president’s acolytes are howling calamity even
louder than he is. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York
hops first on one foot and then the other in the
manner of a little boy resisting the urge to dash to
the bathroom. He boasts that the Democrats have the
upper hand in the budget negotiations, but hops
across the line into hysteria country to accuse
Republicans of deliberately sabotaging the economy
just to win the 2012 elections. “It is becoming
clear that insisting on a slash-and-burn approach
may be part of this plan . . . which they think only
helps them in 2012,” he told the Economic Policy
Institute in Washington.
Bill Clinton, who is no longer president except in
his own mind, suggests that the solution to the
budget dilemma is to agree to both cut spending and
raise taxes, but not actually do either one. “What
I’d like to see them do is agree on the outlines of
a 10-year plan and agree not to start either
[raising taxes] or the spending cuts until we’ve go
this recovery underway,” Bubba told ABC News in
Chicago, where he is holding forth at something
called the “Clinton Global Initiative.” Finally, a
plan—promising something and then not delivering—any
politician could master.
And here comes the apparition, slowly becoming
flesh. The Republican field is sorting itself out,
as presidential fields always do. Only a month ago,
anyone would have imagined there might not be an
audience this season because everyone was a player
on stage. Now Mitt Romney, steady as she goes but a
little shopworn; Michelle Bachmann, improving with
experience; and Rick Perry, maybe a Texas messiah
and maybe not, are all the buzz. Tim Pawlenty, Newt
Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, like vaudevillians who
couldn’t quite play Peoria, seem to have been jerked
back to obscurity by the man with the hook. Of
course, there’s always tomorrow.