The failure of of
liberal gods
By Wesley Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
The gods of the liberals—“progressives,” as they
insist on calling themselves this season—are failing
all over the place. Restless natives are rioting in
London. Peasants are getting rich selling 90-proof
Oolong in Washington. The elites are “unsettled,” as
elites always are, in a lot of places between.
The “progressives” are particularly frightened by
Barack Obama’s prospects for expanding the debacle
he wrought in Washington. They haven’t yet come to
terms with the fact that it’s not just the man, but
his fraudulent message. Another speech won’t
accomplish anything more than another national
shrug.
“He’s a do-gooder at heart,” a former official in
the Clinton administration and now one of the
consultants who make a good living dispensing cheap
wisdom and other profundities, tells the London
Daily Telegraph. “He thinks everyone has the same
agenda to do the right thing, but other people don’t
have the same agenda. Their agenda is to score
points and get their party re-elected. This is the
downside of him not being terribly political like
Bill Clinton. Bill woke up every day relishing this
kind of fight, and Hillary is just a tougher person.
The Clinton are much more combative. They’re always
ready to go to Defcon 1.” Defcon 1, as every
Washington slinger of insider slang knows, is
Pentagon talk for “war is imminent.”
Obama’s not political enough? “Bill woke up every
day relishing this kind of fight” says a former
Clinton aide.
The terror that dare not speak its name is not yet
Barack Obama (the left is getting there), but Jimmy
Carter. Mr. Jimmy is the president’s mortal twin,
the doppelganger the White House tries to keep to
shelling peanuts in the basement. The Obama approval
ratings, as reckoned by the pollsters, are sinking
well into the neighborhood where Mr. Jimmy dwelt for
one miserable term. Gallup reckons the Obama number
is flirting with the 40-percent mark. Rasmussen
posts a similar finding.
Gallup finds even scarier signs and omens in its
plumbing of sentiments of religious folk. By far the
friendliest are the Muslims, who make up only a
fragment of the population and who, fairly or not,
are the religious folks who frighten everybody.
Eighty percent of Muslims think Mr. Obama is doing a
good job as president, compared to 65 percent of the
Jews, 60 percent of the atheists (who yearn
recognition as a sort of religion), 50 percent of
the Catholics, 37 percent of the Protestants and 25
percent of the Mormons.
Anyone paying proper attention to what’s causing Mr.
Obama’s trouble has concluded that the stuff
everyone got drunk on in 2008 was poison moonshine.
The portents abound, in the prospects of incumbent
mayors, governors and senators. The easy ride is
over, and the future of easy riders is dark and
bleak. But the land is nevertheless littered with
those unable to learn the lessons taught by
Experience. Theory, after all, grades on an easier
curve.
The chattering class is drinking deeply just now of
an elixir peddled by Drew Westen, a professor of
psychology at Emory University, and author of an
op-ed essay in the New York Times suggesting that
all the nation needs is better bedtime stories from
the president. “The stories our leaders tell us
matter, probably almost as much as the stories our
parents tell us as children, because they orient us
to what is, what could be, and what should be; to
the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold
sacred . . . Children crave bedtime stories.”
If only President Obama would let him write the
bedtime stories the professor could help the
president put the children to sleep happy, contented
and oblivious to the harsh vicissitudes of reality.
All those unhappy American children want is “a
clear, compelling alternative to the dominant
narrative of the right.” They want to be reassured
that the problem was not caused by “tax-and-spend
liberalism,” as common sense is telling them, but by
. . . George W. Bush.
This is a familiar pot of mush from a wimp, like
Jimmy Carter’s much-mocked malaise, but it’s mush
that still finds an appetite on the left. The
professor’s op-ed has been much e-mailed, whizzing
about the Internet at the speed of fright since it
first appeared in the New York Times a week ago. A
“progressive” just can’t understand how anyone so
kind, so compassionate, so educated, so
tender-hearted, so like himself, could be so
misinformed about a man who so many wise and good
people drooled over for so long. The humiliation of
the “progressives” is the realization that such
loathsome folk as Tea Party voters are smarter than
they are, and were never fooled by the man.