The Progressive Pajama Boy Era is Over
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Obama’s approval ratings and MSNBC’s viewer
ratings are in a close race to the bottom of Death
Valley. It’s only a question of which set of
obnoxious hipsters with a head full of bad policy
ideas and no real life experience will be fired
first; the Maddow crew or the White House staff.
The progressive pajama boy era is over. The
asexual messenger bag toting wonk has met an ISIS
Jihadist and run home to its non-traditional family.
Liberalism isn’t over, but its contenders are trying
to butch up their act.
The second coming of Hillary is accompanied by
bellicose rhetoric about Putin and Syria. Leon
Panetta, her gnomish errand boy, is sneering at
Obama as an egghead too busy dithering about what
not to do to be able to actually do anything about
ISIS.
Democrats are adjusting to a new reality of less
nuance and more centrist politics. So is MSNBC.
If Obama loses the Senate, then his leftist backers
also lose their death grip on the Democratic Party.
And that’s why they’re panicking so badly.
Progressives proved that money and media bias could
let them get away with anything. But then they lost
in 2010, barely hung on in 2012 and are heading for
a beating in 2014. If they can’t buy the Senate now,
the Democratic Party will have to correct its
course.
A sober analysis of the Big Billionaire Left shows
that they were good at getting Obama elected, but
not much else. Like the USSR, they could pour a lot
of energy and capital into inefficiently getting one
big thing done, but they aren’t much good at doing a
lot of little things. Their hijacking of democracy
ran into trouble the moment they tried to push past
the White House. It was only the White House’s
hijacking of democracy by trying to function as a
unilateral dictatorship of pen and phone that
extended their influence beyond their initial defeat
in 2010. And that came with its own price in
popularity.
Obama’s arrogance isolated him politically. He
insisted on running everything and is stuck with the
bill. In countless speeches he demanded more power
and authority; his sinking approval ratings reflect
the growing willingness of even his own supporters
to hold him responsible for his unilateral
policymaking.
As the election approaches everything that could
have gone wrong has gone wrong. Not only did Obama’s
aggressive efforts to stoke racial unrest on the
border and in Ferguson to turn out the minority
voters who generally sit out midterm elections
backfire, but the resulting messes deepened the
popular impression that he was in over his head. Now
instead of pivoting from Global Warming to a minimum
wage to some offensive thing that some local
Republican somewhere said, the media is stuck in an
Ebola-ISIS cycle that reminds Americans on a daily
basis that everything really is out of control.
The critiques from even friendly media outlets keep
throwing around words and terms like “detached”, “in
over his head”, “flailing” and “too smart for his
own good”. That word salad adds up to the same
message as the one being peddled by Leon Panetta;
America needs strong experienced leadership.
And Obama isn’t it.
Obama is already receding into the imagination of
liberals as the youthful folly of a political Age of
Aquarius when millennials tried to levitate the
Pentagon by electing a brash inexperienced community
organizer to fix the world. They are writing him off
as an act of political naiveté by a war-traumatized
generation still unaware of the practical limits of
the real world.
And that infuriates and terrifies the left worse
than anything else. The left can thrive on
hostility, but it hates being dismissed by its
fellow travelers as naive idealists who don’t
understand the real world.
But that’s the historical revisionism that had
been prepped and waiting in the wings all along for
Obama. What the right does wrong is always
attributed to malice, while the left’s worst
atrocities from the Gulags to the killing fields are
put down to idealism gone wrong. Obama takes his
place somewhere between Mao and Eugene McCarthy as
the Democratic Party rushes to reinvent itself as
the adult party of serious experienced political
leaders like Hillary Clinton. Its message is that
it’s time for the Obama pajama boys to grow up and
compromise on their progressive politics by voting
for Hillary in 2016.
The left has few options left. Money can only buy so
many votes. If Obama’s base stays home, then the
magical turnout operation starts looking like a lot
of political consultants taking credit for the Oprah
tilt of black women coming out to vote for Obama.
And there is no obvious replacement for Obama.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio was supposed
to inaugurate a new era of progressive politics by
pushing so far to the left as to make Obama look
like Bob Dole. Instead Bill de Blasio has been
tagged by the same progressive incompetent moniker
as Obama. The analogy is being drawn explicitly by
liberals even in left-of-center publications like
the New York Times and the Daily News.
Bill de Blasio didn’t extend the progressive
lifespan. He was elected just in time for everyone
to be primed to expect the Obama progressive cycle
of self-righteous cover-ups, thin-skinned media wars
and grandiose policy announcements that go nowhere.
The political future of the progressive mayor has
been Obamanized off the scene. And that leaves few
great hopes for the progressive cause.
Elizabeth Warren still fakes left, but she seems to
know her limitations. 2018’s midterm election
without a president on the ballot and a different
demographic makeup for the electorate could easily
topple her. If she tried for the big chair, she
would be run over by harder Democrat candidates
faking centrist. And without Warren, all that’s left
are clown acts like Bernie Sanders and Seattle
Socialist Kshama Sawant.
The progressive resurgence was powered by leftist
billionaires and non-profits chasing power. They
have the money and the organization, but they don’t
have the candidates. Six years of Obama produced
compelling conservative figures like Ted Cruz, Trey
Gowdy and Mike Lee. There’s no equivalent to them on
the left. It’s why liberal billionaire election
spending is characterized more by the candidates
that they are against rather than the ones that they
are for. They have spent so much time and money
battling the Tea Party that they have failed to
build a post-Obama political future for their
movement.
The left isn’t going anywhere, but its current
incarnation as the party of diversely wimpy
progressives who compensate for their lack of
experience with their enthusiasm and their political
connections is. Obama has done a great deal for the
political agendas of the left while doing a great
deal of damage to the political ambitions of the
Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party won’t
forget that. Obama was thinking about transforming
America, but the Democratic Party is thinking about
the next four years.
The liberal verdict on the age of Obama has been
written. It may change with history, but for now the
Hope and Change period will be praised for its
idealism and its innovative political organizing,
but dismissed for its policy incompetence and its
inability to listen to voices outside its bubble. It
was an elitist phenomenon whose diversity was faked
with media imagery and the party will now work to
try and recapture its lost position among the rest
of the country, particularly among white Democrats.
The progressive will continue to haunt American
politics, but his current hipster incarnation is
headed for extinction.