The Left Wing Spiral Trap
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on
DickMorris.com on July 7, 2010
Barak Obama faces about the same problem that confronted Bill
Clinton in 1994 when he lost control of Congress. In both cases, the
Democratic presidents had alienated moderate and conservative voters
and found themselves increasingly isolated with a political base of
liberals and minorities. In each instance, the president worried
that off-year election turnout among their base would be attenuated
both because it always is in non-presidential years and because
their policy failings had reduced the enthusiasm they found among
their base voters. And both men found themselves forced to escalate
their rhetoric and move their ideological positions to the left in
order to try to drum up the kind of turnout they needed to keep
power in Congress.
Clinton failed and Obama will too.
When President Clinton asked me to help him to move to the center to
win re-election in 1996, he said "I've moved so far to the left that
I don't even recognize myself." At heart a moderate while Obama is,
at core, a leftist, Clinton was alluding to the positions he had to
take to keep the support of his liberal House majority. Obama -- for
whom the further left he drifts the better -- has no such qualms but
the political impact of his move to the left will be just as fatal
for his Congressional majority as it was for Clintons'.
When a president moves leftward, a vicious cycle begins to set in.
Driven to raise the intensity of his rhetoric and to take positions
further to the extreme, he alienates more and more centrists and
moderates, forcing himself to rely more and more on left wing
voters. This reliance, in turn, fuels an ever more pronounced
leftward drift until he ends up with a vastly diminished political
base.
In Obama's case, his reliance on minority voters adds to the
difficulty as he drives racially fair whites to see him as governing
primarily in the interests of minority voters.
Obama's decision to have his Justice Department sue Arizona over its
immigration law -- despite the fact that American voters back the
statute by 2:1 -- is the latest illustration of that leftward drift.
So is Attorney General Eric Holder's decision not to prosecute the
Black Panthers who posted themselves at a mixed-race polling place
in military uniform with clubs to deter white voters.
The further Obama moves to the left, the more he has to move to the
left. And the worse it is for his ability to control Congress.
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