Hoover + McGovern = Obama
Obama's presidency will discredit the Democratic party
into the future
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on National Review Online on September 29, 2010
Printer-Friendly Version
Comparisons of Barack Obama's presidency to Jimmy Carter's miss the
point. Carter's presidency did little to change the basic party
construct of the nation or to influence its ideology. Reagan's
presidency accomplished both.
But Barack Obama is destroying the Democratic party. It may not recover
for a long time. In this, he most closely resembles a synthesis of the
failed candidacy of George McGovern and the catastrophic presidency of
Herbert Hoover. The damage he is doing to his party's image and
prospects closely resembles the harm Hoover did to the Republican party,
from which it did not recover for 20 years after he left office. And the
extent to which Obama is discrediting the Left parallelsthe damage
George McGovern did to his ideological confreres in 1972, when he went
down to flaming defeat.
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In a sense, America met its first conservative in 1981 and fell in love.
We met our first liberal in 2009 and are running away screaming.
FDR was too long ago to count, Lyndon Johnson too distracted by
Vietnam to make an impact. So Obama is the first full-throated
liberal to be president in our lifetimes. And we won't soon
forget him and the lessons his failure is teaching us.
Strangely, the Democrats don't yet get it. They whistle a happy
tune as they march off the cliff. There is no voice of dissent
against Obama's policies, no mumbled animosity, no suppressed
discontent. The party is solid as a phalanx behind its leader
even as he sends it to political death. It is the Charge of the
Light Brigade, and none of them know that "someone has
blundered." |
For decades, the liberal alternative
glittered attractively on the sidelines. As income inequality increased
and Wall Street bonuses excited class animosity, the possibility of an
economic-populist response had become more interesting to voters by the
time Obama came along. The hyperactive Bush foreign and military policy
made the yearning for peace and isolation stronger. And as conservatives
increased our national wealth, the glaring omission of the health-care
system loomed larger. Finally, when the depression hit, voters called in
the liberals from stage left and asked them to take a shot at turning
the country around.
And did they ever! They kept their promises and then some. They tripled
the deficit and sent the debt soaring. From the moment George Washington
took the oath of office until Obama did, America had borrowed $9
trillion. Under Obama, it has borrowed $3.2 trillion more, in less than
two years. Our health-care system was deformed, manufacturing was
terrified by the prospect of cap-and-tax, GM was absorbed by the
government and conquered by the unions, and federalism was buried in an
avalanche of subsidies that turned state governments into branch offices
of Washington.
Americans have learned their lesson, just as they learned from Hoover
the evils of Republican laissez-faire economics. His legacy cast a
shadow over politics until Eisenhower vanquished it with his personal
popularity in 1952. But it was not until Nixon and Reagan that
anti-Hooverism stopped structuringnational elections.
In George McGovern, we all saw the incompetence of liberalism, its
disorganization, its extremism, and its ultimate impotence. The best
testament to his failure as a candidate is his own discovery of the
virtues of private-sector capitalism in his old age. This gentleman --
who was never anything less than that -- clearly paved the way for
Ronald Reagan and the conservative ascendancy.
This is likely not the legacy Obama had in mind when, with his massive
ego, limited competence, and paltry experience, he took over the White
House. Americans, in a fit ofnational delusion, made what they now
realize was one of their biggest mistakes.
The magnitude of our error -- or at least of our understanding of it --
will become apparent on November 2, when the GOP will win both houses of
Congress, the House by a considerable margin. The 2010 landslide will
likely set the record for the largest transfer of House seats in an off-
year election. The prior mark of 74 seats in 1922 (a Democratic gain in
the wake of Harding's scandals and the Teapot Dome investigation) will
probably be eclipsed. But the true measure ofthe damage Obama has done
to his ideology and his party will not be evident for some time.
GO TO
DICKMORRIS.COM! TO READ ALL OF DICK'S COLUMNS!
THANK YOU!
COPYRIGHT EILEEN MCGANN AND DICK MORRIS 2010.
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