Stanley Kurtz: Obama's Tactics May Be Small, But His Political Ambitions Are Vast

He intends exactly what he campaigned for in 2008: A "transformation" of America, with a leftist coalition governing without regard to the center (or of course the right).

We heard a lot about a left-leaning electoral realignment in 2008. That talk seemed to stop after the tea-party shellacking of 2010. Yet the truth is, Obama and his advisors never abandoned their quest to shape a permanent leftist majority, a coalition that would forever put an end to Clintonian triangulation and usher in unfettered leftist Obamaism instead. Obama’s frantic efforts to gin up the women’s vote and the youth vote aren’t only desperate attempts to secure his base. They flow from a deliberate decision not to fight for the center, but to build an independent majority on what is supposedly the “demographically ascendent” left…

And the New Democratic Party is not much like the Old Democratic Party. The old party was at least a party of unions -- practical-minded people. Obama has reshaped the Democratic Party into his own image -- an antiwar intellectual semi-professor. The New Democratic Party is the Nation magazine with candidates.

Read The Obamians by James Mann and you discover that the Obama team came in thinking United States foreign policy could be fixed simply by doing the opposite of whatever Bush had done. What they found instead is that Bush’s policies are difficult to overturn because they are not as unreasonable or as superfluous as his opponents had thought. There is a resurgent global jihadist movement bent on killing Americans. Russia is belligerent not because Bush was rude but because Putin’s interests are not our own....

It turns out the people who supposedly knew better did not, actually, know better....

The Obama coalition, piece by piece, has been disassembled. All that remains is the antiwar, anti-Republican core of the Democratic Party. There are more registered Democrats than Republicans, so Obama could still squeak out a second term. But he has forsaken independents and whites, the groups that swung to him definitively and significantly in 2008. He is losing independents, in some polls by double-digits. His opponent Mitt Romney is “winning the white vote by more than any GOP candidate since Ronald Reagan,” according to the Washington Post. If the 2012 electorate resembles the 2008 one, it is possible for Obama to win reelection. But if the electorate turns out to be more like the electorate in 2004 or, God help him, like in 2010, Obama will lose.

Even a narrow win for Obama, though, would not reestablish anything like the mandate and amity the president enjoyed on his Inauguration Day. The reason is that, as the Obama coalition diminished, Obama no longer disguised the prejudices, inflections, outlook, and approach of the progressive movement....

The Democrats allowed the progressive movement’s hatred of Bush to take over their old and storied political party. That party and movement found a champion and a path to power in Obama, but the electoral forces on which his power relied were unstable. In 2008, he satisfied the left and won the middle. Once in power, though, he kept the left satisfied and lost the middle and right.

In 2012, there is just the left. The Democrats are back where they started eight years ago. And this time, Barack Obama cannot save them.

Really good pieces. On that last one, it's just a Read the Whole Thing deal. I couldn't find the excerpts that really sold it. But it's great.

posted by Ace at 02:15 PM

| Access Comments