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The End of the Obama Era

The End of the Obama Era

Put that race card back in the deck, man. It’s over.

The brutal truth of electoral politics is that, not unlike Supreme Court reasoning, wins, losses, and philosophies exist on a pendulum. Whether the dog wags the tail, or the tail wags the dog, the power of one party over the other waxes and wanes as sure as the sun rises and sets.

The midterm elections ushered in a massive pendulum swing away from progressive power plays and toward the comparatively common sense conservatism of both established Republicans and eager newcomers. The right ran against Obama, his caucus, and their destructive policies, while the left ran against the increasingly faded spectres of microaggression; the result? They failed miserably, embarrassingly, and in toto.

Roger Simon writes for PJ Media:

Liberalism n’existe pas — and almost everybody knows it. It is completely out of ideas. Obama was the last gasp of a dying ideology. All they have left is some pathetic and teetering identity politics. That is why the Democratic Party was so flummoxed over the last few days over the words of their stalwart Chuck Schumer, when he criticized the risibly titled Affordable Care Act. The New York senator said his party (and Obama clearly), rather than trying to reform healthcare, should have concentrated on improving the state of the middle class. But crucially, Schumer didn’t say how. That’s because in his ideology, there is no more how. It’s all been tried and shown to be useless or, worse, destructive of the people it pretends to be helping. At this point, we no longer need Gertrude Stein to tell us there’s no there there.

No more how, and for progressives like Schumer, no more need for how. How implies solutions that look ahead toward a better future; what progressives offered this cycle—and indeed, during the totality of the Obama Administration thus far—was a catharsis for loyal Democrat voters who at this point have got to be questioning the Commander in Chief’s figurehead status.

The important thing to remember, as Simon points out, is that we can’t get cocky. This cycle was won after strategists and activists deployed an enormous “grassroots + digital” effort that reached beyond the borders of our moderately-sized tent and touched new voters. Simon also notes that, in the run up to 2016, we need to touch those voters with new ideas; we got that ball rolling in 2014. From millennial outreach on social media to multilingual literature, websites, and press appearances, conservative campaigns dug out of their comfortable holes and broadened the Republican brand.

The results were spectacular in that they succeeded because they bucked the very trends that liberals rely on: Republicans are afraid of people of color, Republicans don’t respect women, Republicans don’t understand what it’s like to be young and in debt.

What does this mean? It means that Republicans and Democrats have entirely switched positions and strategies. What was once the party of slick, eye-catching messaging and a formidable ground game is now the party of tired ideas and ideological isolation—and Republicans are more than capable of taking the Democratic Party’s place at the top of the pile.

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Comments

The problem with this analysis is it treats the ballot box and elections as the most relevant current forums where politics occurs. A big part of the Obama fundamental transformations is creating or shifting to different forums to impose obligatory burdens on individuals. The motto could easily be “No Notice until you are already bound.”

When K-12 classrooms all over the country really are requiring instructional practices that track to Soviet psychologists http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/locking-in-marxs-dream-psychophysiological-means-precisely-what-we-fear-as-the-real-goal-of-education/ and the classroom HAS to now be about reaching a consensus perspective on issues like race, class, and gender, President Obama has created a whirlwind that will continue to roll after he leaves office.

Because of the cronyistic workforce innovation boards at a local level, required state economic plans, industry sector strategies being created by Governors working with the federal Labor Department and lots of other initiatives not being adequately discussed, many Republicans at a state and local level are working just as actively for a government planned economy as anybody on the Dem side. The groups they seek to benefit are simply different.

This administration works by engrenage–policies that work together like interlocking gears. The hope is that people will focus on the parts and not the overall functioning that truly is a fundamental transformation. Handled at the bureaucratic level and bipartisan because cronies benefit, it is the typical parent and taxpayer being fleeced by both parties and away from scrutiny. It loves to create policies at the federal or global level and dictate what must be done. State and local politicians then pretend its their idea to get federal or foundation dollars.

We will have a great deal of difficult to fix economic and human damage if we keep simply focussing on the elections.

    snopercod in reply to Robin. | December 1, 2014 at 5:59 pm

    The problem with this analysis is it treats the ballot box and elections as the most relevant current forums where politics occurs.

    Rush was talking about that very thing last week. In a nutshell, he said, “The democrats have been tossed out of office by the voters a number of times but the democrat agenda still advances.”

      Barry in reply to snopercod. | December 1, 2014 at 8:22 pm

      “the democrat agenda still advances.”
      Well, yes. We have the current republican party to thank for that. Some are lefty’s. And some are spineless bastards afraid of the left wing press. And a few, very few, are named CRUZ.

Unfortunately, as Liberalism is on display as a failed ideology there are a cadre of the undead posing as unaccountable bureaucrats furiously writing regulations that will stick around longer than a the dreaded styrofoam meal container, thanks to a GOP that is afraid of its own shadow.

“Simon also notes that, in the run up to 2016, we need to touch those voters with new ideas…”

I’m surprised you offered no analysis of 2010 and what screwed up in 2012. Because Nov.4 2014 is just a reset to what we could face again if we don’t learn from our mistakes.

That is, the confusion wrought upon minority, women and independent voters by the discordant, sectarian voices on the right who are always operating under the fatal conceit that liberty, constitutionalism, free markets, Americanism should be self-evident to all voters.

And then there’s the non-media savvy presidential candidates and their panhandling GOP campaign consultants setting themselves up as convenient Piñatas for the Left media complex.

Edge of Tomorrow. Live. Die. Repeat.
Show some humility and smarts and we just might break the cycle of defeat in 2016.

“It is completely out of ideas. Obama was the last gasp of a dying ideology.”

Wul, yah. It’s been “out of ideas” for essentially ever.

It’s NEVER worked, and there have been LOTS of trials, and they all leave trails of misery, and very often mass death.

But how many more “gasps” will this “dying ideology” get? Quite a few, I’m afraid. Because, remember, it LIVES on delusional “thinking”. Reality does not dent it.

And, in the case of this dangerously anti-American regime, we MAY see its failures resulting in a cataclysmic war…or two.

We WILL see its toxic effluent lasting for years or decades unless we assertively reform our exploded regulatory state, staffed now with protected and committed Collectivists.

I’d LOVE to believe that this is the end, and all we need worry about is cleaning up this Aegean pile. But the children screwed over by our monopoly schools will, I am afraid, give this evil another “gasp”.

Oh, and I’m not in the LEAST sanguine about changing the sources at ‘the top of the pile’, if that’s all we’re doing. The pile jes’ keep’a growin’ in that case, with a slight change in the stink.

    Anchovy in reply to Ragspierre. | December 1, 2014 at 6:30 pm

    The salmon may die but the spawn lives on, Grasshopper.

    snopercod in reply to Ragspierre. | December 1, 2014 at 7:30 pm

    I’d like to recommend two books that are highly relevant to the situation in which America finds itself: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer which described the political chaos prior to the rise of the National Socialist Party, and The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff which correctly placed the blame for the rise of Naziism on the philosophy of emotionalism-irrationalism-mysticism in which which the German people had been steeped for over 50 years.

    Radegunda in reply to Ragspierre. | December 1, 2014 at 11:18 pm

    I remember when the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR broke apart, and some conservatives were basically saying “Well, that’s that. Case closed. We won.” Why would anyone go back to coercive collectivism when it had been so thoroughly rejected by those forced to live under it, and its failures so clearly demonstrated?

    And immediately the collectivists set about writing their counter-narrative: that the concept just hadn’t been properly implemented, or, alternatively, that it was really much better and fairer for “the people” than the greedy capitalist system that subsequently took root.

    It’s the eternal dream of utopian schemers: If only they get the power to mold society to their vision, we’ll finally have perfect justice. The moving force, of course, is not just utopian dreams but also the ambition to wield power over others, and what better excuse than to say you’re doing it in the interest of justice?

Henry Hawkins | December 1, 2014 at 7:46 pm

“The brutal truth of electoral politics is that, not unlike Supreme Court reasoning, wins, losses, and philosophies exist on a pendulum. Whether the dog wags the tail, or the tail wags the dog, the power of one party over the other waxes and wanes as sure as the sun rises and sets.”

Pendulums! Dogs/tails! Moon wax/wane! Sun set/rise! It’s here! The mixed metaphor apocalypse! Ahhhhhh! AHHHHHH! (lol,j/k)

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Obama’s political legacy (whether he likes it or not):

Heretofore, many liberal ideas had not been tried in the US. Other lib ideas had never been tried everywhere. It is hard politically to denounce an idea, especially liberal ideas which come prancing in atop unicorns and dusted with fairy dust. If only these ideas and policies had a record we could judge, something to prove they don’t work.

That’s Obama’s legacy – proving liberal policies do not work and rendering them politically impotent for a long time coming.

    Radegunda in reply to Henry Hawkins. | December 1, 2014 at 11:55 pm

    There are many people who still say the problem is the Republicans constantly getting in Obama’s way. Many will say if only he had been permitted to go full-bore socialist, we would all have free health care and “living wage” jobs by now. Or they say that if Obama hadn’t rescued the economy we’d all be foraging for weeds to eat.

    Ideologues generally don’t accept empirical evidence as conclusive. They might say that the problem isn’t their ideas but the refusal of people to do their part to make the ideas work. I have a relative (whom I haven’t seen in many years) who wrote about finding Obamacare really aggravating, but he trusted that the Dems meant well and he really wanted to do his part to make the system work.

    I have a brother who seems like just about the last kind of person to adopt left-wing collectivism, but he seems to think it’s the position that smart and compassionate people take. (Like I’m neither?) He argues that human nature just hasn’t evolved enough to make socialism work well but we should be optimistic that it can. (Whether fairness requires him to give up his big house with an ocean view is a question he may not think about.)

    Then there’s the large part of the American electorate that doesn’t pay attention to policies but votes for whichever candidate they imagine cares about people like them.

      Ragspierre in reply to Radegunda. | December 2, 2014 at 2:31 pm

      “He argues that human nature just hasn’t evolved enough to make socialism work well but we should be optimistic that it can.”

      We can have perpetual motion as soon as physics evolves enough, so just keep on clicking the heals of your Ruby Slippers together…!!!