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During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama assured us that if he didn’t get the economy turned around in three years he would be a “one-term proposition.”
Now, three years later, he tells 60 Minutes that he always said it would take two terms, even two presidents, to get the job done.
Well, he’s right about one thing — it will take another president. Someone other than him. And that’s what 2012 will be all about. Finding that other president and getting him/her elected.
Yet Obama said something far more alarming in that 60 Minutes interview, telling Steve Kroft of his first term in office: “I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln.”
Many commentators interpreted this as Obama brazenly, and unbelievably (even for someone with his level of self-affection), boasting that he was the fourth greatest president in American history. But what he said was the “possible exceptions” of the other three — which means, in Obama’s mind, they are possibly not exceptions at all. So he actually sees himself as arguably the greatest president ever.
Greater than Washington, the Indispensable American who led the fight to win our independence, and the Father Of Our Country who served as our first president and model for all others to follow; greater than Lincoln, who preserved the Union and freed the slaves; greater than Reagan, who won the Cold War, revived the American spirit and launched decades of unbridled economic prosperity through his policies.
Greater than all of them.
At the same time, “Clueless Joe” — Biden, that is — was insisting that “the Taliban is not our enemy,” even as forces loyal to the Taliban are fighting against our soldiers in Afghanistan.
Obama’s only hope for re-election is to run a slash-and-burn campaign of eat the rich, us against them, the haves and have-nots — to stoke the fires of fear and anger and class envy, pitting one group of Americans against another. That’s why he’s been doubling down of late on his class warfare rhetoric.
He knows he can’t run on his record. He cannot campaign on the slogan that swept Reagan into office in 1980: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Not when even Bill Clinton calls this a “lousy” economy. And he certainly cannot campaign on Reagan’s 1984 theme of “Morning in America,” which resonated so powerfully across America that the Gipper won 49 out of 50 states that year.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama assured us that if he didn’t get the economy turned around in three years he would be a “one-term proposition.”
Now, three years later, he tells 60 Minutes that he always said it would take two terms, even two presidents, to get the job done.
Well, he’s right about one thing — it will take another president. Someone other than him. And that’s what 2012 will be all about. Finding that other president and getting him/her elected.
Yet Obama said something far more alarming in that 60 Minutes interview, telling Steve Kroft of his first term in office: “I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln.”
Many commentators interpreted this as Obama brazenly, and unbelievably (even for someone with his level of self-affection), boasting that he was the fourth greatest president in American history. But what he said was the “possible exceptions” of the other three — which means, in Obama’s mind, they are possibly not exceptions at all. So he actually sees himself as arguably the greatest president ever.
Greater than Washington, the Indispensable American who led the fight to win our independence, and the Father Of Our Country who served as our first president and model for all others to follow; greater than Lincoln, who preserved the Union and freed the slaves; greater than Reagan, who won the Cold War, revived the American spirit and launched decades of unbridled economic prosperity through his policies.
Greater than all of them.
At the same time, “Clueless Joe” — Biden, that is — was insisting that “the Taliban is not our enemy,” even as forces loyal to the Taliban are fighting against our soldiers in Afghanistan.
Obama’s only hope for re-election is to run a slash-and-burn campaign of eat the rich, us against them, the haves and have-nots — to stoke the fires of fear and anger and class envy, pitting one group of Americans against another. That’s why he’s been doubling down of late on his class warfare rhetoric.
He knows he can’t run on his record. He cannot campaign on the slogan that swept Reagan into office in 1980: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Not when even Bill Clinton calls this a “lousy” economy. And he certainly cannot campaign on Reagan’s 1984 theme of “Morning in America,” which resonated so powerfully across America that the Gipper won 49 out of 50 states that year.
No, fear and anger and envy are all Obama’s got. The problem for him is that it doesn’t look like much of a winning strategy. For one thing, it doesn’t appeal to what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature,” but rather to the worst in us. And Americans, by and large, tend to reject such divisiveness. The “have-nots” may want to destroy the “haves” in other countries, but not here. No less a liberal media figurehead than Tom Brokaw said as much last week, explaining that the 90% of Americans who aren’t considered wealthy would like to be counted among the 10% of Americans who are, and many of them are working hard to try to attain that goal.
To be sure, that’s the true American spirit — not hating someone because he or she is a little better off than you are, or thinking someone else has gotten ahead at your expense and you are somehow owed something, or expecting the government to “even the score” by taking from someone else and giving it to you.
Try as he might, and continually has, to promote Big Government and to scare people into hating and fearing Big Business, Obama just hasn’t been able to pull it off. Again, it’s simply not a winning strategy.
A new Gallup poll shows that 64% of Americans say Big Government is the greatest threat to them and to this country economically. That’s far more than cite either Big Business or Big Labor. Another poll found that 75% of Americans, including two-thirds of self-identified Democrat voters, favor fiscal sanity — they believe that the federal government should live within its means instead of continually borrowing and spending more, to the current tune of $15 trillion in debt and counting.
Needless to say, these numbers don’t bode well for Obama or the Democrats who are running this year. And what worked for Obama, and by extension for Democrats, in 2008 simply won’t work this time around. Back then, Obama was a blank slate, someone in whom it seemed everyone could invest their own dreams of “hope and change,” whatever those words happened to mean to them.
But that was then and this is now. And while Obama cannot run on his record, he does have a record. It’s just that it will be the Republicans who are running on it — against it, that is, whether it’s the ObamaCare nightmare, the wasted $1 trillion Stimulus, all the rest. And that alone could spell doom for Obama.
As Frank Fleming writes in the New York Post: “A potato could run against Obama, and people would say, ‘Well, a potato won’t increase spending or raise taxes. In fact, a potato could be the next Calvin Coolidge!’ That’s why Obama has to crush all hope and make people believe that, as bad as things are, this is as good as it gets no matter who is president. Plus, a potato is a racist.”
It’s not much of a strategy. But, for Obama, it’s all he has.
e-mail: tom3264@msn.com, or go to tom’s Facebook page to send a message
