Obama Has Just Begun
How much damage can he do in his last year in office?
By Victor Davis Hanson — November 24, 2015
Insidiously
and inadvertently, Barack Obama is alienating the people and moving the
country to the right. If he keeps it up, by 2017 it will be a
reactionary nation. But, counterintuitive as it seems, that is fine with
Obama: Après nous le déluge.
By
sheer force of his personality, Obama has managed to lose the
Democratic Senate and House. State legislatures and governorships are
now predominantly Republican. Obama’s own favorable ratings rarely top
45 percent. In his mind, great men, whether Socrates or Jesus, were
never appreciated in their time. So it is not surprising that he is not,
as he presses full speed ahead.
Obama
certainly has doubled down going into his last year, most recently
insisting on letting in more refugees from the Middle East, at a time
when the children of Middle Eastern immigrants and contemporary migrants
are terrorizing Europe. What remaining unpopular executive acts might
anger his opponents the most? Close down Guantanamo, let thousands more
refugees into the United States, free thousands more felons, snub
another ally, flatter another enemy, weigh in on another interracial
melodrama, extend amnesty to another million illegal aliens, make global
warming laws by fiat, expand Obamacare, unilaterally impose gun
control? In lieu of achievement, is the Obama theory to become relevant
or noteworthy by offending the public and goading political enemies?
An
Obama press conference is now a summation of all his old damn-you
clichés — the fantasy strawman arguments; the caricatures of the evil
Republican bogeymen; the demagogic litany of the sick, the innocent, and
the old at the mercy of his callous opponents; the affected
accentuation (e.g., Talîban; Pakîstan, Îslám, Latînos, etc.) that so
many autodidacts parade in lieu of learning foreign languages; the
make-no-mistake-about-it and let-me-be-clear empty emphatics; the
flashing temper tantrums; the mangled sports metaphors; the factual
gaffes; and the monotonous I, me, my, and mine first-person-pronoun
exhaustion. What Obama cannot do in fact, he believes he can still
accomplish through invective and derision.
In
the 2016 election campaigns, most Democratic candidates in swing states
will have distanced themselves from the last eight years. Otherwise,
they would have to run on the patently false premise that American
health care is more affordable and more comprehensive today than it was
in 2009; that workforce participation is booming; that scandals are a
thing of the past; that the debt has been addressed; that Obama has
proved a healer who brought the country together; that immigration at
last is ordered, legal, and logical; that the law has never been more
respected and honored; that racial relations are calmer than ever; that
the campuses are quiet; that the so-called war on terror is now over and
won with al-Qaeda and ISIS contained or on the run; that U.S. prestige
aboard has never been higher; that our allies appreciate our help and
our enemies fear our wrath; that Iran will now not go nuclear; that
Israel is secure and assured of our support; and that, thanks to
American action, Egypt is stable, Libya is ascendant, Iraq is still
consensual, and the Middle East in general is at last quiet after the
tumultuous years of George W. Bush.
The
hordes of young male migrants abandoning the Middle East for the West
are merely analogous to past waves of immigrants and should be uniformly
welcome. For Obama, there is no connection between them and his
slashing of American involvement in the Middle East — much less any
sense of responsibility that his own actions helped produce the crisis
he now fobs off on others.
If
an American president saw fit to attack fellow Americans from abroad,
and lecture them on their illiberality, there are better places from
which to take such a low road than from Turkey, the embryo of
20th-century genocide, and a country whose soccer crowds were recently
shouting, “Allahu akbar!” during what was supposed to be a moment of
silence offered to the Paris dead. Surely an American president might
suggest that such grassroots religious triumphalism about mass death is
much more reprehensible behavior than are his own fellow citizens’
demands to vet the backgrounds of refugees.
If
you suggested to Obama that, in his search for a contrarian legacy, he
should do something to stop the slaughter in the Middle East and be
careful about letting in more unexamined refugees, in answer, he would
be more likely to do less than nothing abroad and vastly expand the
influx of migrants. Getting under his critics’ skin is about all that is
left of a failed presidency.
Many
of our observers still do not quite grasp that Obama will end his
presidency by seeking to get his opponents’ goat — and that his
resentment will lead to some strange things said and done.
Few
foresaw this critical element of the Obama character. The tiny number
of prescient pundits who warned what the Obama years would entail were
not the supposedly sober and judicious establishment voices, who in fact
seemed to be caught up in the hope-and-change euphoria and missed
entirely Obama’s petulance and pique: the Evan Thomases (“he’s sort of
god”), or the David Brookses (“and I was looking at his pant leg and his
perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president
and b) he’ll be a very good president.” “It is easy to sketch out a
scenario in which [Obama] could be a great president.”), or the Chris
Matthewses (“the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama’s
speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have
that too often.”), or the Michael Beschlosses (“Uh. I would say it’s
probably — he’s probably the smartest guy ever to become President.”),
or the Chris Buckleys (“He has exhibited throughout a ‘first-class
temperament,’ pace Oliver Wendell
Holmes Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a
Harvard man”), or the Kathleen Parkers (“ . . . with solemn prayers
that Obama will govern as the centrist, pragmatic leader he is capable
of being”), or the Peggy Noonans (“He has within him the possibility to
change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need
changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five
years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a
nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief.”).
In
truth, it was the loud, sometimes shrill, and caricatured voices of
talk radio, the so-called crazy Republican House members, and the
grassroots loudmouths of what would become the Tea Party who had Obama’s
number. They warned early on that Barack Obama’s record was that of a
petulant extremist, that his writing presaged that he would borrow and
spend like no other president, that his past associations gave warning
that he would use his community-organizing skills cynically to divide
Americans along racial lines, that nothing in his past had ever
suggested anything other than radicalism and an ease with divisive
speech, that his votes as a state legislator and as a U.S. senator
suggested that he had an instinctual dislike of the entrepreneur and the
self-made businessman, and that his past rhetoric advised that he would
ignore settled law and instead would rule by fiat — that he would
render immigration law null and void, that he would diminish the profile
of America abroad, and that he would do all this because he was an
ideologue, with no history of bipartisanship but a lot of animus toward
his critics, and one who saw no ethical or practical reason to
appreciate the more than 60 years of America’s postwar global leadership
and the world that it had built. Again, the despised right-wingers were
right and the more moderate establishment quite wrong.
Abroad,
from Obama’s post-Paris speeches, it is clear that he is now bored with
and irritated by the War on Terror. He seems to have believed either
that Islamist global terror was a minor distraction with no potential
for real harm other than to bring right-wingers in backlash fashion out
of the woodwork, or that it was an understandably radical manifestation
of what was otherwise a legitimate complaint of Islam against the
Western-dominated global system — thus requiring contextualization
rather than mindless opposition.
A
lot of ambitious and dangerous powers are watching Obama assume a fetal
position, and may well as a consequence act foolishly and recklessly
this next year. Not only Russia, China, and North Korea, but also Hamas,
Hezbollah, Iran, ISIS, and assorted rogue states may take chances in
the next 14 months that they would otherwise never have entertained
(given that America is innately strong and they are mostly in comparison
far weaker) — on the premise that such adventurism offers tangible
advantages without likely negative consequences and that the chance for
such opportunities will not present itself again for decades to come.
At
home, Obama feels liberated now that he is free from further elections.
He thinks he has a legitimate right to be a bit vindictive and vent his
own frustrations and pique, heretofore repressed over the last seven
years because of the exigencies of Democratic electioneering. Obama can
now vent and strike back at his opponents, caricaturing them from
abroad, questioning their patriotism, slandering them for sport, and
trying to figure out which emblematic executive orders and extra-legal
bureaucratic directives will most infuriate them and repay them for
their supposed culpability for his failed vero possumus presidency.
The
more contrarian he becomes, and the more he opposes the wishes of the
vast majority of the American people, all the more Obama envisions
himself speaking truth to power and becoming iconic of something rather
than the reality that he is becoming proof of nothing.
Hold on. We haven’t seen anything yet.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.
No comments:
Post a Comment