Lessons Conservatives Need to Learn. By Peggy Noonan. Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2013.
Obama is a formidable foe. He means to change the country and crush the GOP.
Noonan:
Finally,
it became obvious this week that the Republican party top to bottom has to
start taking Barack Obama seriously. All the famous criticisms of him are true:
He has no talent for or interest in sustained, good-faith negotiations, he has
no real sense of alarm about the great issue of the day, America's debt. He’s a
chill presence in a warm-blooded profession.
But he
means business. He means to change America in fundamental ways and along the
lines of justice as he sees it The proper response to such a man is not—was
not—that he’s a Muslim, he’s a Kenyan, he's working out his feelings about
colonialism. Those charges were meant to marginalize him, but they didn’t hurt
him They damaged Republicans, who came to see him as easy to defeat.
He
doesn’t care if you like him—he’d just as soon you did, but it’s not necessary
for him. He is certain he is right in what he’s doing, which is changing the
economic balance between rich and poor. The rich are going to be made less
rich, and those who are needy or request help are going to get more in
government services, which the rich will pay for. He’d just as soon the middle
class don’t get lost in the shuffle, but if they wind up marginally less middle
class he won’t be up nights. The point is redistribution.
The
great long-term question is the effect the change in mood he seeks to institute
will have on what used to be called the national character. Eight years is
almost half a generation. Don’t you change people when you tell them they have
an absolute right to government support regardless of their efforts? Don’t you
encourage dependence, and a bitter sense of entitlement? What about the wearing
down of taxpayers? Some, especially those who are younger, do not fully
understand that what is supporting them is actually coming from other people;
to them it seems to come from “the government,” the big marble machine far away
that prints money.
There
is no sign, absolutely none, that any of this is on Mr. Obama's mind. His
emphasis is always on what one abstract group owes another in the service of a
larger concept. "You didn't build that" are the defining words of his
presidency.
He is
not going to negotiate, compromise, cajole. Absent those efforts his only path
to primacy in Congress is to kill the Republican Party, to pulverize it, as
John Dickerson noted this week in Slate, to “attempt to annihilate the
Republican Party,” as Speaker John Boehner said in a remarkably candid speech
to the Ripon Society.
Mr.
Obama is not, as has been said, the left’s Ronald Reagan. Reagan won over, Mr.
Obama just wins. What Mr. Obama really is is Franklin D. Roosevelt without the
landslides. He has the same seriousness of intent but nothing like the base of
support.
