Hanson:
How much damage can he do in his last year in office?
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.
