From Glenn Harlan Reynolds, exactly one year after the election that brought us the Obama presidency, discussing faded Obama magic.
The truth is, Obama wasn’t ready to be president when he ran in 2008. When he started, he probably thought he had no real chance — he himself admitted upon entering the Senate that he wasn’t qualified to be president — and that his first run would simply be a PR effort that would lift him to the top ranks of Senate Democrats.
When, to everyone’s surprise, resentment of the Clinton machine crystallized around him, he wound up beating Hillary for the nomination, and found himself riding an out-of-control express train. He rode it to victory, with some help from erratic McCain actions.
But he was right the first time about not being ready for the Oval Office. As president, he seems confused and a bit distant on the issues, leaving the details to congressional Democrats and an ever-growing number of "czars" while he golfs and launches attacks at Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
The Instapundit has a point. The magic does seem to have magically disappeared. Massively increased deficits, marxist czars, wilted will in Afghanistan, bigger government with even bigger taxes, non-stimulating 'stimulus', warring with adversarial press entities to the point of demonizing all opposition, and drives to make health care worse for all Americans will do that.
11/4/09 0930: Here's another, from John Steele Gordon in the Wall Street Journal, discussing the liberal paradigm:
Not only does the liberal paradigm not even come close to agreeing with the social and economic reality on the ground today, worse, it has largely congealed into a political religion, especially in the nearly 30 years since Ronald Reagan shifted the nation's political center of gravity, just as FDR had done 48 years earlier. Since liberals care about the sheep, all who disagree with liberalism must not, making them morally inferior if not downright immoral. Thus the nastiness in American politics is largely on the left. Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, her treatment in the liberal press was ugliness personified.
The conservatives of today bear little resemblance to those of the 1930s that cartoonist Peter Arno immortalized heading down to Manhattan's Trans-Lux theater to hiss newsreels of FDR. They are instead abubble with ideas to reform aspects of American politics and economics that badly need reform, such as the tax and legal systems, and the impending entitlements crisis. They want to utilize the great power of markets to force efficiency, drive down costs, and drive up yields. But liberals refuse to engage those ideas, simply because they are not liberal ideas and must, therefore, be wrong if not the latest plot by the wolves to exploit the sheep.
Sarah Palin's treatemtn in the liberal press was ugliness personified ...and still is. All conservatives are seen as evil, primarily because they are not liberals. The ideas of conservatives, therefore, are not just wrong but a dirty trick to steal back power from an unsuspecting populace, and a way to re-oppress blacks/gays/women/etc. And protesting that characterization to a liberal merely proves to them that they're right.
