King Solomon put it best when he said “there is nothing new under the sun”. And so it is with politics.
Even now, political history is repeating itself. We have a Democrat in the White House giving speeches about how America is losing its spirit in the midst of a recession and high unemployment – just like Jimmy Carter in his “Malaise speech” in 1979. And we have polls indicating that what Americans are really getting tired of is the President. Again, just like with Carter.
According to the latest Gallup poll, only 42% of the public approve of Obama’s job performance – fewer than any other president at this point in office since the dawn of polling. And the opinions are pretty strong.
According to pollster Scott Rasmussen, only 23% “strongly approve”, while 38% “strongly disapprove”, leaving Obama fifteen points in the hole when it comes to those who have any passion to their opinions. Further, 3/4ths of voters think that the nation is on the “wrong track”, and over half of the country still opposes his biggest legislative success, ObamaCare, and want to see it repealed.
Of course none of this bodes well for re-election, which explains Obama’s reach for another historical retread – class warfare.
For decades, liberal political strategy has been built around buying large segments of the electorate with government largesse and, more often than not, doing it with borrowed money. Obama’s problem is that his administration comes at a time when most everyone has realized that the national credit card is maxed out, and that the bank won’t increase the limit.
This is creating political turbulence.
Whether with the Tea Party or the Occupy movement, what we are seeing is just a taste of the social and political upheaval that is the inevitable result of the financially inevitable rollback of the bloated welfare state. The Tea Party is tired of paying for it and having liberties trampled under the feet of big government, and the Occupy crowd demands that the coddling nanny state continue to grow and that the checks keep coming.
Someone is in for a disappointment.
Keep in mind that it was the philosophy of Obama and the Occupy crowd that helped get us here. Liberals (with an occasional assist from big government Republicans) grew government and pushed us deeper in debt. They pushed reckless policies which inflated the housing bubble that supported the credit card economy, and then led to its popping. Now they are upset with having to reap the fruit of their own philosophy, so they angrily demand more of it in order to fix the problems it has created. (I’m drunk! Give me another drink!)
In a cosmic justice kind of way one is tempted to let the baby have its bottle, but for the fact that we have to live here too – and they want to stick the rest of us with the tab.
The political result is Obama’s need to dust off the old class-warfare, divide and conquer strategy, where you seek to define “us” as being an overwhelming majority being set upon by a small “them”. (Giving us the 99% vs. 1% rhetoric)
But the rhetoric doesn’t match reality.
One presumes that in a down economy, many of the so-called “99%” want economic growth, which means jobs, but those are easier to come by in a capitalist economy where the 1% - or anyone for that matter – can put their capital at risk in the market, as opposed to having it at greater risk of government confiscation.
For their part, the “rich” finally seem to be catching on to the political game the left has been playing.
For decades, liberals have been politically biting the wealthy hands that have fed them. The question has been how long those hands would keep feeding them. It seems that we now have an answer. Recent reports suggest that many of Obama’s wealthy donors have had enough, what with his class warriors camping out in public, beating drums and demanding that their wealth be re-distributed.
Democrats are desperate for the Occupy movement to have the same electoral impact for them that the Tea Party did for the GOP in 2010, but Republicans benefited only insofar as they adopted much of the Tea Party’s agenda, which is conservative. And given that almost half of Americans self-identify as conservatives, the result was success on Election Day.
The problem for Democrats is that the Occupy movement is united on very little other than being militantly liberal, but since liberals make up only about 20% of the electorate, publicly promoting those views won’t help at the ballot box.
Hence Obama’s need to use class warfare to change the subject.
Republicans will be fools insofar as they allow the upcoming election to be about anything but Obama.
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Cross-posted at DrewMcKissick.com [8]
