- A cliche repeated every four years is "this is the most important election of our lifetime".
- But like broken clocks, even cliches are right once in a while.
- Mark Steyn explains why this election really is the most important one of our lifetime.
- In 2008 there were many reasons to vote for Barack Obama despite his total lack of qualifications to be president, his dodgy collection of rascist, terrorist, slum landlord and crooked associates and his loony left platform. He would be an historic figure as the first black (or at least mixed race) president, he seemed a very likable sort, his rhetoric soared in his platform speeches, he promised to fix the seriously broken economy, the party in power when the great recession hit needed to be punished not rewarded with re-election and, hope and change was in the air.
- In 2012 Obama has been amply exposed for the charlatan, incompetent and loony left failure that he obviously is and so there is only one reason to vote for Obama and the Democrats.
- The reason, as Steyn explains here, is that a majority of Americans like a big government that will give them "free stuff" or, more accurately, stuff freely stolen from the diminishing minority that still believes in working hard and smart for a living within a free society and a competitive market economy and that these same Americans don't give a flying fig that the cost of this "free stuff" is to beggar the economy and the finances of the republic and turn it into the next Greece in which ultimately everybody suffers.
- Here is Steyn's column:
The Audacity of Hopelessness
National Review's Happy Warrior
October 2, 2012
According to the New York Times, "the magic is gone." According to the New York Post, "the thrill is gone." And yet, according to the polls, he isn't a goner. Even if you shave off two-three-four points for Democrat over-sampling and other pollster malarkey, the unmagical non-thrilling President Obama remains remarkably competitive.
Which means that if he wins we won't have the same excuse as we did last time. In 2008, Senator Obama was lucky, as he has been all his political life: a global downturn, war-weariness, a Republican opponent who even in his better moments gave the strong impression that honor required him to lose . . . These and various other stars all aligned for him. But he himself was the biggest star of all: a history-making candidate, a messianic figure and not merely a national but a planetary healer. Not all of us bought into it even then: I saw him on the stump just the once and thought the silver-tongued orator was a crashing bore. Couldn't see what the fuss was about. But fuss there was. It's one thing if the Republican loses to a thrilling, magical superstar; it's quite another if the Republican loses to a mean, petty, leaden, boring, earthbound hack who hasn't lit up a room in years. In 2008, the American people said: We like this guy. In 2012, they'd be saying: We like these policies. That's far more disturbing.
And yet it's entirely within the realm of possibility. The conventional line is that this election is a referendum on Obama. But it's also, as Jay Nordlinger wrote, a test of the people. In advanced Western societies spending themselves into oblivion, the political class has looted the future to bribe the present and the electorate has largely gone along with it. The question for voters now is a very simple one: Can they get real before it's over?
The Democrats think they know the answer to that one. In recent election seasons, the United States has been, rhetorically, a one-party state: Republicans sound like Republicans, and Democrats sound like Republicans — tough on crime, fiscally responsible, cool with churchgoing. Bill Clinton slapped down Sister Souljah and went back to Arkansas to fry a guy. But even John Kerry talked about how he'd hunt down and kill America's enemies, and, when abortion came up, did 40 seconds of anguished contortions on what an agonizingly painfully deeply painfully agonizing decision it is.
Not this time round. Abortion? The more the merrier. Bring it on. Half the speakers onstage at the Democratic convention would gladly have performed partial-birth abortions on audience volunteers, of whom there would have been no shortage. God (and Jerusalem) found Charlotte a tougher crowd. And, as for debt and jobs and boring CBO graphs and numbers with twelve zeroes on the end, who cares? Anyone can rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, but it takes a certain bravura panache to stage The ****** Monologues on the lido deck as the iceberg looms.
A month or so back, I chanced to drive through Brussels, specifically the "Euro-quarter," home to the architectural excrescences that house the EU bureaucracy. From every ugly rain-streaked concrete tower dangled their current slogan in 30-story-high font: "Strengthening Europe through Governance." A charitable sort, I assumed something had got lost in translation. But the Democratic party's first language is still, just about, English, and their money quote was: "Government is the only thing we all belong to." Take any electable center-leftie from around the Anglosphere in recent years — Britain's Tony Blair, Canada's Jean Chrétien, Australia's Kevin Rudd, New Zealand's Helen Clark — and the disposition on display in Charlotte was well to their left. All that coy stuff from the Clinton years about "New Democrats" and "Third Way" has been cast aside. These Democrats are out, and proud. They offered their most explicitly left-wing convention in 40 years — and they got away with it.
The Dems have made a calculation. They've bet that the electorate accepts the first part of the Republican critique — times are bum and getting bummer (to quote Gus Kahn in "Ain't We Got Fun") — but not the second part: that the antidote to the lousy Obama economy is Romney-style economic dynamism. In a land where Americans in their late 20s have moved back in with their parents and Americans in their early 50s have gone on permanent disability, more and more people have given up on any hope of change. To the old question "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" there are millions who answer "No" — but that's all the more reason to stick with the party of mass dependency and supersized food-stamp programs. In other words, what conservatives think of as Obama's "failure" — the moribund economy, flatline jobs market, underwater housing, general sclerosis — the Democrats see as a wildly successful expansion of the base. Or as Hilaire Belloc put it, "Always keep a-hold of Nurse / For fear of finding something worse."
Over on the other team, the instinct is to soft-pedal. Romney decided a long time ago that his general line on the incumbent is that he's a nice guy who's in way over his head. This might even work — that's to say, it may enable Mitt to thread the needle and get to 270 electoral votes. But it happens not to be true, so that even the terms in which Romney has chosen to frame the election are a preemptive cringe and a concession to the other side. As I say, Mitt could yet pull it off. But the confidence underpinning the Democratic convention — that the bleak certainty of dependency without end has more appeal than the possibility of economic revival — says nothing good about where America's headed.
- But like broken clocks, even cliches are right once in a while.
- Mark Steyn explains why this election really is the most important one of our lifetime.
- In 2008 there were many reasons to vote for Barack Obama despite his total lack of qualifications to be president, his dodgy collection of rascist, terrorist, slum landlord and crooked associates and his loony left platform. He would be an historic figure as the first black (or at least mixed race) president, he seemed a very likable sort, his rhetoric soared in his platform speeches, he promised to fix the seriously broken economy, the party in power when the great recession hit needed to be punished not rewarded with re-election and, hope and change was in the air.
- In 2012 Obama has been amply exposed for the charlatan, incompetent and loony left failure that he obviously is and so there is only one reason to vote for Obama and the Democrats.
- The reason, as Steyn explains here, is that a majority of Americans like a big government that will give them "free stuff" or, more accurately, stuff freely stolen from the diminishing minority that still believes in working hard and smart for a living within a free society and a competitive market economy and that these same Americans don't give a flying fig that the cost of this "free stuff" is to beggar the economy and the finances of the republic and turn it into the next Greece in which ultimately everybody suffers.
- Here is Steyn's column:
The Audacity of Hopelessness
National Review's Happy Warrior
October 2, 2012
According to the New York Times, "the magic is gone." According to the New York Post, "the thrill is gone." And yet, according to the polls, he isn't a goner. Even if you shave off two-three-four points for Democrat over-sampling and other pollster malarkey, the unmagical non-thrilling President Obama remains remarkably competitive.
Which means that if he wins we won't have the same excuse as we did last time. In 2008, Senator Obama was lucky, as he has been all his political life: a global downturn, war-weariness, a Republican opponent who even in his better moments gave the strong impression that honor required him to lose . . . These and various other stars all aligned for him. But he himself was the biggest star of all: a history-making candidate, a messianic figure and not merely a national but a planetary healer. Not all of us bought into it even then: I saw him on the stump just the once and thought the silver-tongued orator was a crashing bore. Couldn't see what the fuss was about. But fuss there was. It's one thing if the Republican loses to a thrilling, magical superstar; it's quite another if the Republican loses to a mean, petty, leaden, boring, earthbound hack who hasn't lit up a room in years. In 2008, the American people said: We like this guy. In 2012, they'd be saying: We like these policies. That's far more disturbing.
And yet it's entirely within the realm of possibility. The conventional line is that this election is a referendum on Obama. But it's also, as Jay Nordlinger wrote, a test of the people. In advanced Western societies spending themselves into oblivion, the political class has looted the future to bribe the present and the electorate has largely gone along with it. The question for voters now is a very simple one: Can they get real before it's over?
The Democrats think they know the answer to that one. In recent election seasons, the United States has been, rhetorically, a one-party state: Republicans sound like Republicans, and Democrats sound like Republicans — tough on crime, fiscally responsible, cool with churchgoing. Bill Clinton slapped down Sister Souljah and went back to Arkansas to fry a guy. But even John Kerry talked about how he'd hunt down and kill America's enemies, and, when abortion came up, did 40 seconds of anguished contortions on what an agonizingly painfully deeply painfully agonizing decision it is.
Not this time round. Abortion? The more the merrier. Bring it on. Half the speakers onstage at the Democratic convention would gladly have performed partial-birth abortions on audience volunteers, of whom there would have been no shortage. God (and Jerusalem) found Charlotte a tougher crowd. And, as for debt and jobs and boring CBO graphs and numbers with twelve zeroes on the end, who cares? Anyone can rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, but it takes a certain bravura panache to stage The ****** Monologues on the lido deck as the iceberg looms.
A month or so back, I chanced to drive through Brussels, specifically the "Euro-quarter," home to the architectural excrescences that house the EU bureaucracy. From every ugly rain-streaked concrete tower dangled their current slogan in 30-story-high font: "Strengthening Europe through Governance." A charitable sort, I assumed something had got lost in translation. But the Democratic party's first language is still, just about, English, and their money quote was: "Government is the only thing we all belong to." Take any electable center-leftie from around the Anglosphere in recent years — Britain's Tony Blair, Canada's Jean Chrétien, Australia's Kevin Rudd, New Zealand's Helen Clark — and the disposition on display in Charlotte was well to their left. All that coy stuff from the Clinton years about "New Democrats" and "Third Way" has been cast aside. These Democrats are out, and proud. They offered their most explicitly left-wing convention in 40 years — and they got away with it.
The Dems have made a calculation. They've bet that the electorate accepts the first part of the Republican critique — times are bum and getting bummer (to quote Gus Kahn in "Ain't We Got Fun") — but not the second part: that the antidote to the lousy Obama economy is Romney-style economic dynamism. In a land where Americans in their late 20s have moved back in with their parents and Americans in their early 50s have gone on permanent disability, more and more people have given up on any hope of change. To the old question "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" there are millions who answer "No" — but that's all the more reason to stick with the party of mass dependency and supersized food-stamp programs. In other words, what conservatives think of as Obama's "failure" — the moribund economy, flatline jobs market, underwater housing, general sclerosis — the Democrats see as a wildly successful expansion of the base. Or as Hilaire Belloc put it, "Always keep a-hold of Nurse / For fear of finding something worse."
Over on the other team, the instinct is to soft-pedal. Romney decided a long time ago that his general line on the incumbent is that he's a nice guy who's in way over his head. This might even work — that's to say, it may enable Mitt to thread the needle and get to 270 electoral votes. But it happens not to be true, so that even the terms in which Romney has chosen to frame the election are a preemptive cringe and a concession to the other side. As I say, Mitt could yet pull it off. But the confidence underpinning the Democratic convention — that the bleak certainty of dependency without end has more appeal than the possibility of economic revival — says nothing good about where America's headed.
