Authentic grass roots movement
Obama vs. The People
By Daniel Greenfield Monday, September 7, 2009
Obama is falling and contrary to what anyone might have expected, it
was not the marginalized Republican party under the inept leadership
of Michael Steele or its stable of Congressional Republicans
providing nothing but token opposition, who gave him that big push.
While the official Republican leadership sat in the corner, information
flew back and forth between bloggers, activists and talk show hosts
and the result was an authentic grass roots movement.
“The Mobs” that panicked Democratic politicians and their media
press corps decry represent the one thing that a phony grass roots
movement like the Obama campaign fear the most… being
confronted with an authentic grass roots movement. Their campaigns
against radio and TV hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck
reveal that they cannot understand what is going on as anything but
some top down operation. After all they are supposed to represent
“The People”, but the only people they could find to represent them
at the Town Halls were the SEIU goons they packed the halls with.
And there’s nothing like a “grass roots movement” that you have to
bus in, which consists purely of people who are set to profit from
your legislation.
The Republican leadership is almost as nervous, torn between
seizing the moment or standing aside to avoid being accused of
“extremism”. The same folks who thought the best way to run a
Presidential campaign was by being as inoffensive as possible,
who think Meghan McCain represents the future of the Republican
Party and that public opinion is determined by the op ed page of
the New York Times and the Washington Post, naturally have no
clue how to respond to the situation. The Republican leadership
has become detached from its base and increasingly has no idea
how to connect to the concerns of ordinary Americans. By
stepping back from the fight, they lost the chance to set the
agenda, and now the agenda is being set for them.
But as appealing as populist rhetoric about fiscal conservatism
may be, the whole power of being a congressman rests in handing
out pork. Even Ron Paul who tried to brand himself as a leader in
fiscal conservatism turned out to have his share of earmarks and
family members on the payroll. And that unfortunately is the default
standard for politicians, and though some may hide it better than
others, a politician is a man who works on your payroll to spend your
money on behalf of his supporters, which is why expecting fiscal
conservatism from congress is like expecting a lion to go vegetarian.
Politicians listen to their constituents when they say they want lower
taxes, less regulation, less immigration and no NAFTA. Sometimes
they even mimic the rhetoric or even get out front to lead the parade,
but when they’re in the Senate cloakroom, it quickly becomes a whole
different ballgame. But politicians can’t do anything except on behalf
of the people—and rarely has there been such a showing of the people
coming out to denounce a policy supposedly being enacted on their
behalf. The Town Hall protests tore away the philanthropic facade
behind ObamaCare. It was not some imaginary wealthy “Brooks Brothers
Brigade” that went into the Town Halls, but ordinary working class
Americans who firmly and vocally said, “No Thanks” to the ObamaCare
boondoggle. And that has become a major gamechanger.
Obama and his cronies were counting on fighting the Republican party.
They were counting on taking swipes at Limbaugh or Beck. They were
not counting on serious public opposition. Denouncing the health care
protesters as right wing extremists did not help. Trying to claim that the
Obama socialist photoshop was racist was a desperate move that
jumped the race card shark. By their very presence, the protests made
ObamaCare controversial, and simply denouncing them was not going
to be able to reverse that. The more the media denounced them and
the more SEIU thugs attacked them; the more the general public came
to see ObamaCare as a controversial program.
While the Republican party may have been neutered for now, Obama
finds himself in the very uncomfortable position of playing, “Obama vs
the People”. The Obama Administration was counting on being able to
run up the tab by the trillions with no serious congressional opposition.
But while that worked long enough to subsidize UAW auto companies
and bailout Obama’s Wall Street buddies, after two thirds of a year in
which the economic situation kept sliding downward, the American
people began grumbling about his lack of results.
Like most politicians, Obama did not understand that the voters did
not put him into office so that he could run up a deficit of trillions of
dollars composed of pork, giveaways and senseless centralization.
Obama ran for office promising hope and change. The only things he
delivered were payoffs to Wall Street donors and UAW union feather
bedders. And just as he was about to deliver a whopping payoff to his
SEIU union Marxist buddies, the whole thing collapsed because the
American people reached the point where they had enough.
Obama’s egotism and immaturity let him gain power, without
understanding that being in charge, also means being responsible
when things go wrong. And in his increasingly pathetic attempts to
try and blame Bush for his own deficit spending, Obama showed that
he did not know how to function without someone like Bush up top to
blame the whole thing on. But now Obama is Bush, stuck with the big
chair that he doesn’t actually know how to use, and clueless about
what it takes to pass legislation, because between photo op
appearances and running for office, he had never really passed any.
The State Senate assigned him credit for other people’s legislation.
In the United States Senate, he ran for higher office after only a 100
days in the chamber. Like a precocious third grader who suddenly
finds himself in college, Obama had no idea how to work with
congress to get legislation passed. And the same media which
sneered at McCain’s claims that he had the experience that Obama
didn’t, was now forced to admit that the lack of focus and credibility
at the White House level was a serious problem.
While Obama was still coasting on his “historic election”, a lot of
congressmen were getting ready for their nerve-racking midterm
elections. The Republicans were still shellshocked, and liberal
Democrats were arrogant, but the conservative Democrats who
had given their party the majority in 06 and 08, felt vulnerable. Cut
out of the loop by an increasingly radicalized White House and
congressional leadership, and threatened by midterm elections that
traditionally cut down seats belonging to the ruling party, they became
the legislative weak point in ObamaCare. And once the Town Hall
protests made it safer to do nothing, than to do something,
ObamaCare hit an invisible brick wall.
Using the media, Obama squashed most opposition by established
politicians, but he has now come face to face with a vocal popular revolt
at the Town Hall protests and a quieter but vaster sense of dissatisfaction
by the American electorate. Republican and Independent approval is
peeling away, followed by that of many Democrats, leaving the naked
emperor cloaked only in his own base and without a national mandate
for change. And even his own supporters are beginning to suspect that
Obama may have nothing more to offer beyond magazine covers and
high minded rhetoric.
The White House has tried to fight back by targeting first Limbaugh and
then Beck, demonstrating a profound contempt for the views of the grass
roots opposition, which they imagine will go away if a few talk show hosts
will just stop “inciting it.” But what the left fails to understand is that if
Limbaugh and Beck went off the air tomorrow, the situation would not
change in any significant way. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are not
some sort of aberrant phenomenon, they are a reflection of the views,
fears and concerns of their listeners. And those views and concerns are
not going away. The battle is a battle of ideas, and while the Democrats
occupy the executive and legislative castles, they are finding that those
positions may give them power, but also invest them with responsibilities
in the middle of a crisis that they are simply not capable of living up to.
Throughout it all Obama has relied on his media manufactured charisma
to shield a multitude of sins. But incompetence is one sin that cannot be
covered by magazine covers. In the Senate, Obama could have gotten
by easily enough. As a Vice President, he could have posed endlessly
for magazine covers while accomplishing nothing. But in the Oval Office,
he had to deliver, and the only thing he delivered was the hijacking of
America at the hands of his radical legion of czars. Now is the moment
of truth where Obama faces the people, and begins to deal with the
consequences of the disaster he has created, the deficit, the lost jobs
and the economic crisis he tried to exploit for political gain. The case
of Obama vs the People has just begun.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and freelance commentator.
“Daniel comments on political affairs with a special focus on the War on Terror and
the rising threat to Western Civilization.