After Thatcher And Obama
Here is a fun fact: following this past week’s death of
Baroness Margaret Thatcher, the second most popular song in England was apparently
“Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead.”
And, a second one: there is going to be a Presidential
election in November of 2016, and Barack Obama is not going to be on the ballot. We will have to wait to see what runs up the
pop charts.
The first fact is a testament to the enduring, and
controversial legacy the Iron Lady left.
She is both revered and reviled, despite the more than twenty years that
have passed since her own party showed her the door.
The second fact, the end of Mr. Obama’s Presidency, is one
that has to be a sobering thought for the brain trusts of both parties. Because, for four years and a few months, the
Obama Presidency has been solely about Barack Obama. It hasn’t been about the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it hasn’t been about guns, or immigrants, or
abortion, or prayer in schools, or taxing and spending. Nor about who built it, who was a taker or a
maker, the 47%, the 1%, class warfare, education, climate change, socialism,
drones, Gitmo, gays, or entitlements. It
hasn’t even been about Obamacare. It has
been about Barack Obama. We have,
collectively, poured all of our hopes, our apprehensions, our ambitions and our
paranoia into one man. He has been the
lens through which every policy issue is seen and he is the boogieman under the
bed. Barack Obama is the physical
embodiment of the atomization of our political culture.
Why Obama? A friend,
economically conservative but socially moderate, may have said it best. Obama was a man he felt he had nothing in
common with. Not just racially, but
where he came from, his friends and associates, the time he spent abroad, the
exposure to Islamic cultures, the influence of socialist and even
communist-leaning people in his formative years.
My friend is not an irrational kook or some partisan zealot,
but he can’t help but feeling that if Obama does it, there is a secret hidden
agenda, something subversive and totalitarian and freedom-destroying. There is nothing in Obama he recognizes;
Obama is an alien who cannot be trusted.
In 2017, Obama will be gone.
He will give speeches, travel, write books, and build a library. The media will do retrospectives, and
historians will write appraisals, but he will still be gone. One thing we know about Barack Obama is that
he is no Bill Clinton, for good or bad. He may feel white-hot on the inside,
but he’s a politician for a media age; on the outside, he burns cool.
When he is gone, the pall that his person casts over every
policy debate will fade, and all the rest of us will be stuck with each other, and
a host of unresolved issues, without the luxury of his personal lightening
rod. And, chances are, none of us are going to
recognize the landscape.
The fact is that the country is changing, and it is changing
rapidly. It is not necessarily becoming
more conservative or more liberal, because those labels have become little more
than slogans or pejoratives. It is becoming different, as the population
changes and moves. Much has been made of
the growth of immigrant (particularly Latino and Asian) populations, but that
is only part of the story. What is also going on is generational, a passage from
Depression-Era/WWII types to Boomers, to Gen X, and so on. These are not merely age groups, they are
attitude groups, and becoming a certain age does not necessarily transform one
into a New Deal Democrat of Reagan Republican.
So, too, has population movement, land development and
suburbanization changed attitudes of the voting electorate. We all know the
conventional story; how the South is a conservative Republican redoubt and how
Northeastern Republicans are becoming an endangered species. But that is only a
piece of it. There is a fascinating
story in the Washington Post by
Philip Rucker and Paul Kane. How did two
conservative Senators (Manchin and Toomey) with A ratings from the NRA come to
be the possible dealmakers on gun legislation?
“The rapid
growth of suburbs in historically gun-friendly states is forcing politicians to
cater to the more centrist and pragmatic views of voters in subdivisions and
cul-de-sacs as well as to constituents in shrinking rural hamlets where gun
ownership is more of a way of life.” Rucker and Kane looked
outside Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and found similar trends in Georgia,
Arizona, Colorado, and Virginia.
What
about those suburbanites? They may best
reflect where the center of the country is actually going: neither fish nor
fowl when it comes to party identification.
They don’t like taxes, but they want their kids to go to good schools
and have the garbage picked up. They
think government is too large and intrusive in the economic sector, but don’t care
for the noisy scolding that emanates from the Right on social issues. While the two parties hunker down in their
ideological (and geographic) bunkers, a large segment of the population wonders
why if you are for lower taxes, you must also be for burning books, and gays,
at the stake. Why can’t Washington just
fix the things that don’t work, and leave us all alone for the rest of it?
Where
does Obama fit in all this? He is an
accelerant, just like Thatcher was, but in an emotional rather than policy
way. Thatcher, in Barron’s Tom Donlan’s
words in Barron’s “Before Margaret Thatcher pushed her way
into 10 Downing Street, the United Kingdom had two major political parties,
both engaged in the country's longstanding class war. The Labour Party courted
and served the lower class, the people who worked with their muscles. The
Conservative Party represented the interests of the upper class, the people
whose inheritances allowed them not to work. After Margaret Thatcher finished
reorganizing the politics of her country, both major parties more closely
represented and courted the middle class, the people who work with their brains
to make money.”
Donlan
is an economic conservative and an admirer of Thatcher; he skips over the
collateral damage of Thatcher’s radical reforms.
Obama,
by contrast, is a moderate draped in the radical costume others put on him. Witness
what just happened when he introduced his budget. For many months, he has been urged to
put on the table, in writing, a credible compromise position. Something that includes revenues and
entitlement cuts. Go big, he’s been
told. Show leadership! Take risks! This he did. Liberals all over the country let out a
collective groan. Labor was
unhappy. Seniors were unhappy. Criticism flew in from all directions, much
of it from the very same people who told him to go big in the first place.
Naturally, the Republicans, displeased with a proposal that didn’t give them
everything they would have received with a Mitt Romney Presidency, denounced it. But, in the most appalling (typical, but
appalling) moment, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Greg
Walden (R-Ore.) went on CNN to slam it “I
thought it’s very intriguing in that his budget really lays out kind of a
shocking attack on seniors, if you will.”
Think about that for a second. The head of the NRCC plans to win
Congressional seats in 2014 by criticizing Mr. Obama for doing the one thing
Republicans (and even many non-partisan) commentators, have urged him to do;
put entitlement reform in the discussion.
What are these folks going to do when Obama’s not in office
any more? They can’t always think with
their glands, can they?
Maybe they can. Steve
Stockman, Republican Congressman from Texas (you remember him, he’s the chap
who invited Ted Nugent to be his guest at the State of the Union) tweeted the
following: “The
best way to honor Baroness Thatcher is to crush liberalism and sweep it into
the dustbin of history. What are you doing this morning?”
There’s a fun guy
to invite to breakfast.
MM
