My conservative friends — and even a few media liberals — are agreed: The bloom is off the Obama rose. He’s not the Obamessiah, just another 50-percent president. He tried to do too much too fast, and his numbers are sinking. The Europeanization of health care is dead. Fuhgeddabouddit.
I wouldn’t be so sure. President Obama has no choice but to move fast, in part because the image he presented during the campaign — a post-partisan, post-racial, post-anything-unpleasant-and-controversial, pragmatic centrist — was a total crock. He has a vast transformative domestic agenda and — because most of its elements are not terribly popular — he has to accomplish it at speed, or he won’t get it done at all.
Health-care “reform”? As we’ve seen this past week in the House of Representatives, put not your trust in “Blue Dog Democrats.” And, as we’ll no doubt see in the weeks ahead in the Senate, put not your trust in “moderate Republicans” whose urge to “reach across the aisle” is so reflexive it ought to be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The president needs to get something passed. Anything. The details don’t matter. Once it’s in place, health-care “reform” can be re-reformed endlessly. Indeed, you’ll be surprised how little else we talk about. So, for example, public funding for abortions can be discarded now, and written in — as it surely will be by some judge — down the road. What matters is to ram it through, get it done, pass it now — in whatever form.
If this seems a perverse obsession for a nation with a weak economy, rising unemployment, and a war on two fronts, it has a very sound strategic logic behind it. As I wrote in National Review a week or two back, health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. That’s its attraction for an ambitious president: It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in a way that hands all the advantages to statists — to those who believe government has a legitimate right to regulate human affairs in every particular.
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Is the bloom also coming off Sarah Palin’s rose as it has been confirmed that shes about to be divorced. Rumors have it that both she and her husband had affairs?
http://alaskareport.com/news39/x71283_divorce_palins.htm
Naw UV, ever since Bill Clinton had affairs they have been extolled as virtues, or at least not to be worried about in terms of job related abilities.
It may be true, but since Obamas loss of bloom comes as a result of unpopular policies and same old, same old politics – and Sarah Palin’s (if indeed her popularity does wane) comes from non office related issues, then its probably a stretch to try to put the two on equal footing.
Well if that is true, UV, those on the left will soon begin to like her. All she needs to do then is have an abortion and she’ll be elected Pres no problem!
As for Obama, Glenn Beck had chilling footage of some speeches O gave to SEIU (a large union). He said he would have meetings with them on every change to public policy he wants to do. He would consult them in everything he did. That’s exactly what Taliban Jack would do and why it’s best to keep that nutjob as far away from power as possible. We dodged a real bullet when the Coalition of Idiots went down in flames, thank God.
See my comments about Miller in Toronto. That’s why you shouldn’t elect socialists who are beholden to unions to get voted. Guess who gets screwed. Of course during the election, O campaigned to sound more moderate. Boy did he pull the wool over a lot of folks’ eyes.
If true about Palin, could upset the right wing of the so called ‘Morale Majority’ of the Republican Party.
Geez, with an alleged background like that, might cross the floor and become a Democrat saying “I did not have sex with that man’ on National TV as did former President Clinton.
Seriously, she will probably disappear from sight and probably the true reason she is leaving politics. One must’n't upset the Morale Majority.
Looks like the latest smear has been unequivocally denied. If the leftist media cant find any evidence to support their wishful thinking they just make it up, and hope most people only catch the smear.
She is no longer a public servant yet the smears ramp up. They continue to throw thier worst at her, and yet she still stands proud.
Should she ever decide to run for the big job, the media will simply have no credibility in criticizing her or creating controversy around her.
Whats that old saying “if you cant take the heat, then get out of the kitchen’ and it looks as if Palin has done just that. I wonder if there are any other skeletons are in her closet? Both Canadian and American politics has become a ‘blood sport’ on both sides of the political spectrum.