Typically in politics there are things you can do and things you can’t do. Affairs, DUI, corruption, communist tendencies, and manslaughter are all things the public can look past. However, you can’t say anything that can remotely be associated with being racist. I should not there are two standards. There’s the Democrat standard and there’s a Republican standard. When Trent Lott made controversial comments about Strom Thurmond he was force to step down as Minority Leader. Former Klansman and Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd simply had to apologies for his racist remark on television.
This brings me to Senator Harry Reid. The embattled Senator from Nevada is facing a tough reelection bid already. Now the Majority Leader is in trouble for some off-color comments about the President.
Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, apologized on Saturday for once predicting that Barack Obama could become the country’s first black president because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
Reid made the comment to the two authors of the book, “Game Change.” What was Harry thinking? The whole things sounds to me like an inside job. Someone probably wants Reid’s position. President Obama has forgiven Reid.
“I accepted Harry’s apology without question because I’ve known him for years. I’ve seen the passionate leadership he’s shown on issues of social justice, and I know what’s in his heart,” Mr. Obama said in a statement, adding that the remark was “unfortunate.” “As far as I am concerned, the book is closed.”
Ah, the Church of the Democratic Party offers forgiveness of racism for party membership. At the Catholic Church you simply have to offer confession and do ten Hail Marys and one Glory Be. When a Democrat mentions social justice what does that mean?
Harry Reid wasn’t around during the Civil Rights era. He’s been a Senator since the 80s. Democrats have been paying lip service to African Americans since President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, but they haven’t done anything productive in over forty years. Democrats sure have milked that voting bloc though.
On social issues like abortion, gay marriage, and immigration African Americans share more in common with Republicans than they do with Democrats. What Democrat policy is helping African Americans? Social justice is a clever political phrase, but it’s not a license for forgiveness.
One year after the 2008 election, one thing is certain: the average American voter is center-right. After Obama’s win, many pundits and bloggers opined about how America had moved left. In reality, Obama’s election was more about a rejection of eight years of Bush, not to mention the rejection of a boring, moderate McCain campaign. Now that the Democrats are in power their coalition is falling apart. The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg makes some good points about this phenomenon:
The Democratic Party’s leaders are a lot more liberal than their voters (the dynamic is even more true when it comes to committee chairs who are to the left of the average Democratic congressmen). The Democrats came into power in 2008 thinking they had a huge mandate for liberalism, when they really had a huge mandate for competence (for want of a better word). Obama and his coterie misunderstood this. They used a lot of “pragmatic” rhetoric, but they governed from the left, starting with the calamitous stimulus bill. Obama’s personal popularity is still sustaining him, but it seems to me that the Democratic Party missed an enormous opportunity. I don’t think they’re doomed or anything like that. But, they’ve managed to rebrand themselves as a very liberal party again, and that’s a problem when 80% of Americans don’t describe themselves as liberals.
Gallup released a new poll measuring ideological groups in America. There’s nothing really startling about the poll. It’s relatively unchanged over the last two decades. Liberals enjoyed a small jump toward the end of the Bush years, but have settled back to 20%. Goldberg is correct; Obama and the Democrats cannot maintain a winning coalition governing from the left. Obama will most certainly tack to the center at some point or risk a reelection nightmare.
Simply moving to the center will be more difficult for Obama than it was for Clinton. President Clinton campaigned for a few centrist ideas. The cornerstone issue for Clinton was welfare reform. When Clinton ran for reelection his most significant first-term achievement was something Republicans wanted. In 1996 the economy was doing better and Clinton has taken a valuable campaign issue from the Republicans. Obama doesn’t have any popular centrist plans. The President is unwilling to adopt any health care reform ideas from the right. Instead, Obama contrasts his opponents as having no ideas.
The President was able to run as a moderate in the last election because no one was willing to look at his record. Obama basically won by default against an old Republican who refused to differentiate himself in a winning year for Democrats. Even if the economy bounces back 2012 will not be a cake walk. Al Gore ran for president in 2000 when the economy was doing well and Clinton was still popular and lost. The economy was doing well in 2004, but Bush didn’t win handily against Kerry. The nation is still divided. Obama’s best hope is the rise of a third-party candidate to drain votes from the Republicans. Since the Republicans do not have a leader and there’s populist unrest within both parties a third-party candidate is becoming more likely. Who will it be?
It’s one thing for liberal bloggers, talking heads, and small time politicians to complain about FOX News, but for the President of the United States to say that FOX is like “talk radio” is insane. Does President Obama really want to go to war with America’s most popular news source? What does he hope to gain? The President is faced with a bad economy, a health care fight and a war. Why is he wasting time bashing FOX?
“I think what our advisers have simply said is that we are going to take media as it comes,” Obama told NBC’s Savanah Guthrie. “And if media is operating basically as a talk radio format then that’s one thing, and if it’s operating as a news outlet that’s another but it’s not something I’m losing sleep over.” [Emphasis added]
Oh really? Does anyone truly believe the that White House would be wasting time on FOX if Obama was completely unconcerned? One thing I think Americans are learning about this young presidency is that he can’t take criticism. By any standard Obama has received the greatest coverage from the press in modern history. Yet, he’s upset with FOX? I can see why the White House holds up CNN as the model of centrist journalism. After all it was CNN’s superstar Anderson Cooper who was making jokes about “teabagging” and Wolf Blitzer “factchecking” a skit on SNL. I can see why the White House loves CNN. Just for the record, George W. Bush never said the word “strategery” and Sarah Palin never said that she could see Russia from her front porch. I didn’t know “factchecking” was necessary for sketch comedy.
Corruption we can believe in!
Maybe what Obama is really upset about is his falling approval numbers. If so, he really is a thin-skinned woosie. If I remember my Greek mythology correctly, Narcissus was a thin-skinned woosie. This is part of the job, Mr. President. Even President Reagan had days when he wasn’t so popular. Obama needs to get tough. Quit complaining about FOX News. The leader of the free world needs to start acting like it. Let’s start with making a decision about Afghanistan.
A few months ago with the White House and Congress were ramming the pork ridden stimulus bill through Washington the President’s economic team produced the graph below to justify the legislation. The stimulus isn’t helping, it never will help, and it was a colossal waste of money. The economy will eventually bounce back and if it happens during this administration the White House will cite the stimulus as the reason. The economy is the number one issue right now and the President seems more worried about health care, climate change, and the Olympics.
ht: Greg Mankiw
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