Krauthammer gets it very right:
…November ’08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ’09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm — and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.
The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm — deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years — because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his “New Foundation” for America — from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.
Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama’s hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt — the tea party demonstrators, the town hall protesters — as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.
Some rump…
The stars aligned perfectly for the Democrats in 2008 – there was not one additional thing which could have been added to give them a better advantage. And yet their vote total, while a solid win, was fairly modest. The sort of result you’d expect from two evenly matched parties who slugged it out with enthusiasm. Actually, the GOP was in terrible shape in 2008 – short on money, lacking enthusiasm, with an unexciting standard-bearer; and yet, had just a couple things gone right, McCain would be President right now.
But Obama and his Democrats choose to treat their victory as a mandate for change – and not just a mandate for any, old change, but for very ardently leftist change. This in spite of the fact that one of the prime reasons they won was because they hid their leftist agenda behind a fog of centrist rhetoric and the MSM played cover for them. They didn’t win on a leftist platform, but immediately proceeded to govern on one. The reaction we’ve seen is completely natural – the people are not leftist; never have been, never will be. We’re Americans.
Added to this and intensifying the effect has been the stunning incompetence of President Obama. I was discussing this with a friend yesterday and our hope is that Obama is a puppet…because if he’s not, then he’s just a plain and simple idiot. If Obama is lucky, hardly anyone saw that presser in the wake of the Ft Hood attack – my wife saw it live and was just disgusted by it; listening to it on the radio later I was stunned at the complete obtuseness of the man. To talk up Indians while America is in shock over mass murder is, well, just the most amazingly dumb thing imaginable. But this isn’t the first time such things have happened. I’m actually a bit worried that Obama simply will not get the hang of being President and that we’ll be stuck with a moving disaster until January of 2013.
Be that as it may, the playing field has tilted back towards the center/right. But it has not tilted back towards the GOP. The Republican party still has a long way to go to earn the trust and respect of the American people – even though the GOP is likely to score some impressive gains next year, it won’t matter much unless the people actually trust the GOP to do the right thing, once back in power. The people are in the process of taking back their government – our job, as Republicans, is to simply assist them in this task and then carry out the long-needed reforms being demanded. We do that, and we’ll route the left for good in this nation.
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