For us rock-ribbed conservative GOPers, we’re really not that angry – we knew precisely what was coming down the pike with the election of Obama. There are a lot of angry people out there, however – and who are they? Victor Davis Hanson provides the best explanation I’ve seen:
Bait-and-Switch
There is a growing sense of a “we’ve been had”, bait-and-switch. Millions of moderate Republicans, independents, and conservative Democrats—apparently angry at Bush for Iraq and big deficits, unimpressed by the McCain campaign, intrigued by the revolutionary idea of electing an African-American president—voted for Obama on the assumption that he was sincere about ending red state/blue state animosity. They took him at his word that he was going to end out of control federal spending. They trusted that he had real plans to get us out of the economic doldrums, and that he was not a radical tax-and-spend liberal of the old sort.
Instead, within days Obama set out plans that would triple the annual deficit, and intends to borrow at a record pace that will double the aggregate debt in just eight years.
He not only took over much of the auto- and financial industries, but also did so in a way that privileged unions, politically-correct creditors, and those insider cronies who favor administration initiatives. On matters racial, his administration is shrill and retrograde, not forward-looking. It insists on emphasizing the tired old identify politics that favor a particular sort of racial elite that claims advantage by citing past collective victimization or piggy-backs for advantage on the plight of the minority underclass.
In other words, the Obama swing voter thought he was getting a 21st-century version of pragmatic, triangulating Bill Clinton—and instead got something to the left of 1970s Jimmy Carter.
You see, we knew Obama was putting up a false front all along – liberals learned the lesson all the way back in 1988 that you can’t win nationally as a liberal. Since then, they’ve tried various expedients to dodge the liberal tag – successfully with Clinton and now with Obama. But in policy, there is no actual difference between George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama. Any one of them would do what any other would do with hardly a shade of difference. This is not so much because of what is inside the men, themselves, but what is inside the people they will appoint – especially appointments lower down the scale, where actual policy is implemented. Unless Obama decided to appoint his people out of the Heritage Foundation, it was dead certainty that the Obama policies would be straight down the line liberal – and rather extreme liberal, in to the bargain.
In practical terms what this means is that no matter what shading there is in the Democrat, he must not be voted in to office because the people who will trail after him will be in direct opposition to the American people. Even someone as worthy as Joe Lieberman could not be trusted with the White House because he would have in his administration the same sort of people Obama has – and while Lieberman might be able to force through pro-Israel security policy, the rest would be right out of the ultra-liberal play book…one, as President, can’t get too bogged down in the details…but the Devil is there in. Our only safety is to ensure that, on balance, a conservative is running the show because only such will give a chance for non-liberals to run the day to day machinery of government.
As it relates to Obama, the waves of anger are just going to rise higher unless Obama “pulls a Clinton” and at least starts talking right and throwing a few sops to conservatism (tax cuts, welfare reform, dropping ObamaCare, eg). This, alone, would defuse the surging anger out there – anger of a people who really thought that Obama was different. We’ll see what course Obama adopts.
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