The Pride Of The Liberals

IN THE LATEST National Review Ramesh Ponnuru disusses The Pride of the Liberals. He is talking about the state of mind in a political movement when it stops listening. Conservatives did it, he suggests, in the later Bush years. But with our Democratic friends in Washington it has started already.

President Obama and his supporters are showing early symptoms of this syndrome in the first flush of victory. The liberal ascendancy is already becoming a liberal complacency.

Actually, I think it’s worse than that. I think that our liberal friends are not just proud and complacent, having persuaded themselves over the past eight years that President Bush was unusually stupid, even for a Republican president. I think they have become reckless.

The Clinton administration was, despite the personal recklessness of the president, a strategically conservative administration, especially after the disastrous first two years. It wanted to be liberal but knew that the American people didn’t. That’s what all the triangulation was about.

But I think that our liberal friends have just got tired of being so careful. What’s the point of being a liberal if you can’t legislate grand liberal programs?

So our liberal friends are going for broke. They are cramminhg all their liberal pet projects and their grand vision of comprehensive health care and cradle-to-grave government education and their global warming program down our throats before we understand what is happening.

I think it is understandable. They must sense that their time is running out. So they are going for one last Big Push. They are like the Germans on the Western Front in 1918. Ludendorff knew that he had to strike in the west right away before the Americans had reinforced the western allies. So he struck in the March offensive and nearly broke the British army. Nearly broke them.

When the great offensives failed then it was all over for Germany. The tide turned in August as the British and the Americans started their counteroffensives, and by October the Germans were suing for an Armistice.

In my view President Obama is the Democrats’ Ludendorff. He is brilliant, prideful, and doesn’t seem to know much outside the world of his liberal sub-culture.

There seems to be a kind of bullying clumsiness about the Obamunists. It contrasts with the carefulness of the Bush people, who seemed to prefer to say nothing rather than say something stupid. It especially contrasts with the briliant polemics of the Clinton people. Bill Clinton knew how to own the public square, how to use partisan rhetoric to advance his agenda and confuse the opposition. But I don’t see that sort of brilliance in the Obama administration.

From a partisan perspective, all this is encouraging if you are a Republican. You feel that the clumsiness of the Obamunists will escalate into collisions with the furniture. You feel that they will overreach and that a strategic reversal will occur.

But, of course, it won’t be so much fun for the American people. They willl be confused and angry, and rightly so. They don’t care about grand political strategy. They just want to be able to live their lives in peace and prosperity.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.