Red Meat For The Left

THE BIG problem for any political leader is the care and feeding of the base. You’ve got to keep them on the reservation. But you’ve got to keep them under control because they scare people.

That’s why the Religious Right is always a problem for Republican presidents. The president needs the Religious Right kept happy, but he needs to avoid scaring moderate women with jobs in the welfare state.

President Obama has the opposite problem. He needs to keep the Angry Left onside, but he needs to keep them from scaring the rest of America.

So what does the president do about the “torture” issue? He needs to throw a little red meat to the Angry Left. Torture has been a big issue for them; their websites are always munching on some new nugget, and hoping for worse.

But most Americans want the president to keep America Safe, even if it means a little skulduggery off in a corner that people would rather not know about.

Now Michael Barone has weighed in on the issue. First Obama published some memos embarrassing to the Bush administration, then he released a memo from his own security official and redacted the part where he wrote that he understood why the Bushies might have felt that enhanced negotiating techniques were needed in the months after 9/11. Then the president went to the CIA to raise morale, then he came out against a 9/11 type investigation.

The problem is that he is just whetting the appetite of the Madame Defarges on the Angry Left with all this to-ing and fro-ing.

Just as Madame Defarge relished watching the condemned walk from the tumbrel to the guillotine, our contemporary Defarges want to see the people they hate condemned and destroyed.

The Angry Left may hate nationalism and US hegemony and want to see Bush administration officials led to the guillotine, but ordinary Americans do not. And the more that the president truckles to the left’s taste for blood the more he loses ordinary Americans.

The more we see of President Obama, the more we wonder whether he’s got what it takes to be president of all Americans. That may be great for partisan Democrats and partisan Republicans, who love a good fight. But it can’t be good for America.

Sphere: Related Content |

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