I’ve made the comparison between Stinkin’ Dinkins and St. Barry for a few months now. When I first said, people thought I was sorta whacked. Now, it seems like an apt comparison.

When you’re elected as pretty much a blank slate basic on a slogan (“Hope and Change” in 2008, “Gorgeous Mosaic” in 1989) that swing voters can paint their own pictures on based on an idealized notion of what’s going to happen, disappointments like this for those swing voters are the natural outcome. Americans elected Obama for the same reason New Yorkers elected Dinkins — because neither of them reminded voters of Al Sharpton, in terms of the aggressive partisanship and overtly race-based agenda that voters did not want in their first African American mayor/president. But that same personality made Dinkins, and makes Obama loathe to challenge their base on the left, and therefore allows them to run wild with an agenda they’ve been longing to implement for years, but one the public didn’t vote for.

Obama’s inability/fear of challenging his base actually emboldens them to double-down on the demagoguery when things aren’t going their way, which is why you’re seeing attacks that used to be reserved for conservative politicians, pundits and radio hosts now being extended to attacks on the public itself. The left is convinced their right and the public opposing them is stupid and/or evil and can be crushed with enough pressure. This failure to reign in your base in New York led to Crown Heights in 1991, a murder rate that at one point hit six persons a day and, eventually, to Mayor Rudy Giuliani; where the same failure by Obama to confront his special interests is going to lead remains to be seen.

Lame.