“I am not so sure that Barack Obama is going to lose support among his followers any time soon. If deception has worked to his advantage so far it was largely the self-deception among those who felt compelled to believe in him. BHO’s great talent was knowing how to tap into this need and package himself so that he passed, like a shiny silk cloth which changes color depending on the angle of the light, as anything you wanted him to be at all.”
“One of the nasty side effects of political polarization is that it becomes difficult for people to even privately admit to making a mistake in the voting booth.”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
And therein lies the problem. It’s often been said that one of the most defining characteristics of the left is an absolute inability to admit any error of any size or at any level, because doing so means that other errors are possible, and that simply cannot be, due to the ‘perfect’ ideology that they follow (heaven on earth, as it were).
Add to this the adolescent idea that if you buy a lousy car and are more afraid of your neighbors mocking you for the purchase than you are of owning a lemon, you’ll NEVER puclicly have buyers remorse, and will always act as though you own a finely tuned Bugatti instead of a Lada.
Contrast this with the zeitgeist of the center-right, whose tradition is steeped in concepts like original sin and an inherent belief in the imperfection of man vs the perfection of the creator. “I made a mistake” vs “mistakes were made”.
This belief in man being less than perfect is useful in many ways, because it allows for improvement within, but it is often a vulnerability when competing against the left in elections. W was savaged by many conservatives in a way that is literaly impossible (given their mindset) for the left to apply to ANY of their leaders, much less one that gives a good speech.
I believe that the only way that O voters, particularly white O voters, will leave “their man” is if he moves to the center in the realm of social issues. His staying hard left on economics or remaining authoritarian in terms of politics will literally never move them off the dime even if it brings damage and ruin, and in fact may endear him to the more romantic among them even more.
