The Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Mort Zuckerman: “World Sees Obama As Incompetent And Amateur.”

At the Corner, Mark Steyn responds, “Now They Tell Us:”

Most of what follows won’t come as news to NR readers, but this is the nub of it:

“The end result is that a critical mass of influential people in world affairs who once held high hopes for the president have begun to wonder whether they misjudged the man.”

I touch on this very subject in my own column. The question is whether these “influential people” are sufficiently chastened to examine in any meaningful way which of their own biases caused them to think a community organizer with no executive experience and more memoirs than accomplishments was just what the world’s superpower needed.

‘Cause if all these “influential people” aren’t up for a bit of self-analysis, golly, they might make the same mistake all over again next time round.

And they will. As Big Journalism’s Frank Ross has noted, “Remember, this is the same Mort Zuckerman who owns the New York Daily News, wherein an October 19, 2008 editorial endorsed candidate Obama:”

Obama has been called audacious, and he certainly is. But his confidence is supported by both a high intelligence and a clear-eyed pragmatism, qualities that enabled him to best more established competitors – now to stand within reach of breaking America’s ultimate racial barrier.

A brilliant mind combined with practicality would well serve any President, and the reserves shown by Obama suggest he would bring nimbleness and judgment to the Oval Office. So does his crucial vow to reach across the aisle for solutions frozen in partisan gridlock.

Yeah, Obama’s vaunted bipartisanship has surely been one of the best features of his spectacularly-successful presidency…

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, because Obama’s “solutions” to the various “crises” he’s been faced with (and/or ginned-up) have invariably been from the far left-hand side of century-old playbook, as Michael Barone writes, voters “don’t like the dog food:”

William Galston, than whom there is no better thinker among Democrats today, has been reading the same polls as his Brookings colleague E. J. Dionne, but takes a much harsher view of what Democrats can do. “In a blogpost on The New Republic website headlined “Prepare yourself for Speaker Boehner,” Galston tell House Democrats “it’s time to press the panic button,” and cites the analysis of political scientist Alan Abramowitz on Larry Sabato’s website and the analysis by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg of the poll he and Republican pollster Glenn Bolger conducted for NPR. Here’s Galston’s advice for House Democrats:

Democrats must face the fact that much of the legislation that seems both necessary and proper to them looks quite different to the portion of the electorate that holds the balance of political power. And they must face a choice as well—between (to be blunt) the politics of conviction and the politics of self-preservation. They can continue on as they have been going since January 2009, or they can adopt a concerted strategy designed to take the edge off public anger and reduce their losses. They can spend the summer arguing about matters like immigration, climate change, and the war in Afghanistan, all of which are valid and important but way down on the public’s list of the most urgent problems—or they can refocus on jobs and the economy, reinforcing the ‘Recovery Summer’ theme the White House unveiled on Thursday.

Read that first sentence again. It reminds me of the old story about the advertising agency and the dog food. The best ads in the world failed to increase sales of the dog food. So they sent a market researcher in and found the reason: The dogs didn’t like the dog food. The Democrats’ problem is similar. The American people don’t like the dog food (“legislation that seems both necessary and proper to them”) produced by the Obama Democrats.

Doug Ross notes that in Orlando, that the Road to Serfdom finally has a name: