ROGER KIMBALL OFFERS a self-help plan for disillusioned Obama voters.
First time around, these people voted for Obama, giving themselves a little frisson of self-satisfaction when they pulled the lever and, even more, when the emitted condescension about anyone who happened to vote for John McCain — they didn’t encounter such people often, but it always gave them a little thrill of self-satisfaction when they did. It wasn’t long, however, before doubts began to accumulate. The seas didn’t subside, as promised, nor did the unemployment figures. By now, they’re thoroughly depressed. Their man has clearly let them down, and the inadvertent comedy of Joe Biden screaming that Republicans are going to “put y’all back in chains” isn’t helping. Even worse is the news that team R&R, the Romney-Ryan express, is surging among young voters.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. The good “Liberals” (i.e., the illiberal liberals) who voted for Obama first time around, the mostly white, privileged products of elite schools and progressive attitudes: they were supposed to be on the winning side of all such controversies. They were the enlightened ones. Republicans, the people who voted for John McCain and —Ohmygod! — Sarah Palin: they didn’t go to the right schools, they didn’t ingest the proper balance of gluten free, free-range, macrobiotic, whatever: they wore the wrong sorts of cloths, had funny hairdos, owned guns and (often) were God-fearing people who took religion seriously. Such people were less objects of pity than of contempt, though when their politics were not on view they provided vast fodder for interventionist government programs aimed at transforming these unfortunates into consensus-chic, testosterone-free liberals.
The deep problem now is how to help the vast regiments of disillusioned liberals. As I’ve noted in this space before, momentum towards Romney is mounting. Soon, I predict, it will be all but irresistible. And then the consensus-chic liberals who had supported Obama in 2008 will be ideologically homeless. It is up to us to offer them a helping hand: a two-step program of recovery. Self-knowledge is the first step.
Read the whole thing. And it’s important to help them see reasons to vote against Obama that won’t make them feel like they’re on the wrong side of the culture wars. Hey, let’s run that graphic one more time:
