Steve McCann has an excellent piece at American Thinker this morning, arguing compellingly that the Obama presidency is “failed” and effectively “over” because he has “abdicated” leadership to Congress. It’s good stuff, big chunks of red meat for a Monday morning.
But there might be a simpler reason.
President Obama has had a good two-plus years, handing out deficit-busting goodies to all the favorite Democrat constituencies. The EPA has become the monster it always threatened to be, the unions are stuffed full of automakers and have the mighty Boeing trembling at their power. The insurance companies are wards of the state, the medical profession has been saddled and broken. The symbiosis of Washington and Wall Street is complete, each too big to fail and utterly, sickeningly and dangerously co-dependent.
But yesterday’s debt deal showed that Obama’s goodie bag is empty. There’s nothing more to hand out. Santa Claus has left the building, and the Grinch has taken his place.
“Honestly,” the Democrats must be wondering, “what good is he to us now?”
Bernie Sanders saw the writing on the wall a week ago, which is why he called for a primary challenger — and Obama might yet get one. Oh, no one to make the few surviving Obamanoids sweat their simple little brows; incumbent Obama almost certainly can’t be beaten in a Democratic primary race. And I doubt he has the magnanimity to pull an LBJ and refuse to seek reelection. In fact, on the off chance the President reads this, I bet he’d have to look up the word “magnanimity.”
And then he’d probably chuckle at it. Anyway.
Today, President Obama is a shrunken executive, unable to do anything to influence the debt negotiations other than to scold the grownups doing the negotiating. And a nation mired in debt and out of work and with little remaining hope for the future, is tired of being scolded.
The progressives and the unions and the nanny-staters and all the rest — they’re tired, too. Come the election, they’ll get out there and plant the yard signs and raise the money and push the doorbells and twit the tweets. But their hearts won’t be in it. Because they’ll know that, come 2013, this shrunken, ineffective President will face an House and a Senate fully controlled by the “Taliban wing” of the GOP. If Obama couldn’t stand up to a Congress half-controlled by the GOP, how will he fare against the next one, after the GOP takes the Senate, too?
“Not well at all,” is the inescapable conclusion. And if you were asked how Obama has done in office overall, “not well at all,” is the most generous thing you could say in response — other than “it’s over,” for an Administration not even three years old.
Don’t get me wrong. If the GOP nominates one of its Unwinnables, Obama could very well take the election next year — but to what purpose?
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