◼ He is running as if the last three years didn’t happen. - Victor Davis Hanson/National Review
As the election year heats up, we seem not to have noticed the surreal nature of the campaign. One would expect Barack Obama to run on his record from 2009 to 2012, and especially during 2009–10, when he had a solidly Democratic Congress and passed his signature Obamacare. But he is not....
I have no idea what “civility” is supposed to mean today. The more the president references the need for softer tones, the more we hear of things like “punish our enemies.” If a president is to take time out from a bad economy and a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran to offer commentary on a radio-show host’s use of a slur against a female student, how can his campaign affiliates take a million dollars from a humorless comedian who so trumps Rush Limbaugh that his style of misogynist attack requires asterisks even to be quoted? During the 2008 campaign the candidate who was called a healer boasted of bringing a gun to a knife fight, advised “getting in their faces,” deprecated working-class voters as clingers, had a crowd cheering with a middle-finger rub on his face when mentioning Hillary Clinton, suggested his grandmother was a “typical white person,” and asserted that he could not disown the racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and so it makes sense that Obama is now praised even as he polarizes.
...we are seeing a campaign apparently framed on four general themes: an omnipotent, omnipresent George W. Bush in insidious fashion still hampers the Obama administration; a Republican House (why it is now Republican is never quite explained) for 15 months has stopped all the good things that Obama and a Democratic House would have done; opponents have not appreciated the president’s unique postracial symbolism and are often quite racist; and anything Obama did was better than not doing it, and his not doing other things was better than what he might have done....
Could not Obama instead galvanize Democrats by running proudly on his record?
