◼ The Obama narrative is that he inherited the worst mess in memory and has been stymied ever since by a partisan Congress — while everything from new ATM technology to the Japanese tsunami conspired against him. But how true are those claims? - Victor Davis Hanson/National Review
...Rarely does a president enter office with a majority in both the House and the Senate. Not only did Obama do so, but his soaring ratings put enormous pressure on the Republican minorities to join the Democratic majorities. Liberals were talking about a new era of Democratic political dominance.
No prior president had such a supportive media. Sometime in mid-2008, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, PBS, NPR, AP, Reuters, and hundreds of other mainstream voices had decided that Barack Obama was not just a liberal Democrat whom they would tilt toward, but a messianic figure for whom they gladly sacrificed the last ounce of disinterested coverage....
In other words, the future seemed to be all Barack Obama’s. Bill Clinton’s second term offered an easy blueprint of what bipartisan centrism might achieve. Balance the budget and create jobs, and the nation will forgive anything, from lying under oath to romancing an intern in the Oval Office.
And what happened?
Barack Obama chose to ram down the nation’s throat a polarizing, statist agenda, energized by the sort of hardball politics he had learned in Chicago. Rather than bring the races, classes, and genders together, he gave us an us-versus-them crusade against the “1 percenters” and the job creators who had not “paid their fair share,” accusations of a Republican “war on women,” and the worst racial polarization in modern memory. Statesmanship degenerated into chronic blame-gaming and “Bush did it,” as he piled up over $5 trillion in new debt. Financial sobriety was abandoned in favor of creating new entitlement constituencies, and job creation was deemed far less important than nationalizing the health-care system.
And so here we are, three weeks before the election, with a squandered presidency and a president desperately seeking reelection not by defending his record, but by demonizing his predecessor, his opponent — and half of the country....
◼ Discussion at Lucianne
