If ‘The One’ Wins - Thinking the Unthinkable
Great article by Jim Geraghty, a contributor to National Review. I’m including the entire text since the perspective he offers is very interesting.
- AP
By Jim Geraghty
For a while during the post-Palin euphoria, more than a few Republicans thought the presidential race was breaking their way. And then, as September progressed, the boom faded and Obama retook the lead in several polls. Now, the Democratic road to the needed 270 electoral votes looks a little easier than the Republican one. There’s a lot of road ahead, but you would have to look far and wide to find a voice on the Right foolhardy enough to declare, “Oh yeah, this one’s in the bag.”
It’s possible Obama wins. Probable, even.
Like all races, this campaign has come down to a lot of “if-then” statements. “If you elect my opponent, then you will not get real change in Washington.” “If you elect my opponent, then your taxes will go up.” Each side is trying to paint a vivid picture of dire consequences.
Lately, the Democrats have had an easier time doing this. One of the reasons Republicans got “thumped” in 2006 was that all their failures were prominent and fresh in voters’ minds: casualties in Iraq with no sign of stable government taking root, Katrina devastating New Orleans, Jack Abramoff’s ties to too many lawmakers. Some of the scandals would have seemed unrealistic and clichéd had they appeared in a novel — Mark Foley soliciting house pages, the FBI raiding Curt Weldon’s home, Don Sherwood facing allegations of choking his mistress.
Now as in that election, vast swaths of the voting public have little or no memory of Democratic failures. When McCain tried to respond to the “third term of George W. Bush” talking point by alleging that Obama would be Carter’s second term, the conventional wisdom was that the jab wouldn’t resonate with the public at large, because not enough Americans remember Jimmy Carter.
Sure, in the early Clinton administration — the last time Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses — they passed the biggest tax increase in history, failed to pass health-care legislation, failed to reform welfare, pulled troops out of Somalia in the face of a foe that resembled extras from Mad Max, and focused the arsenal of democracy’s attention on Haiti, of all places. The surgeon general declared she wanted schools to teach teenage boys how to masturbate. But people forget about yesterday’s problems.
Since 1994, Democrats have been able to say, “our ideas would work perfectly, if we could just get it past those obstructionists standing in our way!” Their ads have chanted it, their cheerleaders in the media have echoed it, and their base fervently believes it. Yet next to nothing on their policy agenda is new or different from the last time around — the government can institute a health-care system that will take care of everyone, and higher taxes on the rich will cover all the costs; industry is polluting the earth and we can solve it by taxing carbon; we’ll stop Republicans from destroying Social Security; we can expand the good work of volunteerism by throwing massive federal funding at those programs.
America is already unimpressed with the Pelosi-Reid Congress. This is, with a few changes, who President Obama would be making laws with — a House Ways and Means chairman who doesn’t understand the tax laws he writes, a House speaker who does freelance diplomacy with dictators, a House Judiciary chairman who speculates in public about the “retroactive impeachment process,” and a House Transportation chairman whose immediate response to the bridge collapse in Minneapolis was to raise the gas tax to establish a bridge-repair trust fund. (Never mind that federal investigators later concluded the cause of the collapse was a design flaw, not insufficient maintenance.)
In the Senate, President Obama will have Robert Byrd holding the purse-strings in Appropriations, ensuring that most of the new president’s national initiatives will be based out of West Virginia. On the Banking Committee, Chris Dodd will watch the financial markets as carefully as he has for the past two years, while Barbara Boxer gets to put her stamp on climate-change legislation. If Joe Lieberman is tossed from his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, he may reconsider his party affiliation.
Obama will set about trying to keep his promise that historians will look back on his election as “the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”
Will President Obama really have all combat troops out of Iraq in 16 months? In May 2010 we’ll know whether he did, and soon thereafter we’ll know how it turned out. Will it be better or worse than today’s post-surge general stability? What will returning Iraq veterans say? What will Gen. David Petraeus say?
Will Obama keep his word and meet, without precondition, with the rulers of North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, and Iran in his first year? If he does, will Mahmoud Ahmadinejad make concessions to President Obama? Will Medvedev will take it easy on the new kid?
How do you think the markets will perform when Obama raises the capital-gains tax? How much capital will leave in search of a kinder tax environment? When top effective marginal tax rates start hitting 50 percent, how many of America’s wealthiest will emigrate?
We won’t see significant offshore drilling under President Obama. What do you think the price of gasoline will be in the summer of 2009? 2010? How do you think that will affect the economy as a whole?
The Left will score some major victories in the first years of an Obama administration: Card check, ensuring that voices of opposition within unions are quashed. They’ll probably pass some version of the Fairness Doctrine, although many ordinary Americans might wonder why talk radio alone requires the government to step in and set content requirements. They’ll hike taxes, and as my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru has noted, the real trouble comes from a nationalized health-care system. Once created, those programs are nearly impossible to repeal, and the public always buys the argument that they’re underfunded, no matter how poorly they’re managed.
But the last time the Democrats had control of the White House, the House, and Senate, they triggered the Republican Revolution of 1994. It’s entirely possible — likely — that by 2010, the Democrats will have overstepped the sensibilities of the American people. What will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? “Truth commissions” investigating the Bush years? Government-managed lists of “Patriotic Corporations”? Obama’s call for driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants?
Will Americans feel better when the First Lady assures them that all of this is part of the process of “healing our souls”?
If Obama wins, then three years from now, Sarah Palin will still be governor of Alaska, still a rising star, and most likely a key figure in the 2012 race for the Republican nomination. Bobby Jindal will continue doing the hard, worthwhile work of cleaning up Louisiana. Tim Pawlenty, so close to being on a national ticket this year, might just be wrapping up a second term in Minnesota and have grown in stature and gravitas. The GOP leader in the House may be Virginian Eric Cantor, and John Thune may be the face of the Republicans in the Senate. Rep. Paul Ryan will be laying out the consequences of Obama’s budgetary decisions.
Obama will take office having just completed the most exhausting two-year marathon of a campaign in American history — and then the real work will begin.
