Some off-the-cuff musings about the election yesterday…
President-elect Obama has promised showers of blessings and a veritable cornucopia of well-being to an unthinking American public, and we bought it. Charisma, charm, and the perception of “appearing Presidential on TV” carried the day. 52% of Americans reacted out of fear and a sense of despair manufactured by the main-stream media. The real underlying behavior at work is “attribution”: people have implicit ideas about how they think leaders should behave or how they want them to behave. They then project these ideas onto a leader–usually somebody with a high degree of charisma — and then point to that person as the kind of leader they are seeking. In this sense, charismatic leaders like Obama are as much, if not more so, a product of social perception as they are their own abilities and traits.
So, the country got the man we think we wanted. Is he the man we think he is? Or was this a case of he told us what we thought we wanted to hear? Time will tell…
Speaking of the media elite: To their credit, they have finally taken their masks off. Now that the Dems own the hill, who will be the new whipping boys of MSNBC and the NY Times? No more blaming Bush and the evil Republicans! Liberals, it’s your chance to ride in the rescue armed with your spread-the-wealth and share-the-pie policies and save the nation! (Anybody hear echoes of Marx?) My only question to the left is this: If the your policies worked like you claim, you’d work yourselves out of a job. How many liberals are willing to have that happen?
Dick Morris writes the following:
Now that Barack Obama has won the election, one thing is certain… he will preside over the largest expansion of the government’s role in the economy since the 1930s — with enormous consequences for your investments.This “New New Deal,” as some Democrats are already calling it, may well have the same result as the original one: to turn a sharp, painful recession into a long Depression.
Will that set the stage for a GOP president in 2012 — the way ’70s stagflation under Jimmy Carter set the stage for Ronald Reagan? I doubt it. More likely, Obama will be able to parlay the hard economic times into a second term.
How? The same way FDR did… by blaming everything that happens on his watch on his predecessors. The worse things get, the more the Obamacrats will blame it on “eight years of Republican deregulation, tax cuts and greed,” calling for even more government intervention as the solution.
And the media, of course, will back them up. (excerpt from Human Events e-newsletter, Nov. 5, 2008)
“Can he now deliver?” is the (right) question pundits are asking (where were they 2 months ago??). Morris may well be right about the “blame-game” strategy — the liberals masterfully played the old cup-and-ball trick right under the nose of the American public with the subprime mortgage and Fannie Mae scandal. Here’s hoping, though, that the American public will prove to be smarter.
Was Obama’s election a “mandate for liberal socialism” or simply a understandable but juvenile reaction to a tough economy? The success of amendments in Florida and California that strengthed a morally conservative position on marriage suggests that the country may not be as hyped on the libs’ secular humanistic socialism as it seems. The President-elect will need to be as masterful at interpreting his own success as he was at posturing the American public.
On the other hand, the United States CAN elect a black man to the highest office, and we ought to be proud of that. Race alone is not a good reason to vote for anyone, and I have significant disagreement with Obama’s politics, but his accomplishment is significant. That much, at least, is worth acknowledging.
