Commentary Magazine

Topic: Freedland

Liberals Pin Their Hopes on an Obama Attack on the GOP

01.27.2010 - 11:19 PM

One liberal trope after the speech, voiced by Chrystia Freedland of the Financial Times on Charlie Rose, is that Obama is putting Republican politicians on notice he will go after them as the do-nothing impeders of progress. Republicans should pray this is the case, and it may be the case. The model here would be Harry Truman’s 1948 war on the “Do Nothing Congress.” The problem is that Truman was running against a Republican Congress. Obama will be asking the country to believe that some weird amalgam of a minority party in the House and Senate and the Fox News Channel is mystically interfering with the will of the people. The delusion that a the president in charge of a party with a 50-seat majority in the House and a nine-seat advantage in the Senate can successfully claim that the minority is in charge  is just that—a delusion. You don’t have to be following these matters closely to know that Democrats won a blowout two years ago and that this is their political moment. If Obama cannot get what he wants, everybody will know it will be due to his inability to convince the country of the rightness of his policy aims. That liberals like Freedland and Andrew Sullivan can’t see this, because they too are fogged over by their rage with a conservative vitality they did not expect, offers up the tantalizing possibility that the White House will be similarly blinded to reality, and will march with authority and vigor right over a political cliff.

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