(part 4 and 5--previous parts posted yesterday)
4. We should look for new furor against the “system” in direct proportion
to the praise heaped on it in 2008 for being redeemed. The polls, if
unfavorable, will be described as innately biased. The uncivil Rush Limbaugh,
talk radio generally, Fox News, and tea-party bloggers, we will be lectured, are
subversive, peddle hate, foment violence, and should be silenced. Whereas David
Brooks, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and Christopher Buckley were recommended
reading in 2008, given their balanced and fair-minded critiques of George W.
Bush and their appreciation of Barack Obama, in 2012 we will learn that they are
right-wing attack dogs for losing their enthusiasm for the first-class mind and
temperament of Barack Obama. Whereas a Pat Buchanan on MSNBC railing against
Bush’s war and McCain’s neocon advisers was a reminder of how the libertarian
Right has positive affinities with the liberal Left, in 2012 such a paleocon
“racist” must be kept off the airwaves. Voter-registration laws and voter-ID
requirements, remember, are designed to exclude the oppressed and must be
relaxed. Advertising has warped American politics. Super PACs are Romney
conspiracies. If big Wall Street money went for Obama in 2008 and thereby won
investment banking and the stock market exemption from charges of greed and
corruption, in 2012 investors may swing to Romney and thereby incite calls to
rein in “big money” and furious op-eds about the toxic mix of politics and cash.
If Romney outraises Obama, we will hear again the calls for public campaign
financing, which were ignored when a cash-flush Obama renounced public financing
in 2008. In 2008, academics, foundation people, the Hollywood crowd,
journalists, and liberal politicians confessed that they had fallen in love
again with an America that had proved it was not hopeless after all; in 2012,
America may prove unsalvageable, with thousands vowing to move to Canada.
5. Suddenly around October the world will become absolutely unsafe. In
these dangerous times, Americans must forget their differences, come together,
and embrace a bipartisan unity — given that it may be necessary, after all, to
hit the Iranian nuclear facilities, since we’ll have learned that the bomb may
be a reality by, say, mid-November. Just as we have been reminded that Barack
Obama has saved us by his brave decisions to use double agents in Yemen,
computer viruses in Iran, Seal Team Six in Pakistan, and philosophically guided
Predator assassination hits, so too a strike against Iran may suddenly be of
vital national-security interest, though keenly lamented by a Nobel laureate
nose-deep in Thomas Aquinas. Cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline delighted
greens; the war on the war on women pleased feminists; gays are now on board
after Barack Obama decided he really did favor gay marriage; Latinos got nearly
a million illegal aliens exempted from immigration law. And yet all those
partisan gifts have not yet resulted in a 50 percent approval rating or a lead
over Mitt Romney. Something more dramatic is needed, given that there are only
so many Obama heroics that can be cobbled together and leaked from classified
sources.
We do not know who is going to win the 2012 election, only that it will be
closer than the 2008 one — and if Obama keeps it up at his present rate he may
destroy the Democratic party for a generation. There is no longer an incumbent
George Bush to blame. Romney is a feistier candidate than was John McCain.
Fundraising is no longer lopsided. The novelty of the first African-American
president has become passé. And “hope and change” has been replaced by a
concrete record of three and a half years. Given those realities, if his being
an unknown quantity was a reason to vote for Barack Obama in 2008, his being all
too familiar will be cause for rejecting him in 2012.
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