|
 |
Wall Street Journal
Obama's Thunderdome
Strategy
The president's goal is to make Republican ideas intolerable.
By Daniel Henninger
Few are the men and women in American public life who haven't heard Mr.
Dooley's famous aphorism: "Politics ain't beanbag." John Boehner,
currently serving out his community service as speaker of the House,
appears to have been meditating on Mr. Dooley's cautionary wisdom. At
the Ripon Society last week he said the Obama administration was trying
"to annihilate the Republican Party."
Better late than never, Speaker Boehner now sees that Barack Obama's
notion of political competition is Mad Max inside the Thunderdome: "Two
men enter, one man leaves."
Last week during the president's second inaugural address, if one can
employ that hallowed phrase to describe this speech, Mr. Obama used the
occasion to defend entitlement programs by whacking his defeated
presidential opponent: "They do not make us a nation of takers."
This was the second time Mr. Obama used a traditionally elevated forum
to take down his opposition. His 2010 State of the Union speech will be
remembered in history for nothing other than an attack on members of
the Supreme Court seated before him. Justice Samuel Alito's whispered
"Not true" would prove a prophetic comment on the Obama modus operandi.
Subsequent targets of the president's contempt have included the
members of Congress's deficit-reduction supercommittee, the Ryan budget
("antithetical to our entire history"), repeated attacks on the "well
off" and bankers, and famously a $100 million dump-truck of
vilification on Mitt Romney.
When he won, the rationalization was that it was all a shrewd if brutal
campaign strategy. But it kept coming. What is striking about the Obama
technique is that it's not so much criticism as something closer to
political obliteration, driving his opposition out of the political
arena altogether.
After the inaugural speech, Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer
said that Democrats don't have "an opposition party worthy of the
opportunity." Even among the president's supporters, one is hard put
now to find anyone who doesn't recognize that Mr. Obama's original
appeal to hope and change has given way to search and destroy.
Conventional wisdom holds that these unorthodox tactics are a mistake,
that he's going to need GOP support on immigration and such. And by now
it's conventional wisdom that when our smiling president transforms
into Mr. Hyde he is merely channeling Saul Alinsky, deploying the
tactics of community-organizing campaigns, the only operational world
he knew before this.
The real pedigree, though, is a lot heavier than community organizing
in Chicago.
Speaking last Saturday, Rep. Paul Ryan said that for Barack Obama to
achieve his goals, "he needs to delegitimize the Republican Party."
Annihilate, delegitimize—it's the same thing. The good news is that
John Boehner and Paul Ryan recognize that their relationship with this
White House is not as partners in anything. They are prey…
Read the rest of the article at Wall Street Journal
|
|
|
|
