For quite a while, I have been confidently predicting that Barack Obama will be re-elected next year, primarily because (A) he has exceptional campaigning skills and (B) because the Republicans have no potential nominee who can compete with his charisma.
But after Barack revealed the outrageous concessions he was willing to to give to The Republicans to persuade them to sign onto his Big Deal, I can now see how the man may very well end up destroying his legacy. The Big Deal that Barrack was offering to Boehner was so bad for the American people, so Republican in its goals, it virtually guarantees a challenge to his nomination from the left.
It could all unfold after a significant drop in Barack's approval numbers, something that is quite probable now that the extent of his willingness to trade away the Sacred Treasures of the Democratic Party has been revealed. If/when those numbers drop into the mid-thirties, he would then suddenly becomes vulnerable to a challenge from a representative of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, especially if there is a lot of vehement criticism being expressed by progressives in the media.
In the modern history of electoral politics in America, no sitting Democrat has won re-election when he was forced to fight off a challenge from within his own party (e.g., Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson). And yet Barack Obama was willing to risk this possibility for his Big Deal. Does this mean that he is actually a reckless gambler, like John McCain, or just that he is hopelessly naive?
If he is as good as he apparently thinks he is at "ending divisions" and "bringing people together", why hasn't he been able to demonstrate such a talent within his own political party? Instead of reaching out to his left-wing supporters, he has actually tried to distance himself from them, and has even disparaged them in order to establish his credentials as a "Centrist."
Sadly, Barack Obama appears to have no "feel" for how to advocate for the victims of Republican economic policies, no sense of how to use his Bully Pulpit to explain the irrationalities of their economic agenda. His choice of economic and political advisors has been almost unbelievably flawed. He didn't need a PhD in economics to understand what it was that finally cured the Great Depression, just a willingness to listen carefully to a couple of Noble-Prize winning Democrat economists: Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz.
It is amazing to me that he became the leader of the Democratic Party without having learned THE NUMBER ONE LESSON of the Great Depression, that Democrats can become the majority party in this nation if/when they INCREASE GOVERNMENT SPENDING DRAMATICALLY, enough to drive the economy into high gear.
Throughout FDR's first two terms as President, improvements in the country's high rate of unemployment were made, thanks to the increases in government spending that a Democratic Congress and President passed into law. But the economy nevertheless limped along up until the time when government spending really took off during WWII. Then, like magic, all unemployment disappeared and the economy of the United States enjoyed a wartime boom.
The experiment was performed, the results came in, the truth was revealed: if the federal government increases its spending enough, unemployment will disappear virtually overnight, and a prosperous economy will be enjoyed by all. If Barack Obama had understood this simple truth back in 2008-2009, and had pressed a Democratically-controlled Congress to authorize a dramatic increase in the government spending on real economic investments (infrastructure, education, health care, the environment) all unemployment would have disappeared by now and the Republicans would have been rendered mute and discredited.
Instead, our Democratic President has completely ignored the lessons of the past and is repeating the mistakes of Herbert Hoover, a man Democrats used to equate with utter economic incompetence. I used to entertain some hope that he might wake up to the folly of the advice he's been receiving from his Number One Banker Friend---Tim Geithner, but no such luck. I'm afraid this time Barack Obama has sealed his own fate, and has destroyed the legacy that we all hoped would be one for the ages.
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