WASHINGTON -- I am not an ideologue protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions.
Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier. The consistency is remarkable. In 2009 after passing a $787 billion (now $862 billion) stimulus package the largest spending bill in galactic history he unveiled a manifesto for fundamentally restructuring the commanding heights of American society -- health care education and energy.
A year later after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia New Jersey and Massachusetts Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health care reform (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus of course another stimulus package this time renamed a jobs bill.
This being a democracy dont the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Dont they understand Massachusetts?
Well they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim led by the malicious vote incorrectly.
Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been post-Massachusetts remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking in the plain words of plain folks because the people are suspicious of complexity. Counseled Blow: The next time he gives a speech someone should tap him on the ankle and say Mr. President were down here.
A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob explaining that we are a nation of dodos that is too dumb to thrive.
Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when with supercilious modesty he chided himself for not explaining it (health care) more clearly to the American people. The subject he noted was complex. The subject it might also be noted was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.
Then there are the emotional deficiencies of the masses. Nearly every Democratic apologist lamented the peoples anger and anxiety a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them.
That brings us to Part 2 of the liberal conceit: Liberals act in the public interest while conservatives think only of power elections self-aggrandizement and self-interest.
It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas being red in tooth and claw cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozicks masterwork Anarchy State and Utopia proved comforting to the right which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification. The right you see is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.
This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obamas social democratic agenda -- which couldnt get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey Virginia and Massachusetts -- is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.
By contrast Democratic opposition to George W. Bush -- from Iraq to Social Security reform -- constituted (BEG ITAL)dissent(END ITAL). And dissent we were told at the time including by candidate Obama is one of the truest expressions of patriotism.
No more. Today dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. They made a decision explained David Axelrod they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed that the country failed -- a perfect expression of liberals conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the countrys that their idea of the public good is the publics that their failure is therefore the nations.
Then comes Massachusetts an election Obama himself helped nationalize to shatter this most self-congratulatory of illusions.
For liberals the observation that the peasants are revolting is a pun. For conservatives it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.
The ankle-dwelling populace pushes back. It re-centers. It renormalizes. Even in Massachusetts.
Charles Krauthammer is a 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner 1984 National Magazine Award winner and a columnist for The Washington Post since 1985.
WASHINGTON -- I am not an ideologue protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions.
Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier. The consistency is remarkable. In 2009 after passing a $787 billion (now $862 billion) stimulus package the largest spending bill in galactic history he unveiled a manifesto for fundamentally restructuring the commanding heights of American society -- health care education and energy.
A year later after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia New Jersey and Massachusetts Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health care reform (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus of course another stimulus package this time renamed a jobs bill.
This being a democracy dont the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Dont they understand Massachusetts?
Well they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim led by the malicious vote incorrectly.
Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been post-Massachusetts remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking in the plain words of plain folks because the people are suspicious of complexity. Counseled Blow: The next time he gives a speech someone should tap him on the ankle and say Mr. President were down here.
A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob explaining that we are a nation of dodos that is too dumb to thrive.
Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when with supercilious modesty he chided himself for not explaining it (health care) more clearly to the American people. The subject he noted was complex. The subject it might also be noted was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.
Then there are the emotional deficiencies of the masses. Nearly every Democratic apologist lamented the peoples anger and anxiety a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them.
That brings us to Part 2 of the liberal conceit: Liberals act in the public interest while conservatives think only of power elections self-aggrandizement and self-interest.
It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas being red in tooth and claw cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozicks masterwork Anarchy State and Utopia proved comforting to the right which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification. The right you see is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.
This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obamas social democratic agenda -- which couldnt get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey Virginia and Massachusetts -- is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.
By contrast Democratic opposition to George W. Bush -- from Iraq to Social Security reform -- constituted (BEG ITAL)dissent(END ITAL). And dissent we were told at the time including by candidate Obama is one of the truest expressions of patriotism.
No more. Today dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. They made a decision explained David Axelrod they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed that the country failed -- a perfect expression of liberals conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the countrys that their idea of the public good is the publics that their failure is therefore the nations.
Then comes Massachusetts an election Obama himself helped nationalize to shatter this most self-congratulatory of illusions.
For liberals the observation that the peasants are revolting is a pun. For conservatives it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.
The ankle-dwelling populace pushes back. It re-centers. It renormalizes. Even in Massachusetts.
Charles Krauthammer is a 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner 1984 National Magazine Award winner and a columnist for The Washington Post since 1985.
