Same Old Garbage Ideology Wrapped In Softer Words?

The losers and their supporters in the press and media have now begun to tell the winners they must compromise, reach across the aisle, listen and do the work of the people. Obama even urged civility. Hard to hear his new message from the back of the bus, while slurping Slurpees.

Last night most Americans soundly rejected Obama's radical ideology and the furthest thing establishment Republicans should do is compromise but I fear they will because they want to be re-elected and believe that is the best way to do so.

Obama now wants to engage and listen to serious Republican ideas but for the last two years arrogant hubris dictated his actions and he refused to give Republicans their seat at the table. Now that Obama has driven the nation's car into the ditch, piled up debt that will cause more pain if continued and plenty more if paid down, he still seems not to get last night's message. What I heard were a lot of passionless words about how he was dealt a difficult hand and had to respond quickly. Obama has yet to equate that last night's vote was a rejection of his leadership and policies.

It is going to be a very long two years as Republicans, with Tea Partiers on their backs, try to move the ship of state in a different direction while Obama and his remaining disciples resist the unwinding of the legislation already passed.

In my biased view, Obama lacks the leadership skills and remains disingenuous but he is clever enough to resist the change that he said we needed, brought about and which has now been rejected.

I was not comforted by his press conference responses today but then I did not expect to be, so I doubt the markets will be overly impressed either.

What I believe I heard was the same old garbage ideology wrapped in softer language.

Big Ears remains tone deaf in my opinion!
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The article was written before the election but is a reminder of the dangers of progressiveness. (See 1 below.)
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This from a dear friend in California responding to my view that California is not inhabited by real people: "Greetings from California, where we bucked the national tide and elected a moron to the state house and returned an idiot to the senate."

I sent the attached letter to the editor of the Orange County Register… we’ll see if they print it. (See 2 below.)
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More commentary on election. (See 3, 3a and 3b below.)
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Netanyahu partially relents and backroom deals force Abbas' hand so is it back to negotiations? (See 4 below.)
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An Israeli view of our mid term election. (See 5below.)
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Dick
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1)Progressive Determination to Undermine American Elections
By Arnold Ahlert


The progressive assault on America continues, and their favorite whipping boy remains Arizona. A three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned that state's requirement that people show proof of citizenship to register to vote, calling it "inconsistent" with the National Voter Registration Act. In other words, a United States court considers that proving one is an American citizen in order to vote in an American election an "undue burden." How in the world did we come to this?

The National Voter Registration Act, or as it's more familiarly known, the Motor Voter Bill, was passed by a Democratically-controlled Congress in 1993 and signed into law by president Bill Clinton. It was called the Motor Voter Bill because it allowed people to register to vote when they applied for driver's licenses or social services. Such registration can be done either in person or by mail. The Act was established for four primary reasons: to establish procedures increasing the number of eligible citizens who register to vote in Federal elections; to enhance the participation of eligible citizens as voters in elections for Federal office; to protect the integrity of the electoral process; and to ensure that accurate and current voter registration rolls are maintained.

Here's the kicker: the federal law requires applicants to "attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury," but, according to this court's ruling, such registration does not require providing documentary proof of such citizenship. What does this mean?

It means registering to vote is based on nothing more than an honor system. How's that honor system working out? In the 2008 election, just one community activist group, the radical leftist, and now-disgraced ACORN, submitted 1.3 million voter registration applications.

400,000 of them were rejected.

Why would ACORN and other groups submit bogus registration forms knowing that would more than likely be disqualified? John Samples, Director of the Center for Representative Government at The Cato Institute testified before the Committee on Rules and Administration, United States Senate, on May 14th, 2001:

"The Act made it harder to verify the identity of voters seeking to register. It also considerably complicated the states' task of keeping the registration rolls clean. For example, to remove a voter who has moved from the rolls of a voting district, the local jurisdiction has two choices. First, they could get written confirmation of the move from the citizen. Lacking that, the jurisdiction had to send a notice to the voter. If the notice card was not returned and the person did not vote in two general elections for Federal office after the notice was sent, then the jurisdiction could remove their name from the rolls."

"The cost of these mailings is significant. In Indiana, for example, such a mailing would have a price tag of about $2 million or about twice the Election Division's entire annual budget (emphasis mine). Given this price tag and the limited resources of most local election boards, we should not be surprised that the registration rolls throughout the nation are enormously inaccurate. In some counties, election administrators report, the voting roll numbers are bigger than the voting-age population."

In short, the objective is to overwhelm the system, and the only entity with the ability to put a stop to these and other attempts to commit voter fraud is the Voting Rights Section of United States Department of Justice.

Where do they stand on the issue? I refer you to the testimony of former Department of Justice Voting Section Chief, Christopher Coates, before the United States Civil Rights Commission earlier this year. Coates was testifying mostly about the dropping of the 2008 voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party. But the far more damning part of his testimony was virtually ignored by the mainstream media:

"The NVRA (National Voter Registration Act) has three provisions that have led to enforcement activity by the Voting Section…During the Bush administration the Voting Section began filing cases under the list management provision of Section 8 to compel states and local registration officials to remove ineligible voters. These suits were very unpopular with a number of groups that work in the area of voting rights…"

"As chief of the Voting Section I assigned attorneys to work on the matter…During the time I was Chief, no approval was given to this project and it is my understanding that no approval has ever been given for that Section 8 maintenance project to date. That means we have entered the 2010 election cycle with eight states appearing to be in major non-compliance with the list requirements of Section 8 of the NVRA and yet the Voting Section which has the responsibility to enforce that law has yet to take any action…"

"I do not believe the Voting Section has recently been involved in any list maintenance enforcement during the Obama administration."

In keeping with their whacky reputation, this latest ruling by the 9th Circuit Panel, which included former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Conner sitting in as a "temporary judge," overturned a previous ruling--by the same 9th Circuit which ruled Arizona's Prop 200 did not violate the NVRA.

Thankfully, this decision can't affect this election since the deadline for registration has already passed. But there is little question where the American left is headed with this. The voter registration movement was one of the pet projects of two Columbia University sociologists named Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. If those names ring a bell, perhaps it's because they are also the authors of the "Cloward-Piven Strategy," a plan designed to destroy capitalism by overloading government with impossible demands as a means of fomenting economic crisis and eventual collapse. And who did both men cite as their "inspiration?"

Community organizer Saul Alinsky. The same Saul Alinsky who wrote "Rules For Radicals," and whose Marxist theories were taught in a series of workshops--by the president of the United States, Barack Obama.

What's the best way to destroy our democratic republic? Getting enough Americans to question the integrity of our election process has to be high on the list. And since every case ever litigated in this country with regard to voter ID has had Democrats lined up on the side where less proof is required for voting--using the phony "disenfranchisement" argument as an excuse---an unmistakable pattern is emerging. A pattern which can be reduced to one simple idea:

The acquisition and/or maintenance of power by any means necessary.

Every state needs to have a law requiring both proof of citizenship and a photo ID requirement to vote. Even a mail-in vote--or should I say especially a mail-in vote--should also be accompanied by a picture. States should also write laws by which state-issued ID cards can be given to those who claim that producing a birth certificate, a driver's license or any other form of ID constitutes an "undue burden." Maintaining the integrity of our election process far outweighs any individual undue burdens, and the overwhelming majority of Americans know it. Those who are determined to fight such commonsense provisions aren't fooling anyone, except perhaps their fellow travelers. There is absolutely no reasonable argument to offer against making sure that Americans, and only Americans, vote in American elections--none.

One more compelling reason for decent Americans to get out and vote next Tuesday. Maybe the most important one of all.
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2)Sirs:

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville – Brown and Boxer are in, not out.

With apologies to Ernest Lawrence Thayer.
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3)The Dialectic of Obama
By Thomas Lifson

America's left, and the party it dominates, faced a reckoning yesterday. Two short years ago, exultant progressives believed America had shifted permanently to the left. Now that sweet taste of victory has turned to acrid ashes in their mouths.


The scores of congressional Democrats, along with even more state officeholders, who lost their coveted positions need a way of comprehending the disaster which has befallen them. The scapegoats offered by President Obama and his surrogates -- Tea Partiers, witches, foreign money, and Fox News -- will not suffice. President Obama himself, the man with a winning smile, a slender build, and a way with teleprompters, cannot escape blame for the disaster at the polls. Former friends, including many who rode his coattails, see in him the cause of their expulsion from the political paradise of high elective office.


How could it go so wrong so fast? How could a man once seen as a savior turn out to be a disaster for those who embraced him?


For our bewildered friends on the left, an explanation is necessary, one couched in terms from the progressive framework -- dialectical analysis, the means that Hegel created and Karl Marx adopted for understanding history. Dialectics constitutes the Marxian foundation on which modern progressive strategy is built.


Barack Obama himself is almost certainly familiar with the Marxist analytical framework for understanding what moves history. He was mentored by Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member. The typical white grandparents who raised him moved in communist circles after leaving Kansas for Mercer Island, WA and Honolulu. I doubt very much if Davis ever got very specific with young Barry on the complexities of dialectical materialism, the formal basis for communist theory. And because the president's college transcripts are a closely guarded secret, we cannot know if he took any courses on Marxist theory while at Occidental College and Columbia University. But he surely understands its basics.

The Marxist theory of history teaches that it moves forward through a dialectical process, powered by conflict. Thesis -- an action or idea -- generates a reaction, its antithesis, which results in contradictions and conflict. The wise dialectical thinker understands that by heightening contradictions (or not letting a crisis go to waste, in the immortal words of Rahm Emanuel), the final outcome -- the synthesis -- can be shaped in radical directions. Among those who took this lesson was Saul Alinsky, for example, who wanted to "rub raw the resentments of the people" in order to hasten revolution through peaceful means, inspiring young Barack Obama to become a community organizer.


The dialectical game plan of the Obama presidency was obvious: use the ongoing financial crisis sparked by subprime mortgage lending to generate momentum for fundamental restructuring of the economy. Blame Bush and big business for the problems, and use resentment arising from real economic suffering to push for game-changers like ObamaCare and Cap and Trade, putting government in charge of the commanding heights of the economy. Once private enterprise was so constrained and limited, further systemic changes would be child's play. With everyone dependent on government approval for health care, carbon emissions, college loans, and jobs, no countervailing forces would be strong enough to limit the power of the statists. No longer would the power of capitalism dictate the terms under which Americans live.


But problems with this model of change arose quickly. It turned out that Americans' modal impulse in times of trouble is not to seek a government solution, because they are skeptical of the effectiveness of such bureaucracies. A segment of the public, of course, is happy to have government provide for their needs, but it is neither large enough nor motivated enough to become a revolutionary vanguard. Although purple-shirted SEIU thugs managed to bite a finger off here and demonstrate at an executive's house there, and New Black Panthers wielded nightsticks at polling places, the efforts failed to ignite a popular uprising and even generated a backlash, despite the efforts of progressive media allies to suppress information about them.


The American national character is built on the bedrock of self-reliance. Having spent some of his formative years in Indonesia and the remainder in the company of communists in Hawaii, Barack Obama failed to understand the dialectical forces at work. Rick Santelli's famous television rant which sparked the Tea Parties might as well have been spoken in Sanskrit, for all the understanding it evoked from Obama. There was discontent rubbed raw, all right, but it inclined people more to demand freedom from looming government restrictions of regulation and onerous debt obligations than to demand succor from a generous state. The objective conditions, to use a favorite phrase of Marxian discourse, were not as favorable as had been assumed.


A second faulty assumption contradicted the Obamian understanding of the dialectical dynamics. The power of progressive media to control the national news agenda was vastly overestimated. Despite the intense efforts expended to demonize Fox News, the mere existence of a voice not playing along with the narrative propounded by the progressive media was enough to break the mass trance which had been so effectively propagated during the campaign. Actually governing also turns out to be a lot more difficult and rocky than delivering familiar campaign speeches, so dissonant voices pointing out the flaws undermine the sense of mastery and inevitability manufactured around Obama's public persona.


It was not just Fox News, of course. Enterprising internet sites, talk radio, and the few conservative newspapers dug up all manner of information which broke the spell. Worst of all, social media (like Mybarackobama.com) turned out to be a model just as well-adapted to conservatives as to leftists.


The real killer, when it came to the social forces, was the intersection of self-reliance, information, and social media. The Tea Party phenomenon, a self-organizing, spontaneous rebellion aimed at overthrowing the brand-new progressive dominance of government, was fatally misunderstood by just about everyone on the left. The only model they had for understanding it was their own experience of mass mobilization: top-down, centralized, and funded by wealthy special interests. A "starfish" organization with no head, and which generates and regenerates when opposed, is not something which can be effectively fought by believers in the wisdom of democratic centralism.


But the coup de grâce, the one thing nobody on the left had counted on, was that flawed document, the United States Constitution. Tea Partiers began reading the Tenth Amendment and asking awkward questions about the power the central state was arrogating. No matter how many times you call people "fringe," "wingnuts," or "dangerous radicals," it is difficult to make the nasty labels stick when all that is being asked for is adherence to the Constitution. The doctrine of a "living Constitution" has been so thoroughly accepted in progressive circles of journalism and academia that nobody ever took seriously the notion that the actual words of the document would cause problems for them. But for people who have to read and apply rules in daily life -- for example, when paying taxes -- the notion that a living Constitution could kill a portion of the actual Constitution makes no sense. Those honored with public office, the president most prominently, take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Demeaning those who cite it is a losing proposition.


Thus, the Tea Party antithesis to the Obama thesis has turned out to be larger, more powerful, and more deeply rooted than anticipated. The result -- the synthesis -- began to unfold yesterday, and it will continue to manifest through the next few elections. The dialectic of Obama is turning out to be a force returning America to its constitutional moorings.


Thomas Lifson is editor and publisher of American Thinker.


3a)A Post-Election Resolution
By Steve McCann

For those of us who believe in American exceptionalism and individual liberty and freedom, the results of the mid-term election have validated our belief in our fellow citizens.


This has been, up until November 2, 2010, a dismal twenty months.


The people of the United States have seen their President go around the world denigrating the sacrifices that have freed untold millions, and belittling the American inventiveness and can-do spirit that have made lives better for virtually all peoples of the world.


The Administration and the 111th Congress have unleashed a torrent of spending threatening to inundate present and future generations with unsustainable debt -- resulting in a dramatically reduced standard of living and subservience to those who hold our bonds and do not have the nation's or its citizens' best interest at heart.


The passage of the health care reform act galvanized the still-unconvinced that President Obama, his fellow travelers in Congress and the media were only interested in controlling the day-to-day activity of each of us, and not in truly reforming the health care system.


As Election Day approached, many of us refused to despair about the future, but instead we chose to take matters into our own hands, and turn to the mechanism bequeathed to us by the founding fathers to begin the long journey to repair the damage that has been wrought by those entrusted to serve the people.


Some months ago during an interview on a radio talk show, a caller asked if I knew of any nation in the history of mankind that had ever successfully emerged from the financial and societal abyss into which we were entering. I replied that I did not; however, if any country in the history of mankind could, it was the United States.


We could, as we have a written Constitution with a mechanism to allow us to do so, and a unique and fiercely independent American character.


On March 4, 1789, the Constitution of the United States of America was declared ratified and in effect. The citizens of this nation, 220 years ago, were given perhaps the greatest political document in history and the means to not only create a great country but to sustain it against those who would choose to use a powerful central government to impose tyranny and oppression.


The founders of the United States knew of the basic flaw in human nature: the desire to achieve power and control over others. Thus a political and governmental system was set up that deliberately limited the authority of a central government and made the rights of the individual paramount, as well as put into place a mechanism, the tri-partite structure of the federal government and the terms of those in Congress and the White House, to allow the citizen to maintain these rights.


Unfortunately, with the unprecedented prosperity we have enjoyed as a nation over the past century, many simply chose to ignore the first responsibility of citizenship: stay engaged and vigilant against those who would use the power to tax and spend to in order to amass authority over the citizenry.


Over this same period, and parallel to the apathy of the populace, a concerted effort has been underway to undermine the basic tenets of the Constitution. The Courts, Congress and the Executive have succeeded in empowering the central government beyond anything the founders could have anticipated.


However, the empowerment of the individual to be active, organize and vote is the one area in which these forces cannot overturn the Constitution, nor can they change the basic character of the American people and their desire to be free and able to determine their own destiny.


It has always been a source of pride in American families to trace their ancestry and celebrate the courage and determination of their forefathers; whether they came on the Mayflower, by steerage into Ellis Island or suffered and persevered through forced servitude.


These pioneers injected into our uniquely American character a fierce desire to be independent, free and the final arbiter of one's success or failure. There resides deep within the soul of this country a deep mistrust of a powerful central government which stems from the firsthand experience of these immigrants, from whom virtually all Americans today descend.


While many are now more dependent on government largess than ever before, this basic character of the American people has not changed. Every poll taken over the past thirty years shows this to be a right of center country, a plurality conservative and fearful of those in Washington D.C.


The vast majority of the people of the United States are not amenable to a massive government controlling all aspects of their lives while jeopardizing the future of their children and grandchildren.


For those of us who immigrated to this country from the devastation and destruction of war and tyranny, we who have seen the worst side of human nature, we who are now blessed to live in a nation that alone in the world has a written constitution empowering the individual and a history of defending those rights, there is an enormous sense of pride in our fellow citizens and a renewed hope for the future.


Let us all be resolved to be certain that the United States will become the first nation to successfully step back from the abyss of the fall of great nations and continue as the foremost country in the history of mankind.


I know now that we will.

3b)Unaligned Voters Tilt Rightward En Masse.
By GERALD F. SEIB

A massive swing by independent voters propelled the Republican Party to a series of key victories, bringing the GOP back from a near-death experience just two years ago, and delivering a rebuke to the president who rode the same independent wave into the White House.

In House races nationally, Republicans won the votes of independents—voters who said they aren't affiliated with any party—by a 55% to 40% margin, a compilation of exit polls from across the country showed.

That represents a stunning reversal from the last midterm election, in 2006. In that voting, which brought Democrats to power in the House, independents favored Democratic candidates, 57% to 39%.

In other words, independents' preference did an almost complete turnabout over the last four years: They favored Democrats by 18 points then, Republicans by 15 points Tuesday.

Independents also were a crucial element of the coalition that President Barack Obama used to win the White House two years ago, when, according to exit polls, he carried them by 52% to 44%.

In a nutshell, these independents Tuesday made up about a quarter of all voters, and provided the margin of victory for the GOP, because voters who identify with the two major parties stayed largely in line. Some 92% of Democrats voted for the Democrat in their local House race, and 95% of Republicans voted for the GOP candidate.

But the very fickleness that independents demonstrated in these two midterm elections means there's no guarantee they'll remain loyal to the GOP, any more than they stuck with President Obama and his Democrats.

Even more important, Tuesday's vote appeared to be more a protest against what Washington has been doing than a clear declaration of a mandate for a new course.

In effect, this year's congressional election brought forth a kind of primal scream from the independents. They expressed a high level of anger at the government, and were far more likely than voters overall to say the new Congress' top priority ought to be dealing with the federal budget deficit.

"Independents aren't liberal spenders," said Republican pollster Whit Ayres. "They're just not. And that, more than anything else, drove independents into the Republican camp." For them, he said, the Democrats' big health-care overhaul was the "coup de grace" that symbolized government grown too large.

Still, for all the decisiveness of the independents' shift, this election hasn't resolved the most fundamental question facing the country: What should the role of government be in the 21st century?

Instead it has simply set up what figures to be a two-year debate over that question in Washington, and ensures that it will be a focal point of the 2012 election.

Thanks to independents—along with other crucial swing blocs, such as suburban women, blue-collar workers and retirees, all of whom also shifted toward the Republicans—the GOP now has the strength to stop pieces of the Obama agenda and, perhaps in some instances, roll it back.

The testing ground figures to be the coming twin debates over government spending and the federal deficit. In the exit polling, 39% of voters overall said reducing the budget deficit should be the highest priority for the next Congress; 46% of independents said it should be the top priority.

And while this year's campaign has produced plenty of evidence of unhappiness over government spending, it hasn't produced many signs that voters are prepared to take the tough, specific steps that would really tackle budget deficits—or reward politicians who prescribe such bitter medicine.

When The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll asked Americans this summer about a variety of ways to cut the deficit, more than three-quarters of those polled said it would be "unacceptable" to cut federal spending on education. More than 60% said it also would be unacceptable to raise the retirement age to 70 to reduce Social Security expenses, or to gradually raise the eligibility age for Medicare.

Tellingly, the survey found that independent voters, for all their dismay with Washington, may not be any more open than other Americans to taking those difficult steps.

It's possible, of course, that the rise of the tea-party movement, with its clarion calls to cut the size of government, will succeed in shifting public sentiment toward accepting more cuts in such prized government services as Medicare. Certainly the more expansive Republican contingents in the House and the Senate are likely to test that attitude.

In Tuesday's voting, four in 10 of those who answered exit polls said they were supporters of the tea-party movement. Just 31% said they were opponents of the tea party.

It appears that the movement did what GOP leaders who embraced it had hoped above all: It energized core Republican voters at the grass roots in a way the party's traditional leaders couldn't.

Now, though, the danger for Republicans is that those tea-party activists, so crucial to creating a GOP wave, are more gung-ho about slashing the government than are independent voters.

All of which suggests that the question of how far voters truly want to venture in shrinking government will be the crux of the debate in the new Congress—and in the next presidential campaign, as President Obama seeks another term.

Along the way, the fidelity of those independent voters to the Republican cause they have just advanced will be tested as well.

"Obviously the real issue is the independents," said Democratic pollster Peter Hart. "If they are swinging to the GOP, then their share of the electorate will increase after 2010"—which could produce a long-term shift in the fine balance of power between the two major parties.
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4)Mid East talks resume January. Netanyahu relents on building freeze
His concession enables resumption of talks. Direct Israeli-Palestinian talks, interrupted in September after less than a week, will resume in January, 2011 straight after the New Year, following a quiet deal between the US, Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Washington sources disclose. Obama administration officials while admitting that two months is a long time in the Middle East are upbeat after four developments swept aside the last roadblocks:

1. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to a second settlement construction freeze on a limited scale. The first 10-month moratorium ran out in September.

Washington sources declined to say whether the second freeze was total or partial and what exceptions were allowed to enable Netanyahu to get a decision through his security cabinet.

2. Saudi King Abdullah and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak put their weight behind persuading Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to return to the negotiating table with Israel as his only option. They told to cancel all plans for UN Security Council recognition of a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood within -re-1967 boundaries. The PA chairman has complied with their demands.

3. In the two months before the talks resume, Abbas agreed to join the Saudi-Egyptian effort to patch up the quarrel between his Fatah and the Hams extremists with a view to signing a reconciliation accord by early January so that the Palestinians would be represented by a unified West Bank-Gaza Strip delegation.
Abbas has taken the first step of withdrawing from the Fatah-Hamas talks which began last month in Damascus under the Syrian aegis.

4. A high-ranking US official will shuttle between Jerusalem and Ramallah in the weeks remaining up to January to make sure the Israelis and Palestinians stick to the deal and don't change their minds. debkafile's Washington sources report that President Barack Obama has not yet decided to whom to assign the task, but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is a favorite.

5. The one official who will not longer be seen on the Israel-Palestinian peace track is George Mitchell. He secretly resigned as Presidential Special Envoy last month but agreed to delay the announcement until his successor is in place.
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5)Will Obama change course?

Midterm election defeat result of president’s failure to heed feelings of American public
By Yitzhak Benhorin


The writing was on the wall. A year ago, conservative Scott brown won the special vote for late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. A Republican victory in the liberal Massachusetts, the Kennedy and Democratic Party stronghold, was akin to an earthquake that shook the whole of America; yet surprisingly, the shockwaves did not reach Washington. The result was the scathing Democratic defeat in Congress.



The White House spin in the race a year ago was that it was a local failure by Democratic candidate Martha Coakley who was vacationing in the Caribbean while the attractive Republican candidate worked hard to connect with the voters. It’s hard to understand how the people who led Obama to the spectacular victory in 2008 lost touch with the public the moment they entered the White House. Officials in Washington failed to grasp the message conveyed by the public: Grave concerns not only about their livelihood and pensions, but also about the future of their sons and grandsons, sailing aboard the Titanic towards oblivion.



When America was licking the wounds of the economic crisis, White House officials were formulating the healthcare legislation, instead of focusing on unemployment. History will be kind to Barack Obama, as this is a noble law that America had to legislate in order to assist the tens of millions of Americans, including many children, who were lacking any medical protection. However, this law was pushed to Capitol Hill at the worst political timing.



When people are anxious about their livelihood and their and their children’s basic needs, they are not available to help others who lack health insurance. People have lost their livelihood, homes, cars, and ability to pay for their children’s college education. It’s hard to appease such people with altruistic gestures to the weak.



Those who pushed for the legislation were members of the Democratic Party’s leftist camp, who said: This is our finest our, with a liberal president and control of both houses of Congress. The tone was set by the president and his associates, who ran on a social platform in 2008, as well as Congress members from liberal districts, headed by Nancy Pelosi, the house speaker from America’s most liberal district, San Francisco.



Congress members in more moderate states attempted to stay away from this legislation. They knew it threatened their political future. They hesitated, protested, hid, and eventually were trapped in the web of pressure exerted by Obama, Rahm Emanuel, and Pelosi. Last night, they paid the price for it.



Obama had been stunningly successful in his 22 months in office: He passed the healthcare legislation, which the Democrats have been dreaming about for 60 years. He passed the law regularizing the monitoring of Wall Street, in the hopes of averting another economic crisis. However, Democratic candidates shunned these issues like the plague instead of boasting them. These achievements were not at all mentioned during the election campaign. Many Democrats attempted to prove that they object to Obama, but in such cases it made sense to just vote Republican, and that’s what happened.



Americans hate taxes

Obama will be remembered in the annals of US history as the man behind the healthcare legislation, just like Franklin Roosevelt was renowned for passing the Social Security Act in 1935. Yet following this great social achievement, Roosevelt sustained a blow when the Democrats lost 80 seats in Congress. Obama only lost about 60 seats. The lesson is that Americans hate a big government in Washington, and more than that they hate to pay taxes. That’s what happened then, and now.




The public bitterness wave swept over America yesterday. It was a referendum on Obama’s policy, and the message conveyed to Washington was clear. Now we need to see what Obama will be doing: Will he ignore the message, or will he decide to turn a new leaf?



His chances of recovery are better than what many think or hope for. Despite the low approval rating for his presidency, Obama continues to enjoy great public sympathy on the personal level. Despite the grim results of the midterm elections, the public does not blame Obama for the economic crisis. A CNN poll among voters showed that the main culprit in the view of Americans are the bankers (35%), followed by former President George W. Bush (29%). Only 24% blame Obama.



In order to overcome the defeat, Obama needs to take decisions of the type taken by Bill Clinton after he lost the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress after two years at the White House. Obama must put ideology aside and start running America pragmatically. He must seek issues where he can find the common denominator with the Republications in Congress – moves that would achieve budgetary balance and focus on unemployment.




The change required of Obama is not only ideological, but also personal. The president will have to replace some of his close associates and bring into the White House people who are not connected to him personally or ideologically.



Now that the American public spoke, we shall see the emergence of Republican presidential candidates. The Republican establishment is making an effort to undermine Sarah Palin’s undeclared plan to get the nomination. Barack Obama’s White House is crossing its fingers for her, believing that the former Alaska governor is Obama’s insurance policy for another four years at the White House.
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