As Rush Limbaugh said—soon after the last U.S. election, and not without some attendant controversy—we should hope for President Obama to fail. The Republican party establishment were more appalled than the Democrats. The latter were actually gloating. The new Obama administration decided that the mouthy and obstreperous Limbaugh would make an ideal sparring partner, and the new president’s outriders slung a few choice epithets his way, to help Rush with his ratings. Grateful and generous, Limbaugh slung a few back. It was all good theatre.
At some point, it seems, Obama’s brain trust realized it wasn’t exactly wise to be giving the bird to Limbaugh’s vast and accumulating audience. After a couple of cursory digs of his own, the president himself also turned his attention. He began to assimilate the first lesson of high office: let sleeping dogs lie.
So far, all political fun and games, but of course, people get hurt playing them. In their eagerness to accuse their fellow Republican, the fat, vulgar, and extremely articulate Rush Limbaugh, of being “divisive” and scoring an own-goal, the respectables of the Republican establishment—the people with proper table manners who know how to sound their vowels—did themselves a serious injury. They created a division within the Republican party that now only people like Limbaugh can heal. And people like Limbaugh will only be doing that on their own terms.
Out of an understandable aesthetic revulsion for the speaker (I love Rush myself, and laugh with rather than at him, but then I have no taste), the respectables entirely missed his point. Limbaugh made clear, to those whose ears were working, exactly why he wanted Obama to fail. His argument was that everything the new president had promised—everything he had campaigned for, and everything his cronies represented—was against America’s best interests. Republicans should hardly want someone who is acting against America’s best interests to succeed.
I grant, that argument is a little subtle, and Limbaugh does not always slow himself down to the glacial intellectual pace of sound bites in the mainstream media. By not listening, one could easily misunderstand. Perhaps an example would be useful.
The stock markets soared in the middle of this week, immediately after Barack Obama turned in a rather dismal performance in a press conference aimed at rallying the troops behind his socialized medical scheme. As Lawrence Auster, and several other rude conservative commentators on the Internet asked, why would it do so?
They also answered their question: Wall Street rallied because investors began to think Obama-care will fail. The president will not be able to get that revolution through Congress. He looks as if he is beginning to realize this himself. Enough cosmetic measures may pass through to do some permanent damage, both economic and moral; but at the end of the day, it will be nothing on the scale that was feared.
There are innumerable other Obama failures for which one might wish devoutly: that he will fail to get out of Iraq, and Afghanistan; fail to pressure Israel into abandoning her frontiers; fail to negotiate with the mullahs in Iran; fail to make a missile deal with Putin’s Russia; fail to reach an international climate accord, while failing to fully cap, tax, and cripple the U.S. energy industry. Likewise, one might reasonably hope that he will fail to stack the Supreme Court with “culture of death” aficionadi, and fall “tragically” short of delivering any number of other domestic horrors.
My reader may not wish Obama to fail; but by now he should grasp why I would, along with all those horrid jingo Middle Americans in the “flyover country.” If, as the Economist suggested on a recent cover, the choice is between going the way of California, and going the way of Texas—and it is—they will choose prosperity and the American way, over bankruptcy and existential angst. It’s that simple, and the good of America requires Obama to fail, miserably.
From this view, the Republican role in Congress is to help him fail. On the hustings, it is to play as dramatically as possible on what was wrong with Obama’s agenda from the start. The mission is to wipe out the Democrat congressional majorities in the midterms of 2010, in the same way Newt Gingrich and company wiped out the Democrats in 1994, thereby gelding Bill Clinton.
“Nice” will not accomplish this. “Candour” is how it’s done.
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