11/25/14, "The Forgotten Americans," Victor Davis Hanson, NRO
"Obama’s coalition is held together only by his personal mythography."
"When President Obama promised to all but end the use of coal and to send electric rates soaring, would his own friends and associates be affected? What if a candidate from an Appalachian state had argued there that were too many lawyers like Obama and that it was well past time to stop all state and federal subsidies to universities that keep turning out redundant subsidized graduates? Or if he had argued that affirmative action should be based on class rather than racial considerations?
When Justice Sonya Sotomayor talked of a “wise Latina,” it may have sounded chic to those who believe in identity politics, but for millions of Americans it raised disturbing questions. If there were “wise Latinas,” were there logically also “wise white people” or “unwise Latinas”? When Eric Holder talked of “my people,” was the logical corollary that other Americans for Holder were not “my people”? Are we now a nation of my people, by your people, and for their people?
Once one goes down the road of racial chauvinism, the contradictions of prejudice only magnify. Al Sharpton may have his own cable news show and be courted by politicians, but many forgotten Americans remember that he is a serial tax cheat and a veritable racist. When Dinesh D’Souza is convicted and sentenced for an improper campaign donation, how exactly did Sharpton with impunity refuse for decades to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back state and federal taxes? Why was he never indicted? When Sharpton charges America with racism, the forgotten Americans instead remember Sharpton’s own history of gay-baiting, anti-Semitism, and cheap anti-white demagoguery — and wonder how he weaseled his way into being an Obama adviser.
Fairly or not, the Democratic party is now associated with European-style redistribution. It is seen as being
opposed to the creation of blue-collar jobs in industries like mining, oil and gas production, timber, and irrigated agriculture,
being shrill on issues like abortion and gay marriage, and
being more worried about undocumented immigrants than about Americans who pay the additional costs or foreigners who play by the immigration-law rules.
Any one or two of these issues might have been massaged or downplayed, but in toto they send a message to the middle class and working class that they are irrelevant or, worse, despised rather than just ignored. Their livelihoods are seen as unimportant while their culture is written off; they do not receive the empathy accorded the poor or the deference shown the refined tastes of the wealthy.
For six years, the Democratic party had boasted openly about its new constituency in contrast to a played-out, old, white, male — and shrinking — Republican electorate. Herein it committed two terrible blunders well beyond the serial and gratuitous smears. One, its coalition was predicated on the landmark candidacy of Barack Obama and his unprecedented personal popularity among minority groups and young singles. These groups were interested in Obama as the first black president, and not so much because of his liberal social agenda. So, when he is on the ballot, young people and minorities turn out to vote for the iconic, cool person, but they are not necessarily as enamored of his policies. When Obama is not on the ballot, his new base of identity-politics voters stays home, and the ballyhooed coalition dissipates.
Second, each time the progressive coalition panders to an identity group and uses the rhetoric of “my people” or “punish our enemies,” it turns off one voter for each one it energizes. Few have written of the astounding ability of Obamites — Joe Biden, John Brennan, Steven Chu, James Clapper, Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder, Jonathan Gruber, Lisa Jackson, Van Jones, Lois Lerner, Susan Rice, Kathleen Sebelius, and a host of others — to insult the intelligence of Americans on grounds of their supposed naïveté or illiberality or both.
In crude terms, the percentage of white and middle-class voters who support progressive Democrats is shrinking at a rapid clip at the very time when astronomical rates of participation by new minority and young voters are needed — groups that thus far show no predictable record of maintaining their historic turnouts when Obama is not on the ballot. Hope and change was about Barack Hussein Obama’s youth, charisma, rhetorical skills,* race, nontraditional background, and multicultural-sounding tripartite name, but not about an otherwise reactionary liberal agenda.
So the progressives won small and lost big: They got Obama elected twice and have nearly ruined his party in the process."
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"— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution"...
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*Comment: "Rhetorical skills?" He can read words put in front of him. He has a deep voice. Neither of these things necessarily define "rhetorical skills."
Merriam Webster definition of "rhetorical:"
"Of, relating to, or concerned with the art of speaking or writing formally and effectively especially as a way to persuade or influence people."
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Remember, Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose, shortly before the Nov. 2008 election, thrilled that Obama was going to win, freely admitted they knew nothing about him except that "he went to Harvard Law School."
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Also: Rhetoric concerns writing as well as speaking. The first of two books attributed to Obama, "Dreams of my father" is written in a style unlike anything else that exists under his name. This has been documented in detail. Meaning the actual writing of the book, the rhetoric, couldn't possibly have been Obama's.
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P.S. It must be said that the GOP E favors the same things democrats do from European style redistribution, to open borders, on down the list.
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