Long Knives

By lex, on November 21st, 2011

When Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson accepted the reality that they could not effectively govern the nation if they sought re-election to the White House, both men took the moral high ground and decided against running for a new term as president. President Obama is facing a similar reality—and he must reach the same conclusion.

He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president’s accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Never before has there been such an obvious potential successor—one who has been a loyal and effective member of the president’s administration, who has the stature to take on the office, and who is the only leader capable of uniting the country around a bipartisan economic and foreign policy.

Y’orta read the whole thing. The author is a career Democratic Party pollster who has read the tea leaves, and understands that while Barack Obama could be re-elected despite his current low approval ratings, the means by which he would do so would shatter our already trembling national bonds.

It started with hubris, of course. The “I won” bit, followed by a dreadfully ineffective $800+ billion dollars of “stimulus” spending that came from everyone and went nowhere except to the pockets of party loyalists and then back to the party itself. The health care legislation rammed down the national throat. The veiled – and sometimes not so veiled – charges of racism against those who opposed his efforts on principle. Charges that were supposed to have become anachronistic by his own election. The kind of hubris that makes demons of those who disagree, and leads those so demonized to wear the mantle proudly. Hubris leads inevitably to nemesis.

And you might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.

President Obama once confided that he would be content to be a one-term president, so long as he could pass his “affordable” health care reform. But that’s just one of those things you say when the prospect is remote. Pillow talk, like. You don’t mean it.

But there are three things that militate against this move: First is the president’s ego. Apart from winning the presidency of the world’s most powerful country – no mean feat, to be sure – he has no other significant accomplishments. To exit, stage left, would be an admission that he lacked the qualifications to his principal achievement. I simply don’t see it happening.

Second, there’s no real certainty that Hillary could cobble together the same kind of rough accommodation with the right that her husband famously did. While bright and dedicated, she lacks his native political ability, his slickness. And there’s a real feel on the right that we have come thus far down the road to the vividly failing model of a European social welfare state, and that we should go no farther.

Which leads us to our final objection: It might just work.

She could win. And the country would be denied the opportunity to make a real choice about who it is we ought to be, and what will become of our Republic.

Depending upon your point of view, that’s either a bug, or a feature.

** 06-05-18 link updated – Ed.

Back To The Index