No, I’m not talking about Afghanistan.
Confidence Waning in Obama, U.S. Outlook
Amid anxiety over the nation’s course, support for Mr. Obama and other incumbents is eroding. For the first time, more people disapprove of Mr. Obama’s job performance than approve. And 57% of voters would prefer to elect a new person to Congress than re-elect their local representatives, the highest share in 18 years.
…
Mr. McInturff said voters’ feelings, typically set by June in any election year, are being hardened by frustration over the economy and the oil spill. “It would take an enormous and seismic event to change the drift of these powerful forces before November,” he said.Mr. McInturff added that any “little, faint signs” in the spring that voters were adopting a more optimistic outlook have now been “squished by feelings from this oil spill.”
The article says,
The results show “a really ugly mood and an unhappy electorate,” said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducts the Journal/NBC poll with GOP pollster Bill McInturff. “The voters, I think, are just looking for change, and that means bad news for incumbents and in particular for the Democrats.”
But Jeff Goldstein wonders if it’s truly bad news for the Dems:
— Well, that depends. To those cynical Dem pragmatists who are all about power and their own jobs, sure, the news is bad — as it is for many GOP incumbents.
But for the true believers — the progressives, the liberal fascists, etc — the structural transformation of the US into a European-style soft socialist, middling power is nearly complete: federal control over industry has entrenched itself (unless the GOP suddenly grows a set, or is taken over by the Club for Growth), be it in mortgages, banking, auto-making, or healthcare — and the crisis in the Gulf has been spun in such a way that we’ll likely see more growth-strangling regulation on the oil industry, as well as the immediate and pressing “rationale” for all sort of green-energy initiatives and boondoggles.
– And really, once the left is able to fundamentally alter the structure of government — as well as our very epistemology (through perversions of language, control of education and the mainstream press — losing a few immediate elections while they wait for their new client state to take root is a small price to pay. As in Europe, once people become dependent on the government, they’ll begin more and more to vote “in their own economic best interests,” until eventually all the money runs out — or until the leadership emerges that is perhaps capable of turning the tides.
Of course, the true believers don’t see it that way. In their minds, it is they — using the power of their ideas and the force of their own genius — who will finally corral all the people into their proper pens, creating an American Utopia where things are run by the “good” and the “smart” (which, naturally, is at least partially defined by an affiliation with progressivism), and everyone will be happy in his historically-determined place in the social order.
Which, if that’s the ultimate end game, who cares about a few election losses in the meantime — particularly when you’ve got your opponents apologizing for their own ideological positions, and their opinion leaders counseling them to learn to keep their heads down and don’t say anything that might sound “controversial” to the progressive press, or the politically retarded…?
Jeff’s right on the money on this.
We’re very close to EU-style socialism (and don’t get me started on the spending), that I and a few straggling fellow libertarian capitalists will end up meeting at the cafe(*) every afternoon bitterly moaning about the olden days, the way some old folk in the EU have been known to do.
That is, if Obamacare first doesn’t do us in.
I’m saving you a seat at the cafe, Jeff.
* Cafes in Europe sell alcohol, in case you were wondering.
