The end of the Age of Obama. It began with high hopes on a winter’s night in Iowa in 2008 and ended in disappointment on a crisp fall day nearly seven years later.
NEWSCOM Sure, the president has another two years in office,
but he is now the lamest of lame ducks. He is soon to face a House majority
that is one of the most Republican since the 1920s, and a Senate, we hope,
about to be taken over by a Republican majority. But more than this, he seems
to have no friends, and few allies, on Capitol Hill.
One fact of politics that the president never fully grasped
is that/Congress/, not the White House, is the center of our political system.
Sure, the president lives in a fancy house, enjoys a full-time chef, and has
“Hail to the Chief” played when he enters a room. But Congress is—as Stanford’s
Morris Fiorina once put it—“the keystone of the Washington establishment.”
The Framers gave pride of place to Congress, making it
Article I of the Constitution, and were so worried about its potential power
they divided it into two. Ideally, the modern president can use his prestige
and acumen to lead Congress, but Obama has fallen far from that ideal. He has
treated Congress in a supercilious manner, burned his bridges with Republican
leaders, and alienated even Democrats.
With nobody to call on Capitol Hill, the president will have
lots of free time over the next two years. He might use some of it to ponder
this truth: There are no permanent majorities in American politics.
For over a decade, Democrats have been salivating at the
prospect of demographic changes propelling them to permanent majority status.
Obama in particular has been active on this front, and has
ruthlessly divided the country along race, gender, and class lines in the hope of
speeding this process along. But he has overlooked two historical realities.
First, demographic change has been part and parcel of the
American political landscape since the Founding, and yet the parties adapt.
We can go back to the Federalist/Jeffersonian divide of
earliest days. The latter enjoyed a demographic edge for a time because of the
fast expansion of the West, but the old Federalist ideology eventually became
the backbone of the Whigs, who were competitive against the Jacksonians.
Federalism and antislavery then inspired the Republicans. So demography
“doomed” the ideas of the Federalists, until of course a homespun Illinoisan
named Abraham Lincoln united the whole North around a reworked version of their
economic program.
More recently, consider: In 1928 it was the Catholic vote
that flipped Massachusetts from Republican to Democrat. In 2004 a majority of
white Massachusetts Catholics gave their vote to George W. Bush, a Methodist
from Texas, over John Kerry, a Catholic from Massachusetts.
Second, despite our political class’s pretensions to power,
they remain mere pawns in a broader game designed by James Madison. Madison
wanted a large republic precisely so demagogues could never build a fractious
majority, as has been President Obama’s clear ambition.
A society that covers a large space with many people actually
makes it harder to do what this president has so long wanted.
Per Madison: “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater
variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of
the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or
if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it
to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.”
We are seeing this play out right now. Obama’s coalition in
2008 was relatively large—at 53 percent of the vote—but unstable. In a country as
vast and diverse as ours, all such coalitions are bound to be unstable. And
what we have seen is Republicans poach a critical mass of the Obama vote away,
in 2010 and likely in 2014, to foil his agenda. Just as Madison might have
expected.
It is well known that this president likes to golf and watch
hipster favorites like/Game of Thrones/, so he probably is too busy to read dusty
old books about men who lived long ago. But those who aspire to succeed this
sterling mediocrity in the White House would do well to spend their free time a
little differently.
We would suggest a careful study of the words and deeds of
the Founding generation. There is much to learn from Madison’s complex
philosophy, Alexander Hamilton’s innovative economic program, George
Washington’s careful and steady management, and Thomas Jefferson’s pragmatic
policy of conciliation. Let’s hope our next president grasps that you have to
respect our past to lead us effectively into
the future.
NOV 10, 2014, VOL.20, NO. 09• BYJAY COST
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/author/jay-cost>
Comments
I rarely republish esoteric, hard to follow articles like
this, but I liked the title.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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