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Warning: Left Turn Ahead
By Colin Hanna, For The Bulletin
Next week, Barack Obama will be sworn in as our 44th President. While most of the news coverage of that event will focus on the symbolic importance of his being America’s first non-white president — and that is indeed a genuine milestone in the history of American race relations — I believe that the substantive impact of the new president will be significantly greater than the symbolic impression. On a wide range of domestic and international policy fronts, a set of dramatic changes are about to occur that may be collectively referred to as “America’s Left Turn.”
The 2008 election was largely decided on emotional rather than rational grounds. The disdain that many had developed for George Bush was virtually palpable, and it was intensified many times over by a media establishment that almost gleefully extended that scorn to all conservatives and most Republicans. It was both unprecedentedly vicious and basically undeserved. George Bush is a profoundly decent man, and a thoughtful and responsible decision-maker, but he was portrayed as a buffoon. His unfortunate awkwardness of expression was equated with a lack of intelligence. He became an easy target for the mimicry of late night television comics. He was presented as a fool manipulated by a Machiavellian vice president. Even his most ardent supporters began to realize in the last year or so that his credibility and respectability had been destroyed beyond repair, and that of the Republican Party along with it. In that environment, it was probably impossible for any Republican to win, and John McCain’s relative closeness in the overall popular vote was really quite remarkable. A large swath of this great land was simply tired of George Bush and anyone who could be associated with him.
However, when decisions are made that are more reactionary than rational, they often come at a high and unexpected cost. I think that’s quite likely to be the case with Barack Obama’s Presidency. In the reaction against an unpopular center-right President, this center-right nation has embraced a man whose political philosophy as expressed in his scant few years in public office is further left than Clinton, Carter, Johnson, Kennedy, Truman, Roosevelt or Wilson. The candidate who was cleverly packaged as a post-partisan man of the middle has in fact been in league with the most militant factions of the labor movement, the anti-war movement, the gun-control movement, the abortion movement and the ACLU, just for starters. He would not be where he is without their support, and he owes them. His early appointments to the cabinet have been more centrist than these past associations would suggest, and many political observers are concluding that his will therefore be a centrist Presidency. I would argue just the opposite: that each centrist that he appoints actually increases the likelihood that these far left groups will insist that they deserve delivery of policies, legislation and regulation that will advance their agendas.
America’s left turn is underway, and over the next several months, this writer will search out and present evidence that Obama as president is moving continuously to the left of Obama as candidate.
Colin Hanna is president of Let Freedom Ring.
The 2008 election was largely decided on emotional rather than rational grounds. The disdain that many had developed for George Bush was virtually palpable, and it was intensified many times over by a media establishment that almost gleefully extended that scorn to all conservatives and most Republicans. It was both unprecedentedly vicious and basically undeserved. George Bush is a profoundly decent man, and a thoughtful and responsible decision-maker, but he was portrayed as a buffoon. His unfortunate awkwardness of expression was equated with a lack of intelligence. He became an easy target for the mimicry of late night television comics. He was presented as a fool manipulated by a Machiavellian vice president. Even his most ardent supporters began to realize in the last year or so that his credibility and respectability had been destroyed beyond repair, and that of the Republican Party along with it. In that environment, it was probably impossible for any Republican to win, and John McCain’s relative closeness in the overall popular vote was really quite remarkable. A large swath of this great land was simply tired of George Bush and anyone who could be associated with him.
However, when decisions are made that are more reactionary than rational, they often come at a high and unexpected cost. I think that’s quite likely to be the case with Barack Obama’s Presidency. In the reaction against an unpopular center-right President, this center-right nation has embraced a man whose political philosophy as expressed in his scant few years in public office is further left than Clinton, Carter, Johnson, Kennedy, Truman, Roosevelt or Wilson. The candidate who was cleverly packaged as a post-partisan man of the middle has in fact been in league with the most militant factions of the labor movement, the anti-war movement, the gun-control movement, the abortion movement and the ACLU, just for starters. He would not be where he is without their support, and he owes them. His early appointments to the cabinet have been more centrist than these past associations would suggest, and many political observers are concluding that his will therefore be a centrist Presidency. I would argue just the opposite: that each centrist that he appoints actually increases the likelihood that these far left groups will insist that they deserve delivery of policies, legislation and regulation that will advance their agendas.
America’s left turn is underway, and over the next several months, this writer will search out and present evidence that Obama as president is moving continuously to the left of Obama as candidate.
Colin Hanna is president of Let Freedom Ring.
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