Over at National Review, Jim Geraghty writes about those voters who cast a ballot for The Dumb Bastard the last time around but who may not do so again. The problem, as Geraghty points out, is that this particular voter probably does not want to admit to making a mistake when they voted for a Historic First Black President who has turned out to be an utter fuck-up and who hates the country.
Those of us who have been paying attention all along understand and know who The Obama Fuhrer really is and what he really thinks about the country and us. He has given us plenty of evidence to draw our conclusions. But if you’re a naive Obama voter who thinks that Obama means well, even when he really doesn’t, how do you justify changing your vote this time around? Well, you have to rationalize it by telling yourself that it wasn’t really your fault when Obama turned out to be something other than The Chicago Jesus who was going to walk on water and solve all of your problems. You just didn’t know that he would be such a stupid moron once he got into office.
Personally I don’t think that there is any doubt about who and what this President is. And yes, I do not doubt that he is evil. You don’t get every single thing wrong, kiss up to our enemies and piss off our friends by accident. You don’t take every action that you can think of to sink our economy and destroy the wealth of the nation by accident. You don’t try to strong-arm American companies with your goon squads and terrorize regular people while turning the Middle East over to the Muslim Brotherhood by accident. You don’t sit in Rev. Wright’s church of hate for twenty years listening to sermons about the evil of Rich White People by accident.
So if you are a naive Obama voter, you can believe what you want I suppose. But for God sake can you at least try to get it right this time? The rest of us would really appreciate you getting up to speed with this so we don’t have to go over the cliff.
Monday I spoke to a smart political mind who had been watching focus groups of wavering Obama voters in swing states, and he said that one word that those voters kept coming back to, again and again, was “naïve.” (The term was to describe the president, not themselves.) Those who voted for Obama won’t call him stupid, and certainly don’t accept that he’s evil. But they have seen grandiose promises on the stimulus fail to materialize, Obamacare touted as the answer to all their health care needs and turn out to be nothing of the sort, pledges of amazing imminent advances in alternative energy, and so on. He seemed to think that reaching out to the Iranians would lead to a change in the regime’s behavior and attitudes. He was surprised to learn that shovel-ready projects were not, in fact, shovel-ready. He was surprised to learn that large-scale investment in infrastructure and clean-energy projects wouldn’t great enormous numbers of new jobs. He’s surprised that his past housing policies haven’t helped struggling homeowners like he promised. He’s surprised that his signature health-care policy has become as controversial as it has. The “recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized.” When a woman says her semiconductor engineer husband can’t find a job, Obama says he’s surprised to hear it, because “he often hears business leaders in that field talk of a scarcity of skilled workers.”
The poor guy. He’s always getting blindsided.
Some cynics might look at this pattern and conclude that Obama isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, or his fans think he is. Others might conclude some variation of the Reagan line, that the problem with Obama isn’t that he’s ignorant; it’s just that he knows so much that isn’t so.
If we’re seeking to persuade Obama voters that it’s okay to vote for someone else this time, perhaps we need to reinforce that notion that he just doesn’t quite understand how things work in the real world — that he understands the theories of job creation, but not the practice. He talks about a future of algae-powered cars while rejecting pipelines.
