First Conservative Blog

Conservative Blog post for October 2

Angry Americans?  You Bet !  Three Reasons America is Angrier

Update from Friday…  Just when it appeared that the Public Option was dead, Democrats revealed their intentions to do everything they can to ram passage through Congress using the reconciliation process. When support for this legislation is confirmed at no better than 40%, Democrats will be quite surprised when voters start burning down the Congressional telephone system as they did over immigration reform.  Voter anger will be very difficult to minimize as election time nears.  Still, that is why the lefties want to get this done before the 2009 elections in VA and NJ.  Stay tuned! 

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Part of the Hope and Change message from the 2008 Presidential Campaign was that Barack Obama was the one person who could bring the country together again.  And after a mere eight months in office, the punditry couldn’t have been proven more wrong.  According to a recent Rasmussen poll, 59% of respondents believed that the level of national anger had risen significantly over what had been the case under President Bush.

Interestingly, this seems to be one thing that Democrats and Republicans can agree on.  Some 69% of Republicans and 53% of Democrats hold the same opinion.  Maybe that is something we can build on.

Democrats are dismayed after the sweeping electoral win back in November that carried Obama and a number of other leftist Democrats into office.  The source of their dismay is that the country really didn’t seem to want the kind of ‘Change’ that President Obama promised.  Conservatives are naturally dismayed that the country was so badly fooled into believing that a South Chicago Political hack who never (yes, really!) held a real job, could be elected President.   The key to the election, independent voters in the center of the spectrum, are also dismayed at what they are seeing – a President who promised during the campaign to bring the country together – completely dismissing all but the most liberal governing principles.

So President Obama has scored an unbelievable political hat trick – he has alienated some liberals by not being able to get the health care takeover and card check bills through.  He never had conservative support anyway, but His unwillingness to even consider legislative language for things like ensuring illegal aliens wouldn’t have access to taxpayer funded health services – only solidified conservative anger. 

Independents though are the ones that feel the most betrayed.  And they are showing it.  Independents are like parents with a house full of kids within the age range of six to 15.  These parents don’t care nearly as much about fairness as they do about quiet.  After bringing multiple kids into the world, these poor parental units just want people to get along.  If the kids get along for even a little while, Dad can nap in the garage in front of that old TV propped up on the workbench he hasn’t used in ten years.  And Mom can read a book without interruption for more than six minutes.   Mom and Dad just want the kids to take care of themselves without damaging each other or the house. 

Independent voters supported Barack Obama because he promised to gently quell the political infighting so that Mom and Dad could cease worrying about someone burning down the house.  Unfortunately, after the health care legislation became public, Mom and Dad saw their entire neighborhood on fire.  Now they have to intervene and settle the family infighting once again.   

Americans are angrier than we were just a few months ago and there are three main reasons:

Segmentation of the Obama message:  Barack Obama made this bed for Himself.  Independent voters are the source of the President’s most significant problem.   And it is a problem of his own making.  Obama’s liberal allies always knew he was a solid leftist.  This allowed candidate Obama to at least tell the independent, middle of the road voters something different without worrying about having his bluff called.  And since the Prez never held a job and was only briefly a US Senator, there was no record to point to as evidence that Obama was anything other than what He presented Himself to be. 

We saw with Afghanistan, candidate Obama called out the Bush administration for missing the ‘real war’ and choosing a mistaken war in Iraq.  Obama was able to present Himself as someone capable and willing to fight in Afghanistan.  The left thought that any war was very much against His liberal principles and understood that these statements were just empty campaign promises.   Now Obama is in a box.  He can’t do the right thing in Afghanistan by committing to engage the terrorists there (as opposed to waiting for them to train up a bit more and engage them in the US) without upsetting his leftist supporters.  Obama also can’t risk upsetting the independents – without whom He is destined to be a four year Presidential experiment like Jimmy Carter – by cutting and running from terrorists on the battlefield.

Candidate Obama frequently opined that health care needed to be made more affordable and more fair.  The press didn’t demand any details about what Candidate Obama actually meant, so independents took Him at His word that if elected, Obama would pursue legislation to that effect – not try to take over one sixth of the US economy.  The lefties let out a howl the instant Obama had his HHS Secretary announce on a Sunday talk show that the Public Option was not necessarily a key point to health care reform.  Now, without a single Republican supporter, the President will be compelled to ram the legislation through using a shady and improper method called ‘reconciliation.’  (Improper because reconciliation only applies to budget and revenue issues.)  Independents have seen the administration support the grandest expansion of government since the New Deal.  This was something they certainly didn’t support when they voted for him. 
 
By delivering different messages to different voter groups, Obama created multiple expectations from the same situation.  This leaves almost everyone feeling betrayed – and angry. 

Eight years of genuine hatred for GWB – In what is obvious to all conservatives, enduring vicious hatred and hate speech from US leftists for eight years was difficult.  The hatred ginned up with the passive assistance of the formerly main-stream media only exacerbated anger on the right.  Media claiming to be fair stood by and in some instances helped leftists get their message out that George Bush had somehow stolen the election (despite media attempts to intimidate conservative voters in 2000 Florida), to patently obvious smear jobs about the former President’s National Guard Service.  Conservatives are indeed angry.  And after enduring the vitriol for so long, they have absolutely no reservation about dishing out all the venom they can manufacture themselves.  It is at least nice to see the lefties on the receiving end of this.

Inattentive Congress: – This is particularly evident in the health care and stimulus debates.  Congress is blatantly inattentive to constituent wishes and equally blatantly inattentive to reasonable functional behavior – such as reading proposed legislation prior to voting on it.   Voters are truly incensed that their Congress is even considering the current health care takeover plan despite the fact that it has – at best – support of 40% of the population.  If Congress thinks people are angry now, just pass health care reform with a public option and watch animosity elevate to an unprecedented level. 

Nancy Pelosi might really have cause for concern over the level of anger – especially after lunatic lefty Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) presented a sign in Congress stating that Republicans wanted citizens to die should they become sick.   Of course in the Pelosi world, Grayson is blameless and was only responding in frustration to evil Republican efforts to stop the government from ruining American health care.  This and the fact that most media didn’t care about the slander against conservatives only enrages the right even more.

On the plus side, voters are now paying attention to the potential disaster staring at them.  Losing their doctor and health coverage is the obvious (obvious to anyone who has both read the proposed legislation and thought about it for mroe than 30 seconds) consequence of the Obama plan – regardless of what the President contends.  The media won’t analyze the real downside of the health care proposal – such as rationing of service that has occurred in every nation with a similar plan.  

The anger in America is real and because the President has turned out (much to the surprise of independent voters who just wanted peace and quiet) to be as much of a lunatic leftist as the conservative talk shows had warned.  Conservatives of course are upset, independents are also upset that they have to get involved again, and liberals are upset that their cherished agenda items are something they have to fight hard for.

Obama admonished the UN last week to look at all He had done in his first few months to bring peace to the world.  Americans are waiting for a little of that centrist to bring peace to America.