First Conservative Blog

After a genuinely horrible week for Democrats, President Obama spent the weekend gathering his mental faculties and calling together trusted advisors to deal with the new crisis.  Following the weekend strategy sessions, the President’s team set its sights on, well… compounding the disaster.
 
Following the Scott Brown, R-MA Senate election victory, Team Obama was left to sort through the wreckage to come up with a reason for the loss of the Senate Seat until recently owned by the Kennedy Family and the Democrat Party.  In fact, Democrats have done such a good job of taking over the Bay State that the race was originally considered a cake-walk for Democrat Attorney General  Martha Coakley.    In the end, Scott Brown won a Senate race in Massachusetts by sounding like Ronald Reagan.  And this has liberals absolutely terrified.

Although conservatives may have been able to gloat for a few days this week, there may be bigger celebrations ahead.  It now seems that Team Obama has called in the architect of this disaster to, well, help the Democrats recover.  David Plouffe, architect of the Obama Presidential victory in 2008 has been summoned to guide the Democrats in the 2010 mid-term elections. 

Democrats generally hold Plouffe to be some kind of genius.  Unfortunately for them the same issues the David Plouffe successfully exploited during the Presidential campaign will not provide the same power to save liberal candidates.  It may in fact have the opposite impact.  Plouffe’s job in the Obama campaign was to win the election by making voters comfortable with candidate Obama and with Obama’s agenda.  In order to accomplish those objectives, Plouffe was compelled to lie. 

Central to the 2008 Obama victory were promises to centrist voters that the Illinois Senator would be a fiscally responsible, “post-partisan” President who would conduct important affairs of state with transparency and openness.   Continued promises to involve all political persuasions in making important decisions and to be moderate in seeking solutions played wonderfully in the run up to the Presidential election and wound up contributing greatly to candidate Obama’s election win.  Following inauguration, centrist voters waited patiently for signs of the promises their new President had made during the campaign. 

First, the outrageous spending authorized by the Stimulus Bill drove up deficits, offered no rational promise of job creation (because of the massive borrowing requirements) and proved the President to be anything other than fiscally responsible.  Further, payoffs to Unions by taking over General Motors and Chrysler to prevent UAW contracts becoming void under bankruptcy laws only showed the President to be another Chicago political hack paying off his constituents.  The federal budget delivered later that year only exposed the President’s unapologetic willingness to spend an outrageous sum of taxpayer money on marginally useful programs.

“Post Partisan” promises went out the window immediately following the Stimulus passage.  Along with then Republican and soon-to-be unemployed Senator Arlen Specter, two Maine Republicans were the only ones in the entire US Congress that agreed to the package.    And following on the heels of the Stimulus, the Health Care takeover earned not a single opposition vote anywhere.   In fact, Republican input was openly rejected and ridiculed, leaving the leftists to construct a monstrous, 2,000 page bill mandating health rationing, radical Medicare cuts and tremendous escalation of costs for the average American working family.  This was hardly the vision of bipartisanship sold to the electorate by Plouffe and Company.

The promise of transparency and openness became so laughable that even Jay Leno could make a joke of the promises.  Negotiating a Health Care bill without inviting opposition congressional representatives who were duly elected by their constituents and doing so without honoring the pledge to present the negotiations on C-Span was a slap in moderate voter’s faces. 

Although a big time smack in the kisser might be what the moderate voters that supported Obama deserve for their gullibility, the American middle voter has been outraged at discovering it has been lied to.  Leftist elites opine that Health Care and Stimulus are too complicated for average American minds to grasp.  This has only exacerbated the Democrat problems that Plouffe is now being called in to solve.

Plouffe’s biggest problems are that all the promises made in 2008 have been proven to be nothing short of bald faced lies.   He won’t get a chance to assemble another litany of promises without some skepticism from the media and especially from those voters already feeling very betrayed.  This President and His administration exhibited absolutely no intent to work with opposition leaders or to govern from the middle.  Democrats have misread their election as a mandate to take over Health Care and to lead the country in a direction leftward that the nation simply will not tolerate.   This leaves Plouffe no assets to work with.

After the Massachusetts massacre, which constituted the proverbial 2×4 of reality brought to bear firmly over the heads of the Democrat leadership, Democrats are faced with a couple of horrible choices.  Either the left can move back to the middle and try to win re-election based on apologizing for its early errors or double-down on earlier mistakes by pushing Cap and Trade or a wildly liberal Immigration measure.  Neither of these choices is good for the left.

So the architect of Barack Obama’s 2008 election is now being called in to rescue fortunes of Democrats in the 2010 elections.  Given the Stimulus and Health Care bills and all the campaign promises, there can be no policy strategy that will carry any credibility for moderate voters who are now rapidly becoming conservatives. 

The country goes through this once every thirty years or so.  Getting sweet talked by a snake oil salesman is also an American tradition.  Jimmy Carter campaigned on change and certainly delivered.  Obama campaigned on both hope and change and has also delivered. Unfortunately for Democrats, no one expected that voters would actually hold them accountable for what they did deliver.