What Has He Lost?
Jennifer Rubin - 10.01.2009 - 2:00 PM
Digging deep for nice things to say about the president, Charles Krauthammer offers:
I will give him credit for one other thing, for having so depleted his political capital on health care that he really doesn’t have the charisma and political resources now to do a lot of mischief.
Well, ObamaCare isn’t dead yet, but if one accepts that far less than what Obama’s liberal base had hoped for will get accomplished, it is worth examining exactly what Obama “lost” along the way to whatever face-saving, public-option-less health-care measure we wind up with.
For starters, he used up his welcome on TV. His appearances no longer generate much buzz. He has become ordinary and very boring. This was perhaps inevitable, but the rate of descent from Olympian heights has surprised critics and supporters alike.
He has also lost the patina of moderation. His personal demeanor and his jaw-droppingly disingenuous rhetoric (e.g., he didn’t want to take over car companies, doesn’t like spending a lot of taxpayers’ money) used to work for soothing the voters and masking the very radical agenda he envisioned. No more. Americans get that ObamaCare means a much bigger role for government, a revolution in 17 percent of the economy, and lots and lots of new taxes (so much for not taxing anyone making less than $250,000). Whatever the outcome of health-care reform, getting cap-and-trade or other big-government power grabs through Congress is going to get tougher as we get closer to the 2010 elections.
He has also lost the intellectual and political high ground. Fact-checking Obama’s tall tales has become a common activity even for the mainstream media. Somewhere between the Gates-gate fiasco or the tonsil-stealing doctors, Obama began to pick up a reputation for Al Gore–like exaggeration. As Rep. Joe Wilson pointed out, he’s not been telling the truth on a variety of topics (not the least of which was Iran’s not-very-secret Qom uranium-enrichment site). As for the political high ground, Obama seemed unable to resist the political name-calling and tit-for-tat with everyone from the former vice-presidential nominee to radio-talk-show hosts. He’s not only off Mt. Olympus but now often in the mud, an unseemly and inappropriate place for the president of the United States to reside.
Obama still has many resources and big congressional majorities at his disposal. He still has roughly half the country behind him. But he had much more before starting to hawk ObamaCare.
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