Obama’s Rhetoric Only Widening the Enthusiasm Gap?
John Podhoretz - 09.08.2010 - 2:16 PM
The big news in all the polls is the astounding gap in electoral enthusiasm between voters intending to vote Republican and voters intending to vote Democratic — Gallup has it as a 25 point difference, it appears. Rich Lowry explains in a fine column today that the president is trying to close the gap by appealing to his base:
While most people want less of Obama’s program, his base wants more. Obama could ease off his spending to try to take the edge off the brewing backlash, but that would anger his supporters. Instead, he promises his union-member allies yet more infrastructure projects. His new proposals for business-tax breaks are paid for not with spending cuts, but with countervailing business-tax increases, lest the Left throw a fit.
Obama is in a peculiar position here. The trick for him is getting the ideological word out to those who are profiting from his policies (public sector workers primarily) and unvarnished Leftists — without worsening the picture among independent voters, who seem driven almost entirely by their disgust with excessive spending. But how can a president fly under the radar? Obama apparently believes he can attack Republicans, and do so vociferously, without cost because independents don’t like the GOP much either and deeply partisan Democrats hate them. But what is the effect of a president describing his opponents, as he did in Milwaukee, in patently sophomoric ways? “If I said the sky was blue, they’d say no,” he said. “If I said fish live in the sea, they’d say no.”
I could be wrong, but I very much doubt this is the kind of tone Americans want from a president. This is the president we’re talking about here, not some shlepper running for city council. It’s understandable that the president and the Democrats believe they need to get hard-hitting to draw distinctions, that this is their only hope. It is, however, hard to fathom how the White House and partisan Democrats can believe they can close the enthusiasm gap by making such pedestrian use of the bully pulpit. Rhetoric like this may only increase the sense among people who are paying attention that he is not handling this job well. And that might even include some of his own base, who really fell in love with High Obama, the natural aristocrat who spoke in front of those fake Greek columns at the Democratic convention and acted as though he were the second coming of Pericles.
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