It’s About a Choice

If you want to know what the Democrats think of you this coming election, all you had to do was tune into “Meet the Press” this past Sunday and listen to Obama’s point man, David Plouffe.  But it’s not enough for Mr. Ploffe to be Obama’s main strategist, he also has to write a book about it, “The Audacity to Win:  How Obama Won and How We Can Beat the Party of Limbaugh, Beck, and Palin.”  Just in case you miss it.

Catchy title isn’t it.  I’ll bet you don’t need be a mathematician to figure out the answer to this question—What three names could you put in a book title that captures the angst and visceral anger of the left along with a majority of the Democrats to try and stave off the shellacking your party appears to be on track for and paint the entire opposition party as “extremists”?  (Picture the liquid cooled supercomputers in the basement of the DNC churning wildly for days.)  Survey says, Limbaugh—a conservative radio personality for decades; Beck—a television and radio personality who recently played host to hundreds of thousands of people in one of the largest and most peaceful rallies in DC calling on people to return to…cover the children’s ears…God; and Sarah Palin—former Governor of Alaska and a massively influential conservative political personality.  Wow, my guess is you knew that instantly and you didn’t even require a calculator.

And what is the coup de grace that Plouffe and company are going to use to reignite the hopey changey machine?  “The question we have to put in front of people in these next two months is, this is a choice.  And the Republican ideas were soundly rejected at the ballot box the last two years, more importantly were soundly rejected by the American people.  They’re offering nothing new, the same old policies that led this country this close–Senator Graham was talking about, you know, the right ditch, the left ditch, they drove us into the ditch.  And if we give the keys back to the people who did this, it would be like giving Herbert Hoover the keys in the mid-1930s.”  There it is, the entire strategy from Mr. Wizard–Democrats good, Republicans bad.  It reminds me of another refrain from a famous farm, “Four legs good. Two legs baaaad.”

So Mr. Wizard would like us all to climb into his Delorean and take a trip back to the mid-1930’s where we find FDR’s (Democrat) New Deal lifting us out of the Great Depression caused by Herbert Hoover (Republican) and comforting the American spirit with his cozy radio—TV wasn’t invented yet Mr. Vice President–Fireside Chats.  There are only a few problems with that.  You’d have to read Amity Shlaes The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Depression, or Burt Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal?How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, to get a full flavor of it, but suffice to say that the old narrative we have been taught which Democrats are still feeding us today doesn’t actually survive an encounter with the brutal reality that was—mainly that the constant intervention of the Federal Government, started by Hoover and accelerated by Roosevelt, along with the uncertainty it created most likely caused us to go into the Depression and kept us there longer than necessary.   Insert Bush and Obama and this story sounds eerily familiar.

Here are a few more disturbing facts for Mr. Plouffe as we ride back to the future and our present reality after 20 months of this President and four years of a Democratic majority in Congress–“9.6 percent unemployment rate, 14.9 million unemployed, 6.2 million of which are long-term unemployed beyond 27 weeks, an estimated three million property foreclosures this year.” But wait, all is not lost.  There was one shining moment of crystal clarity when, what can only be characterized as a “Freudian Slip”, Plouffe spoke of “…the right ditch, the left ditch, they drove us into the ditch.”  Yes, David, they did.  Presidents and Congresses from the right and the left, Republican and Democrat drove us into the ditch.  So it’s time for the American people to take the keys and give them to representatives not named Thelma or Louise, and soundly reject this President and his Party’s ideas at the ballot box this November.

One more item, because this was my favorite exchange, “MR. GREGORY:  I’m curious, when we talk about economic recovery and the political scene, former President Clinton has been campaigning, The New York Times covered one of his statements when he was on the trail, and I’ll put it up on the screen.  He said, ‘A year and a half just wasn’t enough time to get us out of the hole we are in, so I want you to stick with us.  Give us two more years, two more years until another election.  If we fail, you can throw us all out.’ Does President Obama see it that way?  In other words, he’s got one term to turn this thing around?  MR. PLOUFFE:  He doesn’t view it through the prism of politics.”  [Emphasis mine]  I’ll give you a few moments to compose yourself.

Okay, now that you’re up off the floor from your side-splitting laughter, isn’t it rich how they want us to give them “more time.”  Somehow I don’t think the American people are in the mood to give this administration and the majority party any more time to continue to dig its way to China where we can beg to borrow more money as we enslave our children to a debt they can never repay.

Do we have a choice to make?  Yes, we do.  Is it merely a choice between Democrats and Republicans?  No, it’s not.  It’s much deeper than that, but it’s where we must start.  And while I imagine that you and I don’t agree on everything, I would venture to guess that we can agree fully on one thing, there certainly is a lot of audacity going on.

Copyright 2010 Julie Schmidt.