Hugh Hewitt: Pelosi and Obama's agenda down in flames
By: Hugh Hewitt
Examiner Columnist
It takes a powerful collective repugnance to propel a national political rebuke.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and President Obama have accomplished an extraordinary thing. Tomorrow they will enter the history books as the most spectacularly failed partnership in modern American political history.
Never in the last 100 years have two American politicians squandered so much political capital and achieved so complete a rejection as this duo. (I omit intentionally the hapless Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is very much the Lepidus in this triumvirate.)
The Obama-Pelosi record contains hugely significant actions, but negative ones. They are to the Democrats of this century what Hoover was to the Republicans of the last: a complete platform for the other party in proper names.
How far in the future will it be when a Republican convention does not prominently feature warnings to the public of a return of the era of Obama-Pelosi?
The myth about "off-year" elections is already being spun out by the left as a threadbare cover for their leaders' collective collapse. These observations overlook 1934, 1954, 1962 and 2002 as examples of elections following a new president's entry into office when he managed not to get clobbered at the polls.
FDR saw the Democrats add nine seats in the House of Representatives in 1934. Dwight Eisenhower's GOP lost 18 House seats and JFK's Democrats lost four in '54 and '62 respectively. George W Bush's Republicans actually added eight House members in 2002.
Two other parallels are exact: Presidents Reagan in '82 and Clinton in '94 were also both new presidents taking office after an administration of the opposite party and who had governed for 22 months when the public got to deliver a verdict. Reagan watched the GOP lose 27 seats to the Democrats, and Clinton witnessed the rise of Newt Gingrich as the GOP added 54 seats.
Until Nov. 2, 2010, Clinton was the gold standard for botched opening presidential acts. How the Man from Hope must be laughing at the Man of Hope and Change. Obama won't erase Clinton's stain of impeachment, but he will replace 42 with 44 in the annals of political failure in America.
Pelosi is in a class by herself. Her particular style of leadership -- arrogant, humorless, imperious and dense -- will guide by negative example many generations of future legislative leaders.
"Don't go Pelosi on us," consultants and colleagues will chide their leaders. And what a caution that will be: Do you want history to know you as a wholly, completely, irrefutably rejected failure?
But for the condescension these two have displayed toward their fellow citizens and citizen-legislators, their fall might even elicit some sympathy. But "I won, you lost" and "we'll have to pass the bill to find out what is in it" are not predicates on which much empathy can be built.
Obama and Pelosi were handed unique majorities and a chance to establish a very long-lasting domination of American politics had they only governed from the center-left and not chosen the agenda of the hard left. (The noise from the bloggers and Jon Stewart may be a balm to lefties that Pelosi and Obama failed for want of going far enough left, but Republicans can only pray that Democrats run on "the stimulus was too small and Obamacare insufficiently radical" in 2012 and beyond.)
The epic loss on Tuesday will launch a thousand op-eds and who knows how many dissertations. But the explanation is very simple.
Never have two modern American leaders been so utterly bereft of graciousness. Americans do not particularly value humility in their politicians, but arrogance and disdain are poison to the public.
The president gets a second chance. Pelosi does not. And that is at least some consolation for Democrats on Tuesday.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at http://www.hughhewitt.com/.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Pelosi-and-Obama_s-agenda-down-in-flames-1398024-106409463.html#ixzz144GhTSkN
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1 comment:
Nutmeg will realize tomorrow that you don't know California and California doesn't want you! I will love seeing you eat crow, So Long Nutmeg, see you in the funny papers.
Nutmeg will lose as will Carly the tremendous failure of HP, don’t come crying to me if the GOP, keeps finding weak candidates, its like Mccain with the half-term Governor Palin all over again, what a joke that was, I mean comedian, talk show guest, commentator, now her new BS on the (of all places) The learning Channel, jack of all trades, master of none.
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