“WHAT CAN BROWN DO FOR YOU?”

1/20/10

Back in 2006, when the Democrats won back majorities in both houses of Congress, I wrote that the undoing of the Dems would be assuming that their victory meant that the American public had bought into their big government agenda and acting appropriately. The Dems, I wrote, seized Congress because people were sick and tired of George Bush (and this was before the financial meltdown) and just wanted him out of there. One thing in particular that infuriated people about Mr. Bush was his foreign policy, which I labeled Big Government on a Global Scale, that held that the U.S. government somehow had the right to tell everyone, everywhere how to behave, merely an application to foreign affairs of the attitude of just about every U.S. politician, regardless of party, toward domestic policy. The Democrats were elected because, first, they weren’t George Bush and, second, because the American people wanted them to do something, that is, get us out, of George Bush’s misguided foreign policy adventures.

So the Dems got elected in 2006 and the public’s revulsion toward Mr. Bush remained strong enough to elect Mr. Obama president in 2008, which is indeed testimony to the degree of antipathy Mr. Bush understandably generated. So what did the Democrats do? Some would argue that they pursued a big government agenda, which is true, but, in reality, what the Democratic domestic policy has amounted to is a continuation and amplification of the Bush policy—bailouts for anyone capable of writing a sufficiently large campaign check, ever bigger spending on pointless projects, counterproductive efforts to “fix” an economy which has had enough of injurious tinkering by amateurs, and general disregard for the people who pay the bills. On the foreign front, the Dem policy has been an almost line by line continuation of the Bush interventionist policy, only with Mr. Obama pursuing pointless efforts in that graveyard of empires, Afghanistan, with a gusto that makes Mr. Bush look like a peacenik. This general tendency to pursue business as usual is why I refer to the current administration and its predecessor as one and the same, the Bush/Obama administration.

Given that the complete disregard, nay the contempt, that Mr. Bush and his henchmen showed for the taxpayer has been continued under Mr. Obama and his accomplices, the victory of Scott Brown, a state legislator whom few knew and even fewer seemed to dislike, over uber-establishmentarian Martha Coakley is well deserved, or at least the defeat of Martha Coakley is well deserved. The danger, and the probability, of course, is that the Republicans will make the same mistake in the wake of Mr. Brown’s victory that the Democrats made in the wake of their victories in 2006 and 2008; i.e., they will assume that what happened is not a repudiation of their opponents but, rather, an endorsement of them.

Two more points, only tangentially related to Mr. Brown’s victory:

First, after her pathetic campaign and crushing defeat, Ms. Coakley said: “Though our campaign ends tonight we know our mission goes on.” Think about that puerile pap. Serious people don’t utter such jejune platitudes. But we don’t elect serious people. We elect poltroons and popinjays, and Ms. Coakley is only one of legions of such patheticos. Given the clowns we elect, people who think such gormlessness as “Though our campaign ends tonight, our mission goes on” is the very essence of profundity and determination, we are getting about what we deserve from our public officials.

Second, as I was thinking of this election and the pious proclamations from Democrats that “This had nothing to do with President Obama,” I was, and am, growing more convinced that Mr. Obama and his minions, especially Rahm Emanuel (See my 12/23/09 post, “I CAN TELL BY THE WAY YOU DRESS THAT YOU ARE A REAL COWBOY”) are in WAY over their heads. It seems like in our desperation to rid ourselves of the Bush infestation, we (as a people…yours truly voted Libertarian, as usual) got behind an ephemeral fantasy, an ethereal dream, a man without substance. But time will tell.