Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review Online
9/8/2012
After a first term that has been historically abysmal, President Obama stands a good chance of being reelected. How can that be?
Here is the blunt explanation: We have lost a third of the country and, as if that weren’t bad enough, Republicans act as if it were two-thirds.
The lost third cannot be recovered overnight. For now, it is gone. You cannot cede the campus and the culture to the progressive, post-American Left for two generations and expect a different outcome. So even if Obama is the second coming of Jimmy Carter — and he has actually been much more effective, and therefore much worse — it is unreasonable to expect a Reagan-style landslide, and would be even if we had Reagan. The people coming of age in our country today have been reared very differently from those who were just beginning to take the wheel in the early 1980s. They have marinated in an unapologetically progressive system that prizes group discipline and narrative over free will and critical thought.
The narratives are not always easy to follow. In the progressive weltanschauung, good and evil are relative. Good is whatever it is said to be in the moment; don’t ask anyone to explain why “choice” is a value when it involves killing the unborn, though it is seen as an obvious nuisance when it involves the right to choose the double cheeseburger over the salad. Evil is contextualized and root-caused into vaporous abstraction…
…The third of the country we’ve lost may seem like a decided minority. Progressives do not need more than that, though, to run the show, not today…
…Obama’s base, that lost third of the country, may not be as enthralled as they were in 2008. But they are committed, utterly convinced about who the villains are..That’s how what should be a landslide for his opponent becomes a squeaker.
Read the complete article at National Review Online.
Update: A prime example in tonight’s RSS feed: AP: Obama’s Opponents Are Racists, They Just Don’t Know It…
Thank God for the liberal elites, without them we would never know how evil and racist our intentions really are. Does racial bias fuel Obama foes? How to tell? — AP Is it because he’s black?…
