The Liberal Death Watch Begins by Robert Bidinotto

Robert Bidinotto recently posted the essay below for his Facebook friends. He has graciously granted permission for me to post it here.

The Liberal Death Watch Begins

After just a half year of radical leftist governance, voters are turning against liberal Democrats in droves. Now, so-called Democrat "moderates" -- "Blue Dog" Democrats, first-term freshmen, and Dems elected in "swing" districts -- are becoming scared witless about the upcoming 2010 congressional elections, fearful that they will lose their seats in a voter rebellion against the left.

Even at the time of the last election, I anticipated Obama would face this quick collapse in public support. My assessment was that Obama, like most liberals -- and most Democratic presidential candidates going back to Adlai Stevenson -- is a man of boundless arrogance. His self-image is that he's oh-so-much-smarter, better educated, and more sophisticated than the crude rubes who populate Flyover America. In this, he's cut of the same psychological cloth as McGovern, Kerry, Gore, Carter, and Dukakis: "progressive" technocrats with intellectual pretensions, whose intellectual great-granddaddy was progressive icon Woodrow Wilson. All ooze sanctimonious, self-righteous superiority from their every condescending pore.

But such politicians face a formidable challenge: America is, at core, the nation of individualism. Knowing this, "progressives" must try to camouflage their true nature and values while running for office, in order to fool voters into thinking that they, too, are Regular Guys who share the values of ordinary Americans. Most of them have been awkward in their masquerading, however, which is why they never got elected.

Barack Obama, though, is much more politically slick and savvy than his leftist predecessors. Knowing a radical agenda would never sell in America, he laid the groundwork for his ascendancy in careful steps. He sanitized his background by writing self-serving autobiographies, creating a Horatio Alger "narrative" for public consumption. As state legislator, he avoided taking tough stands that might later come back to haunt him. During his presidential run, he threw his past radical associates under the campaign bus. For years, he's polished and perfected a subdued, reasonable, moderate style and public image, using measured, vacuously noncontroversial language. He also played gently upon America's past racial guilt: A vote for Obama became a vote of racial penance and expiation of sins.

Still, Obama shares with his less-successful liberal forerunners the same smug arrogance that is ever their Achilles' Heel. Liberals think that they know, better than all of us mere mortals, how to run our lives for us. If only we would live according to their all-wise edicts and values, the world would become perfect. So, once in power, they simply cannot resist the temptation to overreach -- to push a radical agenda far, far outside the voters' political comfort zones.

So, I knew that Obama would have to overreach. However, the man's sheer grandiosity and power-lust astonished even me. He aimed at nothing less than to nationalize everything in sight -- overnight. Think of it: the banking and financial sectors of the economy; the auto industry; the housing industry; the entire energy industry; now, the entire health-care industry. Make no mistake; this is deliberate. Obama is a well-read ideologue who cut his teeth on Marx and Alinsky. He knows what he is doing. He aimed to impose his agenda in a rush, before the rest of us realized what he was doing or could organize to stop it.

It hasn't quite worked out as planned, though, precisely because he overreached. The "tea party" rebellion was unexpected. So was the huge influence of conservative talk radio, which has hammered him relentlessly. So was the public's realization that the "stimulus" was a fraud. His hidden values are revealing themselves in countless ways: in his apologies for America on foreign soil; in unscripted racist accusations against police; in befriending foreign enemies and betraying friends. In short, he's living down to every public expectation of what a radical leftist is. And as a result, Obama's poll numbers are tanking; the majority now disapprove of him and his agenda.

Which is why I think we're at the beginning of the liberal death watch.