Humans seem to have a very short memory, for which politicians must give thanks every day. President Obama, and the liberal elite who follow him, are furious at the Tea Party movement because those “terrorists” and “extortionists” have dared to oppose his policies.
Strange, the Tea Party never existed until the Obama administration came to power, with majorities in both houses of Congress, and began to do things like ram ObamaCare through Congress, and bail out feckless Wall Street banks and their wealthy CEOs with taxpayer money.
The Tea Party started with a widely-publicized rant in February 2009 on the stock exchange floor by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli, who was furious that the Obama administration proposed to “subsidize the losers” in the mortgage market with the taxes of the rest of us, who had been more prudent. That rant apparently fired up a lot of people who were seething just as Santelli was, and who subsequently formed Tea Party groups all over the nation and eventually elected a number of new members to the House.
Obama’s two major mistakes to date have been (a) to waste time and political capital on ramming the health care bill through when he should have been focused exclusively on jobs and the economy, and (b) to fail to understand that while he personally may be one of the liberal elite, the majority of the nation is center-right and can only be pushed so far to the left before they will revolt.
In effect, the Tea Party exists simply as a reaction to Obama’s own policies. A wise politician, like Bill Clinton, would have read the tea leaves (no pun intended) and known that it was time to tack to the center a bit and try to co-opt the Republican’s issues. But Obama apparently isn’t as smart as Clinton was.
Now, as the stock market crashes and the economy teeters on the edge of a double-dip recession, what President Obama needs to do is something he has failed to do thus far – show some leadership. Today’s speech, blaming the ratings agencies and castigating the Tea Party but proposing nothing to deal with the real problems, wasn’t leadership.
This may be the defining moment for Obama’s presidency. If he doesn’t come out forcefully as a leader in the next few days, if he doesn’t propose some dramatic steps to deal with the crisis, if he just keeps trying to score political points by blaming others and ignoring the underlying issues, he is probably about to become a one-term president in the Jimmy Carter mold.
This will be his test.
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