Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club describes a phenomenon that reminds me of the old saw regarding Democrats falling in love with their candidates while Republicans tend to fall in line with theirs. This was particularly apparent during the last election when John McCain, clearly not a favorite son among many conservatives, never the less was afforded a respectful if not enthusiastic level of support by most Republicans during the campaign. Of course we are all familiar with the school girl like crush that a majority of Democrats had and continue to have on Obama.
My wife and I have a close friend that I like and admire very much. Leaving a rather difficult home life at the age of sixteen and joining the Navy, she rose to the rank of Chief Petty Officer and is well on her way to being one of a handful of women to earn her Master Chief designation before calling it a career. Smart, driven, a single mother of three fine children, I consider her to be one of the most solid and self disciplined people I have ever known. A good Irish Catholic, although not fanatically so, she could be described as a traditionalist and moderately conservative in thought and action. It was a cognitively dissonant moment for me to say the least when during our most recent election cycle she swallowed the hope and change rhetoric of Obama hook, line, and sinker and voted enthusiastically for “The One”. Mind you, this is someone who considers Ronald Reagan to be the greatest President of her lifetime. We have had many intense but always friendly discussions regarding this seeming contradiction and I have pointedly told her that anyone who can consider Reagan a great President and then vote for someone with the political ideology of Barack Obama cannot by definition possess anything that could be called a political philosophy and is voting strictly on the charisma of the individual in question. She will of course vehemently dispute this but I believe it is fairly obvious that she chooses her political representatives in the same manner in which she has selected her two ex husbands and the men she has dated since we have gotten to know her, an arena in which, as she will freely admit, she has a rather poor record of choosing good looking smooth talking guys who invariably turn out to be not quite as advertised at the outset of the relationship.
The lure of a charismatic lover healing all past wrongs and promising to make it all ok again is strong indeed and not just to those on the Left. It is what our current President offered last November and 52% of the people eagerly said “Yes!”, sure that this time it would be different, that he was the one. Discussing policy or political philosophy with these people is futile as they are smitten. Only when the lies start becoming too great to ignore, the betrayals too many, will the smitten realize that again they have been made a fool of. Then you will see anger as we are already starting to witness.
It will be a sad spectacle for our country when Obama fails, as I believe he will, to transform our society into the Leftist Utopia fantasized by the sixties radicals that now inhabit the current administration. Sad not because I wish them to succeed in this transformation, but sad in the way it always is when someone falls hard only to have the love go missing. Will we choose more wisely the next time after what I suspect will be an especially ugly divorce? Like my friend we don’t have a particularly good track record in this regard. Hope springs eternal in the human heart however so I remain, as always, skeptically optimistic.
westsound modern 
You’re onto something.
Why else consider RR ‘the greatest president of her lifetime’ other than his undeniable charisma, good looks and that aw-shucks delivery of endless platitudes?
Because RR backed up the charisma with results.
RR’s results were catastrophic for many. We can thank him for all the mentally disturbed wandering the streets these days. He made it impossible for them to get help unless they try to kill someone. His trickledown economics didn’t work and they never will.
The main reason Obama’s approval rate is down is because the Republicans are doing everything they can to keep him from fulfilling his campaign promises and the Democrats are disappointed that he isn’t fulfilling them. Here in AZ, we have Kyl and McCAin who both have received approximately 50 million campaign dollars from the insurance industry (this is documented) and are totally committed to defeating healthcare reform. I hope you like paying your continually increasing insurance premiums. Jane’s premium has increased from $150 a mo. to over $400 in less than 2 years and she has never had a health claim. They said it’s because she is now in her 50’s. It’s because we who do have health insurance are paying for all the people who don’t as they can’t be refused care. The only solution is for EVERYONE to pay something. That’s how medicare works. Approximately $100 is taken out of every Social Security check before it’s sent out. If the funds weren’t being used for other stuff, it would be totally funded, but our wonderful government has raided it continuously for years. If EVERYONE had to pay $100 a month for healthcare, everyone would be covered and the people who pay the huge premiums wouldn’t be paying for the ones who don’t pay anything. The government (taxes) would have to pay to get it started but in the long run it wouldn’t add a penny to the deficit.
Pssst.
Disable your television mother so it doesn’t recieve MSNBC any longer.
It really is the Weekly World News of news. In blaming Republicans for Obama’s sagging fortunes, you conveniently forget the fact that the Democrats don’t need ANY Republican support and can pass anything they want as they have filibuster proof majorities in both the House and Senate. Obamas approval rating are down because he is proving to be a remarkably clumsy politician regarding actually getting things done rather than just reading speeches.
Of course Jane’s premiums have gone up at 50. She’s in a higher risk category. Why does this surprise you or seem wrong?
Medicare is bankrupt, why would we want emulate it at large regarding the overall health care sytem? Your sentence “If the funds weren’t being used for other stuffs it would be totally funded, but our wonderful government has raided it continuously for years.” is the key sentence here. It is the nature of government to tax a hundred dollars for something, then instead spend it on getting re-elected, then borrow the hundred to pay for what they said they were going to use it for in the first place, then tax you again to pay for the principal and interest on the loan, lather, rinse, repeat. How anyone could possibly trust the government to run anything efficiently is beyond me. You say the government would have to pay through taxes to get it started but can you name just one instance in which the government has levied a tax and then decided a few years later that it wasn’t needed any longer? It is always swallowed up and then more is demanded. Once the government is in the health care or insurance business the private sector will be at a huge competitive disadvantage and they will simply disappear. Then we will all be treated to the prospect of a visit to the doctors office or hospital resembling a visit to the building permit department.
As far as adding to the deficit, there will be no “long run” if we keep spending at this level. Do you realize that this Congress has just spent more money in one term than EVERY OTHER Congress combined since 1776?! The mind boggles, at least it should.
How did you get to be such a cynic at such a young age? All Obama’s supporters want is a public option. Everyone who is happy with their present health system can keep right on paying those premiums. The insurance industry has almost all the money in the country now. Life insurance, auto insurance, homeowners insurance, etc. We shouldn’t be depending on a profit industry for our health, but like I said, if you like it that way, keep it.
By the way, I don’t get MSNBC. I read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Oh yes, you said that when government competes with the private sector, it has unfair advantage and private enterprise disappears. UPS, Fedex, private and charter schools are a few good examples of the private sector that competes very well with the government. Competition is a good thing. It keeps costs down.
All 5 proposed bills are on the internet in case anyone wants to read them and get the real facts.
You make my points for me. The USPS loses seven billion of your dollars a year while I assume UPS and FedEx are turning a profit. If UPS and FedEx were allowed to compete on a level field with USPS by being allowed to deliver letter parcels, USPS would be out of business in a month but of course they are prohibited by law from doing so. Competition is a good thing but not when one party is free from the constraint of turning a profit. My point being that any entity run by the government will be inherently more expensive than one run by the private sector unless subsidized with your money.
The Dems seem less interested in competition to actually reduce cost and more in telling voters “our plan may be more expensive but don’t worry, we’ll get that fat bastard rich guy to pay your share”.
Many of those “fat bastard rich guys” have stashed billions in Switzerland to avoid taxes and need to share their mostly ill-gotten riches with their native country. Why would you worry about them?
You talk out of both sides of your mouth when you say that the government can’t run anything well and then say that they will have too much unfair advantage over the private, for profit system. The insurance industry is not going to go broke if the government just takes a little health insurance away from them, and there is no comparison between keeping people healthy and mailing packages.
Did you know that the top 1/10 of 1% of wage earners in this country, the “fat bastard rich guys” earning over 7.5 million a year, 141,000 tax returns out of tens of millions, paid 20% of the total federal income taxes collected? Would you say that these people are paying their fair share? More than their fair share? Not enough?
Your billionair avoiding taxes in this country on any large scale is a myth promoted by leftists seeking to steal something that righfully belongs to someone else.
“Need to share”? Who says? Who decides?
I didn’t want to post it on your blog so I sent some facts to you by email. The billions in Switzerland is no myth.
I read your “facts”. It still doesn’t change my fact that 1/10 of 1%, what you might call the super rich, are currently paying 20% of the tab. Why is this not considered enough? Sure they pay a lower percentage of income than some of the rest of us. So What? It would be like going out to dinner with a rich aquaintance and when the check came, he offered to pay not only for his dinner but 20% of yours plus the bar tab. The correct response would be “thank you very much” but apparently you think it would be appropriate to shout “You cheapskate! You should pay my entire tab. You probably stole the money anyway”. What you would get then instead of a generous portion of your tab paid would be nothing. Unless you pulled a pistol and robbed him to pay the entire tab which is essentially what you are advocating of our government.
Our friend, H I’ll call him, is one of these super rich. He came from a middle class background, worked his ass off, got into Stanford on scholarship, graduated with honors, went to work with Microsoft and is now a senior vice president with the company and I’m sure is worth a few billion. He is already forking over a huge amount of money in federal taxes not to mention his many charitable contributions. Why should he be forced to pay more? To forcibly take one’s hard earned income and give it to someone else is theft. He has personally told me that if the government starts taking too big a chunk he’ll just move his main residence to some country where they won’t. He is happy to pay 30%. He will not tolerate paying 60. Then instead of 30% of his income going into the federal coffers, they will get none. What do you think would happen to our economy if they all, remember we’re only talking 144,000 people who pay 20% of federal taxes, went “John Galt” if you remember your Ayn Rand.
The Left’s entire philosphy is based on a weird kind of envy if you ask me. The kids who slacked off in high school and college, smoking weed behind the portable instead of studying hard, or the people who didn’t work quite as hard or as smart the next guy now want to re-shuffle the deck and take a little of what the more serious kids have. They have absolutely no right to it as far as I’m concerned.
We as a people have quite rightly adopted a graduated income tax. The highest earners pay the most. As they should. Tax rates cut for the highest incomes should be restored to help close our deficits. The myth of John Galt is irrelevant.
Warren Buffett has this one right.
Yes, I remember Rand’s John Galt, a fictional character. He and Prometheus are 2-dimentional and unrealistic characters with objectivist philosophies. “Going John Galt” has, in the past, been used mostly in the context of not paying taxes for causes they regarded as immoral.
Your kind of thinking is why this country is in the kind of trouble it’s in now.
Who are you and what have you done with my son?
Continured; what have you done with my son, (the one who slacked off in high school and smoked weed behind the portables)?
Uh oh. Mom’s ratted me out. Truth be told I’m still slacking as much as I can get away with and I’d smoke weed behind the portable if I had one.
I just don’t make a philosophy out of it any more.