by Mark Rhoads
President Barack Obama has his own unique way of looking at the world. If you challenge his policy ideas, you are guilty of being "partisan." But if you abandon your principles to adopt his ideas instead, that is wonderful "bi-partisanship" to be praised. To his credit, the President went to Baltimore to meet with members of the U.S. House Republican caucus. He was articulate and they were much less so which made for good TV sound bites. One of the more humorous clips shows Mr. Obama declaring "I am not an ideologue." The statement stirred some understandable laughter in the room and Obama said, "I'm not."
If Mr. Obama is not a far Left-Wing ideologue, he certainly has done a fantastic imitation of one during his first year. He effectively is now the CEO of good chunks of the banking industry, the automobile industry, the housing industry, and hopes to be Chief Policy Czar for the health care industry. That's not a bad start for someone who claims he is not a leftist ideologue. Obama also tried to be funny by claiming some GOP House members had demonized the health care bill as "Bolshevisim." That was an Interesting choice of words for someone in America who has not made a study of the history of factions in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party of about 1903, when two facions, Lenin's Bolsheviks and Martov's Mensheviks competed for dominance. In my opinion, Obama much more closely resembles the fast track incrementalists of the Fabian Socialists in England at that same time. The Fabians were far more successful and achieved more lasting results than the clumsy Marxist-Leninists in Moscow because they knew how to skillfully package their ideology to make it seem more reasonable to workers without scaring the "capitalist" business class too much. Obama is a master at this technique and it is one reason that polls for much of last year showed his personal popularity numbers were usually higher than the approval numbers for his major policies such as health care. That changed in recent months with his personal approval also dropping fast. With a few exceptions, too often Obama's House and Senate GOP critics are inarticulate and ineffective in directly confronting him because they have not studied the philsophy of freedom in the same way that Obama studies the ideology of collectivsm. In short, they have not done their homework, and Obama has.
President Obama is also very skilled at subterfuge and guile but most House and Senate Republican problems are of their own making and not Obama's fault. Even though Democrats have held the majority in both chambers since January 2007 and the public disapproves of the job Congress is doing by an average of forty points over seven polls tracked by Real Clear Politics, the generic ballot advantage for Republicans is only four points when it should be much higher based on the disapproval of Congress as an institution. One theory as to why the GOP is not polling better on the generic ballot is that in the public mind the GOP brand name was so badly damaged by career office holders wearing the GOP label in recent years, it will have a hard time recovering no matter how mad the public gets at Democrats for the taxes and back room deals.
For example, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi blew more than a million dollars in her personal Air Force jet for a Congressional junket to Copenhagen early in December, it was not just Democrats who took the trip. Career House Republicans such as Rep. Shelly More Capito (R-West Va.) went along for the joy ride, visited tourist spots, and did not attend climate conference sessions. That routine misbehavior and crazy votes by too many House and Senate Republicans makes it much harder to make a good case that the GOP brand should be more trusted more than House Democrats in working for the public interest.
There might still be enough time between now and November for many House GOP candidates who are challenging incumbents to effectively articulate a common-sense theme based on public disapproval of excessive Washington spending and a promise to restore limited Constitutional government. But they cannot just rely on general anger at Washington to sweep them to victory because incumbent Democrats will also try very hard to capture a populist wave if they can. So Republican challengers will have to distance themselves just as far as they can from the bad apples in the GOP barrel while simultaenously confronting the Pelosi Democrats. If Nancy Pelosi's abuses of power become the face of the Democratic Party in 2010, instead of the skillfully shifting poses of President Obama, Republicans have a chance to win the forty seats they need to organize the new House next January.
