In Post-Obama America

It’s not, to cop the cliche, that “the honeymoon is over” for Mr. Obama. It’s that his presidency is, effectively, over.

I’ll skip the overused “emperor has no clothes” and the “you can fool some of the people some of the time” points, and just leave it at this: he’s done.

The election of 2008 wasn’t a triumph for the leftist agenda. (I refuse to cede the word “liberal” to them, and there’s nothing “progressive” about believing in an political economic system that was proven not to work 70 years ago.) It was a rejection of President Bush.

And good that rejection was. Mr. Bush was not a small government, pro-market conservative. Government and regulations grew under him faster than they did under any president since FDR.

People didn’t want  any more of the Bush/Republican brand, but that didn’t mean they were embracing the left’s agenda. It was a perfect storm for an empty suit like Obama, who had no record and absolutely no accomplishments, and thus could talk about fiscal discipline and responsibility to the point he even got support from some prominent conservatives. He could tell people what they wanted to hear and, unlike the other Democrat candidates, he had few votes and no legislation bearing his name that anyone could say contradicted whatever the line of the day was.

But now it’s a year later. The soaring sweet talk people fell for then falls on deaf ears now. People see behind the curtain and realize there’s no there, there. The Nobel Prize pretty much put an underline on this whole farce.

People have seen his scheme for the government takeover of healthcare, and they’re saying they don’t want it. (The continued push for some foothold, in any form, for government health care proves that socialized medicine is, in fact, the “crown jewel of socialism.” They just want some kind of framework they can add to later. Once they get people thinking health care is a right and not a service like any other, they’ve changed the mindset. This is why Democrats are risking their House majority and safe Senate seats for ObamaCare.)

People have seen that all the bailouts and stimulus — which will be billed to people not even born yet — has not only failed to stimulate; it’s made the recession worse. Recessions only last this long when government monkeys with the economy. The “smartest guys in the room” are wrecking the economy by trying to save it. They can’t see that nothing is “too big to fail.”

Cap and trade is, thankfully, DOA. People have awoken to the fact that they’ve been hoodwinked by unscrupulous, agenda-driven junk science, and that hey — they really haven’t established that anything man has done is affecting global temperatures. Certainly not enough to go sticking a samurai sword into the belly of the economy as a “just in case” measure.

Almost a year ago — the day of the inauguration — I declared Mr. Obama’s presidency a failure. I wasn’t entirely kidding. The new president was entirely a creature of the campaign — all speeches, no action. All theory, no real world experience. A year has proven that his presidency was pretty much doomed the day he started governing.

Hype and marketing can close a deal — especially when your last purchase was such a lemon. But the empty promises and the false hopes that were peddled make the buyer’s remorse all the more powerful.