Is America wising up?

It has got to be some of the dumbest reasoning in the world for the American people to have fired Bush I for "no new taxes," if that's truly what happened.  To try to correct the situation by replacing Bush I with Clinton was absolutely ludicrous.  There were some arguably good things that came out of it.  But these are a little iffy. One is that firing Bush I might be one reason why the "rabid Republicans" are being faithful to their base in the recent Republican Revolution in Congress, and not getting suckered into raising taxes like Bush I did.  In the sense that that is true, the Democrats made their bed in 1992 (and crapped it) and are having to sit in it.  However, if the Democratic Party is successful with their strategy of blaming Obama's failure on recalcitrant Republicans (who like--or unlike?--Obama are following the mandate behind their election) then whatever deterrent or "lesson" was brought about by firing Bush I was fairly pointless.

The second good thing was more accidental and not a recipe for success.  The American public found out that Clinton was not a moderate, and the backlash resulted in a Republican Congress that hadn't happened in many decades, and the "Clinton economy" was born.

Almost no one insults the heartland of America like leftwing pundits. The contempt of the Left for the Great Unwashed is legendary.  But almost no one from either party can wrap their brain around the fickleness of the public and their amazingly short memory.  Less than a generation has passed since the public had to give dues to Gingrich for dragging Clinton kicking and screaming into fiscal responsibility, and now it appears the public memory has been wiped clean.  No one can remember what happened before the Twin Towers fell.

The truth is that there are a staggeringly large number of Americans who are tossed this way and that by the latest news.  I saw a chart not that long ago that showed the public polls for Obama going up and down from week to week in response to the stock market.  Wow.  Impressive but really not at all surprising.  It doesn't matter what the incumbent has done or hasn't done.  It's HOW DO I FEEL AT THE MOMENT?  If you have a job, then maybe you are unimpressed by the employment statistics and you find yourself believing Slick Willie when he says that everything is looking up.  If you don't have a job, well, then you find yourself liking Obama's promises to support you however long it takes for his latest stack of ineffective stimuli (also charged to the taxpayers' children) to take effect.

So I'm a little unconvinced by conservatives that have "faith" in the intelligence of the American public.  The public has had over 50 years of progressive education.  We're doing worse in the Milgram Experiment than we were 50 years ago.  We have kids questioning authority whenever authority tells them things they don't like--and they are told by their authority figures in college that this is critical thinking.  Critical thinking is holding the right opinion, and here, kids, is the right opinion: You're not responsible; society is.

When Obama was elected, the Left expressed their positive faith in the American public--after all, they had finally come to their senses.  Then the Congressional backlash came in 2010 and the "mainstream" pundits starting talking about the American public having a "tantrum."  Yes, the election of Obama was an informed choice (even though hardly anyone could paint a picture of Obama's "plan" out of the 300+ promises he made) and NOT (definitely not) a reaction to the manufactured perception that Bush II had singlehandedly created the economic meltdown through "trickle down" economics (a term leftwing pundits use to avoid discussion of the Laffer curve and the increased revenues in the wake of tax reductions).  No, that was just good common sense and the elections of 2010 constituted the tantrum.

Leftwing pundits further complimented the Great Unwashed by assuring us that after electing Obama, they started rejecting him upon finally realizing that he was black and his name sounded Muslim.  It wasn't about his policies, his evasions, his bait-and-switch promise fulfillment, his abandonment of fiscal accountability, his lack of transparency (in spite of getting a reward for it), or his misrepresentation of the fiscal consequences of Affordable Care.  No, it just took a while for the heartland's inherent racism to kick in.

So, even if Romney were to win, I wouldn't be able to attribute it to America getting smart.  There's more discussion over this or that candidates demeanor than any real discussion over what has benefited our country in the past and what will lead to its prosperity.  And too many people still believe that Obama can save the world through the power of his name and face and commitment to the "liberalism of Reagan."  There are too many kids that think the answer to not be taken advantage of by Big Corporations is to consolidate more and more economic power into One Big Corporation called The Government (which, as the Democratic Convention recently reminded us, is the one Thing to which we all belong)--the final solution to monopoly and soaring prices (an idea so laughably ironic as to reduce one to tears).  Hey kids remember all those key conservative treatises you were forced to read in high school and write papers on?  (Don't worry, we'll give you a diploma if you can get half the long division problems right and can regurgitate how FDR once saved America.)

It's possible that Obama will be voted out.  Some of this will be due to some Americans getting interested in what Reagan understood and not just how he made them feel.  But in no small part it would be due to some American's simply being fed up and punishing the incumbent.  I'm not saying that Obama doesn't deserve this, but most fenceriders would be reacting against him based on how they feel in November.  Their tantrum will be America's gain.

It's also possible that Obama will get in and a complete Republic Revolution will happen in 2014.  And then 20 years from now, Obama will be taking credit, like Clinton, for the fiscal responsibility that happened in spite of him, and our liberally educated children will completely swallow that crap.

It's also possible that the American public will buy this load of crap that Obama is selling and be okay with Obama ineffectively "stimulating the economy and slowing down the recovery and the expense of a debt that will stay at over $160,000 per taxpayer EVEN WITH (or especially BECAUSE OF) the ever attractive "soak the rich" snake oil that Obama is selling.  And while we ride the train into the actual Great Depression (from which Obama now takes credit for saving us) they're answer will make as much sense as it does now: "We did all we could but Bush left us such a mess."  And the people will swallow it whole.  They'll believe the reports that Reagan's recession wasn't that bad and believe the oft-repeated trope that Obama out a "bottom" under our economic "freefall." We'll know it for the same reason we "know" it now--because we hear it so often.