Another conversation with a liberal, this one about Scott Brown
Bookworm on Jan 22 2010 at 7:44 am | Filed under: Barack Obama
I asked a liberal I know why he thinks Scott Brown won. Here is my friend’s answer:
I was really shocked. The people are fickle. They just weren’t willing to give Obama enough time. It takes more than a year to do all the transformations Obama needed to do. You know, here they elected Obama and they had all this good will and kind feelings towards him, and then they just turned on him. It’s all so superficial. They abandoned him for a guy who’s really handsome, whose daughter was on American Idol, and whose wife is on TV.
In other words, the problem isn’t with Obama’s agenda. It’s because the impatient, fickle public has already moved on to the next pretty face and novel election.
Because I’d asked an open-ended question, and my friend gave a polite and honest answer, I didn’t push. Had I done so, I might have said that, back in 2008, Obama ran a centrist campaign. If nothing else, polls in both Massachusetts and the rest of the US show that people don’t want Obama to “transform” anything, and are now pushing back against him precisely because he’s not governing as he ran.
Related posts:
- Why Scott Brown’s election is so inordinately important *UPDATED*
- Scott Brown’s Victory speech
- Who is Scott Brown?
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12 Responses to “Another conversation with a liberal, this one about Scott Brown”
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Book (and all),
Suppose your friend is correct in one part: That the voters are fickle.
Definition of fickle:
likely to change, esp. due to caprice, irresolution, or instability; casually changeable.
When I looked up that definition, “casually changeable” caught my eye. I was willing to quietly accept an Obama presidency if he were to govern from the center, because he made a number of promises and speeches that were centrist… when he was in front of a centrist audience. But when he was in front of a liberal audience, he made liberal promises and speeches. As the campaign wore on, it became clear (at least to me) that he was making boatloads of irreconcilable promises that he could never keep.
Your friend saw only his liberal speeches and promises and he or she was happy. I think the Independents saw only his centrists speeches and promises, liked what they heard, and decided (being sick of and disgusted with Bush and the GOP) to give HopeyChange a shot. But if they’d paid any attention, if they’d investigated to any depth, they’d have realized that the centrism was all smoke and mirrors, right? (Perhaps relying on the MSM to do their work for them was the fatal flaw?)
So perhaps they can be considered fickle, because their political involvement is so shallow? Given a full year of the real Obama, the polls are making it clear that they are rejecting Obama/Reid/Pelosi. We’d like to read this as a shift toward conservatism, but might they merely be defining what they are against, and not what they are for? In other words: Maybe they are fickle because en masse, they have no idea what they are FOR?
So I’ll go back to my long-standing position: If we can elect conservatives in our primaries who obviously have integrity, and who campaign against big government, and pledge openness, and can EXPLAIN and communicate conservative ideas in a way that is involving and exciting, maybe we can influence the independents to adopt our ideas and philosophy of government. ”Fickle” may simply mean they are, at this point, unusually (and finally) receptive to ideas? If our candidates can point to the last three years as concrete examples of bad ideas, and promote well our ideas, could that produce a stable shift to conservatism? Or do you think they are already with us, on board?
Brown lost what?
Thanks, Y. I’d originally written “why Coakley lost,” and I think tried to edit it to “why Brown won.” Apparently my edit only went halfway before I got lost in the ether. I’ve fixed it now.
Confused as they ever were–remember Peter “The voters had a temper tantrum” Jennings?
<B>It’s because the impatient, fickle public has already moved on to the next pretty face and novel election.</b>
Yea, you see, Obama needs more time. By the year 2012, they’ll be saying Obama needs 4 more years of time. Then in 2018, they’ll say he needs more time still to transform America. You get the picture?
It’s best you didn’t respond, Book, as I doubt that (according to your account) your Liberal friend would have changed their mind no matter what you said. By just keeping mum, you were able to make a make contribution to the Anthropological study of Homo Libra-rectus.
“I was really shocked. The people are fickle. They just weren’t willing to give Obama enough time. It takes more than a year to do all the transformations Obama needed to do. You know, here they elected Obama and they had all this good will and kind feelings towards him, and then they just turned on him. It’s all so superficial. They abandoned him for a guy who’s really handsome, whose daughter was on American Idol, and whose wife is on TV.”
Gad, the liberal mind is a real thicket of mush, isn’t it?
Which transformations didn’t The One have enough time to do?
The takeover of General Motors, which after a year of protection from the market still can’t make a product that anybody wants to buy?
The closing of Gitmo, which strangely still hasn’t happened despite it being, on the surface, one of easiest things Obama could have done?
The powerful effect of the stimulus, which was going to show up quickly and keep unemployment at 8 percent?
The real howler is the inability of Book’s friend to see that she is the pot calling the kettle black. What could be more superficial than to vote for a man simply because he’s glib and good looking? (Of course there’s the added bonus of his blackness, which presented all liberals with this century’s greatest opportunity yet for cheap grace: “Look, Ma, top of the moral pile, I voted for a black man!”)
If a liberal can vote for an empty suit, why can’t the rest of us?
I concur with the comments above. You simply can’t deal with the diehard liberals and progressives on any rational level. It’s as if Dante had taken Lewis Carroll and not Virgil as a guide. They are impervious to reality, and often simply smug about it too. Reagan’s famous quote is on point: it’s not that they don’t know anything that is the problem, it’s the things they know that aren’t so.
“It’s as if Dante had taken Lewis Carroll and not Virgil as a guide.”
Zhombre, that is exquisitely wonderful writing. Thank you!
From my front row seat in MA, I can see other reasons that Brown got the vote he did. 1. The sales tax was raised this year in MA, despite a popular vote to not do so. 2. Rules for appointing a person to fill out a seat were changed (for the 2nd time in 3 years) so that a Dem could take Kennedy’s seat until an election. 3. The MA House/Senate gave themselves a nice raise this year. 4. Our unemployment rate is officially up to 9something. (It had been 6-7ish.) I believe that the electorate is finally realizing that actions do speak louder than words. The majority here is not Democrat, but rather non-registered Independent. Most everyone that I speak with is fed up with the budget deficit, the lack of transparency, the deficit – and that the promised change -thought to be more about honesty, rather than war, health care, or what have you- did not happen has infuriated everyone from my mailman to my rte 128 entrepreneur friends. Our town had a 75 percent turnout. It was quite exciting. 5-6 calls a day for 2 weeks before the election (Robot calls, but still. All except 1 call from Brown.) I think that this might be the first time in recent memory that the state has had a presidential visit. Normally each party shrugs off MA, and heads to the NH mountains to campaign. Slightly OT: does it surprise anyone that
<snip> Obama’s top source of funds was investment bank giant Goldman Sachs, whose employees, partners, and executives gave him $995,000 — that’s the most any politician has raised from any one company in a single election since the age of “soft money” ended. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Beware-the-Goldman-Sachs-populist-82293977.html#ixzz0dO2tLlYW
Nice one about the study, Danny.
Btw, it’s still true that you can take anything the Left says, replace Right wing with ‘the Left’ and it would be a true rendition of reality.
So if they say we are on the side of Wall Street harming Mainstreet, then you can get the picture. Their propaganda apparatus is amazingly consistent in this one regard.