National Review: still in need of sedation

I've yet to discern if this sort of garbage--this particular heap, courtesy National Review--is an authentic conviction among the right-wing commentariat or is designed only to agitate the primitive base:

Obama is trying to shape a new kind of electorate ["African Americans, Hispanics, women, and young people"], creating a long-term Democratic majority that would allow him and his successors to stop catering to the center and finally govern decisively from the left....

Obama and his advisors never abandoned their quest to shape a permanent leftist majority.

You know, because Obama's entire political history suggests one of uncompromising radicalism, right?

NR's editorial refuses to even acknowledge reality, let alone engage it. Virtually all of Obama's short-term Democratic-majority victories were grounded in pragmatic, centrist politics--ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, a tax-cut-mitigated stimulus package, even the auto bailout came at the president's insistence that "the car business" wasn't for him.

Ah, but that's the past, some say. What might the future hold? NR doesn't say, not in the least; it simply peppers its piece with vague allusions to leftist politics, a "leftist majority" and "leftist Obamaism"--Bolshevik bogeymen all.  

For the right, the Stalinist Obama is always lurking just around the next corner. True, he's governed for four years as a pragmatic centrist, meaning an FDR-style conservative progressive. But like the NRA's warning that Obama's resistance to federal gun control only means a fierce commitment to much more of it, the right's commentariat wants us--or merely the primitive, paranoid base--to know that years and years of Obama's moderation are but vivid signposts to a scalding, far-leftist hell.

Comments

[Alli]

Anyone that doesn't vote Republican is a left wing radical.

[Robert Lipscomb]

"African Americans, Hispanics, women, and young people"

Let me see if I can do the math here. As I recall, women comprise 51% of the contry. I am not sure how to define young people, but let's guess ages 18-30. And we already have the women; so let's add another 5%. Then there are the African American and Latino men over 30. That must be another 5%.

So, we now have 61% being manipulated by white male socialist over 30; let's say another 6%.

Yep, we have that 67% super-majority. But let's not rest on our laurels. There are all those Asian Americans and Indian Americans and Middle Eastern Americans and any other Brownish Americans. Hell's bells, I am smelling at least 85-90% of the country stealing the country from the majority of real Americans - white men over 30 who don't like other men (at least not in THAT WAY or at least not in THAT WAY in PUBLIC) and who hate Social Security and Medicare.

Damn, we are clever.

[AnneJ]

What does it take for people to stop listening to the mad ravings of men whose brains are diseased with Obama Derangement Syndrome and look around at their own lives and what is happening right in front of them? I hope it doesn't take a Romney / Ryan slash and burn administration. I hope it doesn't take four years of possible double-dip recession, no access to women's health care, privatized social security and medicare plus another trillion dollar unpaid for ground war in the Middle East as the cherry on top for people to wake up. Didn't Bush / Cheney slash and burn enough? And why is the right's only solution to keeping as few of these people from voting for Obama is to point at them (us) as the cause of all of these country's ills and keep us from voting? I guess it's just too much trouble for them to come up with better policies that would attract more diverse groups of people. And they call the poor lazy?

[Grung_e_Gene]

HA read this title as "National Review: still in need of Sedition"