Obama and His Ilk Have No Idea What Makes America Great

By David Catron on 9.16.10 @ 6:08AM

During the past several weeks, as the shadow of the midterms has loomed darker and darker over congressional Democrats, the commentary of progressive pundits has become noticeably querulous. In response to a spate of surveys showing widespread voter dissatisfaction with the President and his partners on Capitol Hill, the op-ed writers and bloggers of the New York Times, Washington Post, and a variety of lesser liberal outlets have used their columns and posts to vent frustration with the electorate's inability to see that the current regime has been a success. Why, they ask, is the public not grateful for the "historic" health reform bill, the stimulus package and Wall Street reform? What, they demand to know, are the voters not getting?

Given a chance to respond to this query, most voters would probably provide a one-word answer: "results." The Democrats simply haven't produced. Their signature legislative "achievement," the ironically named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is actually exacerbating the problems it was ostensibly passed to solve. Meanwhile, unemployment has doubled since the Democrats recaptured Congress and the federal deficit has skyrocketed at a truly alarming rate. That such high-profile failures have produced disapprobation for congressional Democrats and their eloquent accomplice in the White House should not be surprising, but the phenomenon seems to have shocked and angered many progressive pundits.

Jonathan Alter's recent cri du coeur in Newsweek is typical of the resultant outbursts: "[N]o good deed goes unpunished, and the GOP seems headed for a takeover of the House of Representatives in November." Alter is piqued and perplexed by the public's refusal to give credit where he thinks credit is due. The president, he huffs, "prevented another Great Depression" while providing "Wall Street reform added to health care." That most of the voters already had health care and see no evidence that any Democrat policy has improved the economy, is evidently lost on Alter. In the end, he concludes that the problem is "the cognitive dissonance of the American voter."

Alter's conclusion that the voters are suffering from some kind of psychological malfunction is echoed throughout the progressive commentariat. His Newsweek colleague, Eleanor Clift, avers that "The heightened role for government in the economy and health care has triggered mass psychosis among voters." At the Huffington Post, Carla Seaquist writes that voter anger has become "more volatile and incoherent the more it untethers from reality" and that it has "spawned a kind of madness." Over at the New York Times, Paul Krugman describes voter disenchantment as a kind of recurring insanity: "Anyone who remembered the 1990s could have predicted something like the current political craziness."

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/09/16/accountability-and-its-discont