Giddy. It’s gotten giddy out there. Every day is Christmas, and Democrats wake up in the morning bouncing like toddlers as they unwrap each new gift from the pollsters. Barack Obama up three in North Carolina? It’s as if the Democrats asked for a bicycle and got a Porsche, a date with Beyonce and a long-term contract to play first base for the Yankees. Obama isn’t winning. John McCain is losing. People would vote for Bill Ayers if he had a (D) after his name.
President-elect-almost Obama has offered no ideas to deal with the economic crisis except the curious notion that the rich, who have already been soaked to the tune of $8 trillion or so, need to get soaked some more. The financial industry is huddling, broken and confused, in the stock market Superdome, and Obama is standing there with a bullhorn telling them they deserved their Katrina and then some.
But the voters are lapping it up. So let’s hear it for Obama’s intellectual and strategic guru, his Karl Rove, his Bill Kristol: Wall-E.
“Wall-E,” the strangest animated feature ever released by Disney, this year sold more than $200 million worth of tickets (most of them, presumably, to Democrats) by telling the American people that we are stupid, fat and lazy, that we are destroying the earth, and that this is ultimately a good thing because things are so far gone that we need to start over with a glorious new beginning. It’s basically the Book of Revelation rewritten in crayon for the secular.
The Disney/Pixar/Obama Prophec-E says that anything that brings a clean slate must be greeted with Rapture. Thus the odd spectacle of the dazed smiles on Democrats’ faces as they discuss the economy. “Did you hear we just lost 200,000 jobs?” “Awesome!” As GOP New Mexico Rep. Heather Wilson put it on “Hardball” on Tuesday, “If the tables were reversed and we had a Democrat in the White House, the Democratic candidate would have gone down in the polls. Reality doesn’t matter sometimes on these things.” (That President Bush caused the meltdown by “loosening regulations” is hard to take seriously. He did not create Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac nor did he repeal the Glass-Steagall Act.)
Consider the reality that no longer matters about newly minted Democrat hero Colin Powell. Powell made the case for the Iraq War. That means he is subject to exactly the same Democrat critique as President Bush: He is either evil (he knew there were no WMDs and lied about it) or foolish (he believed spurious evidence.)
The best possible spin a Democrat can put on Powell is that he lacks something even Bush has never been accused of being short of: courage (or stubbornness, the negative way of describing the same thing). Powell could have resigned rather than make the case to the UN, or he could have refused and accepted the risk of being fired. What no Democrats will say is this, because they’d have to admit it applies to Bush as well: that Powell honestly sifted the available intelligence and concluded that invading Iraq was the best option for America.
The reality that does matter is that the fortunes of the Democratic Party are inextricably intertwined with American misery. Democrats might prefer to have a robust economy and an Obama win, but they know they can’t have both. So they’re psyched about the latter.
Five times in the past century, control of the White House flipped from the Republicans to the Democrats. In 1932 and 1960 the economy was contracting. In 1992 and 1976 the economy was hungover from a recession that ended, in both cases, in March of the previous year. In November of 1912, the economy was between a recession that ended the preceding January and one that would begin the following January.
When Republicans took the White House from Democrats in 1952, 1968, and 2000, it had been three, seven and nine years since the last recession. Republicans can win on likeability, on sturdiness, on values. Democrats win on panic.