AMERICA’S hardcore leftists had convinced themselves they were finally getting “their” president. Boy, were they wrong.
Their latest cause for outrage: Barack Obama has picked the Rev. Rick Warren – a pastor who actually believes in the redemptive power of faith – to give the invocation at the inauguration.
That’s what you get for judging a book by its cover – or believing campaign promises.
Months ago, I predicted that, if Obama were elected, the most-disappointed Americans would be the MoveOn.org gang.
Now our domestic surrender monkeys are in shock.
As a McCain supporter from start to finish, I’m relieved and even pleased by President-elect Obama’s Cabinet choices. Defense Secretary Bob Gates will stay on, while a retired Marine four-star, Gen. Jim Jones, will be a very influential national security adviser.
Even the nomination of Sen. Hillary Clinton for secretary of state suggests pragmatism – she’s downright conservative compared to the loonies who’d been in the running.
The only token lefty on his security and foreign-relations team is Susan Rice, nominated for the UN ambassadorship. She’ll get to give the occasional Hugo Chavez-lite speech at Turtle Bay, but she’ll have no power. The UN job is a booby prize.
And who’s the incoming president’s all-purpose hit man? Rahm Emanuel, a brilliant hack who embodies the conviction that winning elections is the only thing that matters. Think he’ll advise Obama to pardon terrorists?
The left never grasped Obama’s ruthlessness – not a bad quality in a president for times like these. He uses supporters like toilet paper – and he’s quick to flush. Not yet inaugurated, he’s already running for re-election.
That demands three things: positioning himself as a centrist; not winding up on the blame line for security catastrophes (we’ll still have thousands of troops in Iraq in 2012), and breathing life back into the economy by the midterm elections.
Surrender and socialism wouldn’t play well at the ballot box. So, despite an influx of Clinton-era retreads, the Obama administration’s shaping up as more Eisenhower than Kennedy (Eisenhower “ended” the Korean War, but we’re still stuck there after half a century; of course, Obama may ultimately pull a Kennedy and give us Vietnam redux in Pakistan).
All those “totalitarian” anti-terrorism measures with which the Bush administration “undermined our democracy”? Obama will toss the left a bone by closing Gitmo, but the wiretaps won’t stop. The O-man doesn’t want another 9/11 on his watch.
Even in domestic spheres in which everyone expected teachers-union Trotskyites or Green-peace gurus to receive “their due,” Obama’s scrambled for the center. His nominee for Education secretary is a middle-ground reformer, while his compromise choice for Interior disappoints me as a conservationist – Sen. Ken Salazar is more James Watt than John Muir.
Lefties don’t know what to do. If they turn on Obama now, they’ll lose even more ground. But they’re waking up in the cold light of dawn alone with the sheets still wet.
Indeed, Obama could turn out to be the least ideological “real” president we’ve had since Eisenhower (we can hardly count poor Gerald Ford). One almost sympathizes with boutique radical George Soros, who appears to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars electing a mainstream president. The New York Times just seems bewildered.
Of course, the don’t-think-won’t-think left has President Bush to revile for another month. And he’ll still be blamed four years from now when the Obama family dog comes down with fleas. But W will have the last smile, if not quite a laugh: History will take him to task for much, but praise him for defending us.
And Bush will have the pleasure of watching from his new Texas digs as conservatism returns to the White House – with a hip-hop soundtrack.
Ralph Peters’ latest book is “Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World.”