Election Day 2009: No Obama Magic; only more golf

Some good reads on the Democratic trouncings yesterday; in part due to disenchantment with Obama, his agenda, and that of the Democrats ...

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_obama_magic_has_faded_j5hVLRcxiqTHWberCV1DrK

And — until it started looking as if they might lose — the Obama people were suggesting that these races would seal their mandate and encourage congressional wafflers to toe the line on health-care reform. Not so much, as it turns out.

In fact, the elections underscored Obama’s political weakness just one year after his triumphant victory over Republican moderate John McCain.

The Obama invincibility that was so much in evidence then seems to have lost its power. People can argue the reasons why these elections, all in places Obama carried handily, were so close. But if he were the political marvel he was thought to be, these races wouldn’t have been contests, but walkovers. So one consequence of this Election Day is the end of his special political magic.

That’s no surprise — as that magic was a largely substanceless froth whipped up by campaign consultants and compliant big-media cheerleaders.

The truth is, Obama wasn’t ready to be president when he ran in 2008. When he started, he probably thought he had no real chance — he himself admitted upon entering the Senate that he wasn’t qualified to be president — and that his first run would simply be a PR effort that would lift him to the top ranks of Senate Democrats.

When, to everyone’s surprise, resentment of the Clinton machine crystallized around him, he wound up beating Hillary for the nomination, and found himself riding an out-of-control express train. He rode it to victory, with some help from erratic McCain actions.

But he was right the first time about not being ready for the Oval Office. As president, he seems confused and a bit distant on the issues, leaving the details to congressional Democrats and an ever-growing number of "czars" while he golfs and launches attacks at Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

With the economy tanking (unemployment is much worse after Obama’s deficit-swelling stimulus than Obama’s advisers predicted it would be with no stimulus at all), with the promised post-partisanship dissolving into witch-hunts against hostile media and the promised post-racial America devolving into the awkwardly staged "beer summit," with the "necessary war" in Afghanistan the subject of endless dithering and the promised "smart diplomacy" materializing as a series of awkward missteps by Hillary Clinton, the froth has become a lot less frothy.
Republicans, who were prepared to give Obama the benefit of the doubt a year ago, now can’t stand him. Independents who voted for him are deserting in droves. And Democrats don’t seem that happy either.


http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/audacity_of_nope_cGAqdIdSBSd47F3x0Y1JbI

Don't be suckered by the reverse hype. This was a dreadful night for the president and his party -- and an unmistakable signal that voters are, at the very least, uneasy with Democratic political dominion in the United States.

Obviously, the worst news for the White House came in New Jersey, which has become such a Democratic stronghold over the past decade that nothing -- not a governor's installation of his boyfriend as a homeland-security adviser, not a US senator's sudden withdrawal due to rank corruption, nothing -- could keep the state from going blue.

Now, despite the president's aggressive personal-style campaigning in the last week, New Jersey has thrown an incumbent out of office and installed a Republican in Trenton.


But it's really Virginia that tells the tale. It had been moving steadily into the Democratic column after a generation moving in the other direction. By 2008, it had two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor, and its statehouse had gone Democratic as well. Then Barack Obama took the state a year ago, for the first time since Jimmy Carter's victory 32 years earlier.

Last night Virginia snapped violently to the right, with Republicans winning by an astonishing 18 to 20 points in three statewide races. A result of that sort can't be attributed to the fact that the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Creigh Deeds, was lackluster.

He was, but he also had the overwhelmingly powerful support of The Washington Post, which got him the nomination and then abandoned any pretense of fairness in its news coverage of the race after that. Even so, in the Virginia counties where the Post holds sway, Deeds could barely even hold his own.


http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/deathblow_to_obamacare_YSbuCWMLlCet4mv9b421GO