Former presidential speech writer and political talking head Peggy Noonan, I think it is fair to say, has been among the truly loyal conservative opposition to the president, that is, she has been more than willing to support him and give his policies a fair chance.
But she doesn’t like what she sees in the president and his allies’ response to the public’s opposition to Obamacare, calling the response of The Establishment to people who dare speak truth to power “desperate” and a ”crude and aggressive...attack.” From her column, “You Are Terrifying Us:”
All of this is unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative. They are mocking and menacing concerned citizens. This only makes a hot situation hotter. Is this what the president wants? It couldn’t be. But then in an odd way he sometimes seems not to have fully absorbed the awesome stature of his office. You really, if you’re president, can’t call an individual American stupid, if for no other reason than that you’re too big. You cannot allow your allies to call people protesting a health-care plan “extremists” and “right wing,” or bought, or Nazi-like, either. They’re citizens. They’re concerned. They deserve respect.
The Democrats should not be attacking, they should be attempting to persuade, to argue for their case. After all, they have the big mic. Which is what the presidency is, the big mic.
I never believed in candidate Obama’s promise to be a bridge builder and ”post partisan” healer of political and cultural divides in the country. I considered him then, and do even more now, a committed ideologue who knows how to talk moderate (although that gift seems to be lacking these days). I think that many of his major appointments, such as Cass “Let Animals Sue” Sunstein, Ezekiel “Dismantle Hippocratic Medicine” Emanuel, and John “Let Trees Sue as We Impose Eugenics” Holdren, his repeal of the Bush “alternative” pluripotent stem cell funding order—which was the very bridge building policy Obama said he wanted—and now, his surrogates’ demonizing opponents of Obamacare, all confirm my lowest expectations.
Be that as it may, Noonan has some good advice:
The president should call in his troops and his Congress and announce a rethinking. There are too many different bills, they’re all a thousand pages long, no one has time to read them, no one knows what’s going to be in the final one, the public is agitated, the nation’s in crisis, the timing is wrong, we’ll turn to it again—but not now. We’ll take a little longer, ponder every aspect, and make clear every complication.
You know what would happen if he did this? His numbers would go up. Even Congress’s would. Because they’d look responsive, deliberative and even wise. Discretion is the better part of valor
But that would require Obama to really care about what people who don ‘t share his ideology think. He doesn’t, and so he won’t back off, unless absolutely forced, because he is driven by implacable belief.
