Podhoretz: Dems Blame their Base
John Podhoretz in the New York Post looks at the White House's strained relationship with the Democratic base:
Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole got up at a campaign rally and promptly lost it: "I wonder sometimes what people are thinking about, or if people are thinking at all," he shouted. "Wake up, America!"
Those words -- an unmistakable harbinger of the humiliation Dole would experience by losing to Bill Clinton in a landslide 12 days later -- seemed to echo painfully like Taylor Swift singing without the benefit of an auto-tune machine in the bewildering comments made over the last couple of days by President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
It's odd, to put it mildly, that the veep chose to go to New Hampshire on Monday and declare that Democrats disappointed with the president should "buck up" and "stop whining."
Vice presidents are at times tasked with issuing direct broadsides against enemies while the top guy stays above the fray. But never before has a vice president served as an attack dog against his own party's voters.
One might have chalked up these wild words to Biden's propensity to speak incautiously. But then Rolling Stone released excerpts of an interview conducted 11 days ago with Obama in which the president said almost exactly the same thing: "People need to shake off this lethargy," he insisted. "People need to buck up."
He went on to offer a prospective denunciation of anyone who'd voted for him in 2008 but might fail to turn out to vote in congressional races in 2010: "It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election."
Even worse, the president was promising he'd judge such "irresponsible" people harshly when it came to their seriousness of purpose: "If people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place."
Obama is talking to voters as though he is their boss, or their principal, or their father. He is not any of those things. He is their employee. And employers don't like it when their employees yell at them -- even if their employees have it right.
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