Massachusetts: Obama’s high-risk, high-reward strategy

by Rossputin | 6:52 am, January 18, 2010 | Comments Off

Yesterday, Barack Obama went to Boston to stump for Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley.  While I’m skeptical that an appearance by an unpopular president will make the difference in this race, in a close enough race in a blue enough state, it’s not out of the question.

As Charlie Cook notes, “Last minute Democratic attacks on Brown have driven his negatives up some and slightly diminished the incredible intensity of support that Brown enjoyed, but it looks more likely than not to hold.”

The stakes here are enormous, not just for Barack Obama’s far-left agenda, but for the president himself.

If Coakley wins, it will be an enormous victory for Obama as he (or rather his proxies) will claim that he is still popular and that he can be a shield against electoral challenges against Democrats in close races. The Administration will try to use this to arm-twist wavering members of Congress not only on health care but on other issues where they squawk about how it might hurt them at home.  To be sure, Obama will feign false modesty but Nancy Pelosi will do the bragging for him.

If, however, Brown wins, the opposite happens:  Democratics in Congres will realize that the strong coattails which Barack Obama had just over a hear ago have been cut off. Yes, Obama’s defenders will simply say that Coakley ran a bad campaign, which she surely has. But members of Congress, particularly in the House, will have no faith that the Administration is anything but a huge political negative in their next elections.   And they will be less reticent to vote with the wishes of and in the best interests of their constituents.  (Only a minority of members of Congress live in districts so liberal that they support ObamaCare.)

By going to Massachusetts, Obama risks not only losing his health care “reform” dreams but also every other aggressive piece of his agenda.  His deciding to campaign there has made a Scott Brown victory that much more important.

One last point before I head to the airport:  Obama’s rhetoric in Boston was not just highly partisan, but highly anti-banking, with him saying “The bankers don’t need another vote in Washington.”  I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: The banks deserve this.  Their idiotic support of Barack Obama, their massive campaign contributions to Democrats, were far more naive than a group like that should be.  Barack Obama is a dyed-in-the-wool socialist/fascist. It’s been clear since we first learned about him, clear from his associations and his own spoken and written words.  Nobody should be surprised that he is willing to demonize the entire financial system. It’s not just for his personal gain. It’s straight out of the playbook of his idol, Saul Alinsky, whose motivation was to make people feel so desperate and so hopeless that they would turn to government for the solution to all their problems.  The problem for Obama-linsky is that such an approach is distinctly anti-American, especially outside the low-income (and ironically also the high-income elites) in America’s big cities.  Given that Barack Obama grew up surrounded by anti-capitalist haters of America, he’s probably greatly surprised how much push-back there is against his health care plan. Bankers should feel no such surprise at Obama’s ferocity in turning on them.

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