Six months into the Obama administration and the mass hypnosis that hit most Americans is beginning to wear off. They are waking up as if from a collective coma to see that what they believed -- or, more pointedly, hoped for -- was not to be. Obama, who ran on a vague promise of hope and change, has lived up to at least half that mantra. He has changed the United States, but not for the better.
He has taken the country on a radical shift away from its roots. We are tacking to the left increasing government spending to a previously unseen extent and putting the burden squarely on the backs of a few. He has revved up the language of class warfare and pitted Americans against each other. The "wealthy" are the new enemy and the government the only true salvation.
He has turned our foreign policy on its head, embracing our enemies while distancing us from our allies. America hasn't looked so weak internationally since Jimmy Carter. He has sided with Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega in the Honduran conflict despite the fact that the military was well within its constitutional rights to remove the President at the request of their Supreme Court. Yet in Iran, he stayed out of the conflict over the disputed election for a number of days lest he seem to be opposing the incumbent Ahmadinejad (and supporting free elections and democracy).
He and the Democrats in Congress are pushing for the U.S. to agree to cap and trade despite the fact that: other industrializing countries will not be bound, it will severely damage U.S. businesses, and dramatically increase energy costs to the average American.
Recent polling has shown that, now that we have seen the initial results of an Obama administration, reality has not matched expectations. Obama's approval rating has fallen from an astronomical 76% back in February to 61% late last month, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey. That is about where George Bush's approval rating was six months into his first term.
The poll also showed a ten percentage point drop in those who say Obama "a strong and decisive leader," a nine point drop in those who see Obama as tough enough to handle a crisis, a seven point drop in those who think Obama generally agrees with them on issues they care about, and an eleven point drop in those who say he has a "clear plan" for solving the nation's problems.
CNN Polling Director Keating Holland evaluates the results thusly: "Obama's stand on the issues and his plans for the future appear to be his biggest weakness." In other words, Obama is still widely popular personally, but popularity for his positions and strategies is plummeting.
But this cannot be all that surprising. Obama's entire campaign was based on the cult of personality, and was never about moving the country away from its core values. We are basically a moderate, even slightly right-leaning, country. We will not in the long run support a president who wants to move us to the left and Americans may be on their way towards full recovery from the celebrity hysteria that allowed us to choose an untested, inexperienced but highly telegenic personality as the leader of the free world.
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