The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Democrats Discover the SCOAMF Factor

Posted on | September 14, 2011 | 33 Comments

“The Democratic Party’s rare loss of a congressional seat in its urban heartland Tuesday, accompanied by a blowout defeat in a Nevada special election, marked the latest in a string of demoralizing setbacks that threatened to deepen the party’s crisis of confidence and raise concerns about President Barack Obama’s political fortunes. . . . In a high-level campaign conference call Tuesday afternoon, Democratic donors and strategists commiserated over their disappointment in Obama. A source on the call described the mood as ‘awful.’”
— Jonathan Martin, Ben Smith and Jake Sherman, “Twin Defeats Spark Democratic Fears,” Politico

Nothing is sweeter in politics that those occasions when you deliver a victory so shocking in its implications that it sends the opposition into an existential crisis. Tuesday’s special election in New York’s 9th District — echoed by the lesser-noted GOP landslide in Nevada’s 2nd District — was such an occasion and, as the commentariat rushes to analyze and interpret this historic event, conservatives need to avoid liberal efforts to distract from the real message: Barack Obama is a Stuttering Clusterf**k of a Miserable Failure.

Democrats don’t want to admit this, for obvious reasons. Three years ago they interpreted Obama’s election as ratifying their own deepest beliefs — that the Republican ascendancy of 1994-2006 was a political mirage, that the conservative movement’s ability to influence the national discourse was on the wane, and that demographic trends were leading toward a permanent progressive majority. Years of efforts and many millions of dollars expended to attack and discredit conservative voices — the Media Matters/MSNBC onslaught against Fox News, talk radio, Andrew Breitbart, et al. — were designed to suppress criticism of the progressive message. And with Obama’s election in 2008, liberals got their hands on a cudgel that they were eager to wield with bloodthirsty zeal: If you don’t vote Democrat, you’re a racist!

In the 21st-century American socio-political environment, these tactics might very well have put the Republican Party on the road to extinction, if only the newly ascendant Democrats could produce successful and popular policies. Alas, they could not, and the 2010 mid-term GOP landslide — “The Republican Mandate,” a truly historic election — ought to have awakened Democratic leadership to the falsehood of their hopes. But if they ever admitted to themselves that liberalism doesn’t work, they wouldn’t be Democrats any more, so a familiar narrative of denial took hold: Electoral defeat did not actually represent a rejection of Democratic policies, but rather a failure to communicate effectively, a failure exacerbated by corporate-funded right-wing demagoguery exploiting the latent racism that liberals have always known dwells in the American soul.

Liberals seem to think themselves endowed with telepathic powers enabling them to know the real motives of their opponents, yet never imagine that their own motives are apparent to the rest of us. This explains why, more than week before Election Day 2010, Frank Rich didn’t hesitate to preview the Democrats’ self-justifying excuse for defeat — “Stupid Voters Don’t Know Obama Cut Their Taxes!” — prompting me to observe:

This is, evidently, the Great Democrat Myth of 2010, a sequel to “We Didn’t Get Our Message Out” (2004) and “Bush Stole the Election” (2000). Whenever Democrats lose an election, their craving for self-esteem requires that they manufacture a myth to explain it to themselves and to the world. This year, they’re planning ahead!

Explaining every political failure by blaming it on voter ignorance creates an unavoidable problem in explaining your own successes. How, after all, did voters go from abject ignorance in 2004 to dawning enlightenment in 2006 and then onward to the summit of transcendent wisdom in electing Obama in 2008, only to backslide into troglodytic stupidity in 2010?

Liberal apologists are never required to answer such questions. The inherent contradiction therefore goes unresolved and the cognitive dissonance festers, occasionally erupting in bizarre conspiratorial rants about the Koch brothers and Adorno/Hofstadter psycho-politics.

The NY-26 special election in May permitted Democrats a few months’ relapse into a comfortable simulacrum of sanity, cooing to themselves that 2010 was an aberrant anomaly. All they needed to do was to revisit the old “MediScare” tactics, depict Republicans as extremists controlled by greedy corporate interests, and the voting public would resume its upward march to the broad, sunlit uplands of progressive enlightenment.

But . . . SCOAMF.

Perhaps the Democrats’ humiliation in NY-9 was inevitable. Perhaps it was all about the Jews. Perhaps this loss can be blamed on the laughable blunders of Dave “Is That a Toupeé or Just a Bad Comb-Over?” Weprin. As always when Democrats lose, all manner of excuses are being offered by what Andrew Breitbart calls the Democrat-Media Complex.

Fine. Let them delude themselves as they wish. But we who presume to speak for the conservative cause ought to be proclaiming the truth that liberals refuse to confront: Liberalism has once again failed.

Hundreds of billions of dollars in neo-Keynesian stimulus spending and inflationary “quantitative easing” did not restore prosperity. This failure was entirely predictable: “It Won’t Work,” December 2008; “It Still Won’t Work,”  February 2009; “The Fundamentals Still Suck,” May 2009. Yet Democrats had embraced the myth of their own vindication to such an extent that no warnings from conservatives were heeded, no matter how specific:

“The stimulus-and-bailout policies have not addressed the fundamental problems of the economy — namely, an excess of debt and a shortage of capital to spur job creation — while the entitlement trainwreck of Social Security and Medicare looms immediately ahead. By piling on new trillion-dollar deficits, at a time when the recession will result in significant tax revenue shortfalls, the Democrats are steering the economy into a stagflation trap.”

Sixty-nine words written on May Day 20o9, but why should liberals — thinking that Obama’s election had completely discredited free-market arguments —  bother themselves pondering the merits of that prognosis? Why should they bother to read the mini-library of works by Mises, Hayek and Sowell with which I ended that warning?

Paul Krugman and the rest of the neo-Keynesian cargo cult continue to insist that what could not be accomplished with $800 billion in deficit-spending stimulus might yet somehow be accomplished by larger interventions. Obama meanwhile argues that another half-trillion will do the trick. So the man who would cause the planet to heal and the oceans to recede (and pay Peggy Joseph’s mortgage) is now running around the country attempting to hypnotize the masses with his voodoo incantation: “Pass this bill! Pass this bill! Pass this bill!”

A verdict has been rendered, and liberal denials cannot reverse it.

Like the Invisible Hand writing “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” or the raven perched on the bust of Pallas croaking “Nevermore,” the verdict of September 13th is both certain and final:

This is your moment. This is your time. This is your SCOAMF.


Category: Barack Obama, Election, New York

Comments

33 Responses to “Democrats Discover the SCOAMF Factor”

  1. Joe
    September 14th, 2011 @ 7:23 pm

    This is all well and good and we can enjoy pudding and ewoks and all sorts of festivities, but until we defeat Barack Obama in November 2012, take back the Senate, and roll back the looming disaster called Obamacare (and out of control federal spending), we are very much at risk. 

    Obama is beatable but it will not be a cake walk.  We need a good candidate.  A principled one who can explain why we need to change course, explain conservative principles, and who can win over not only conservatives but moderates/independents. 

  2. Steve in TN
    September 14th, 2011 @ 7:28 pm

    “If you love me you will pass this bill!”
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJK7PymvtA&feature=share

  3. Randy G
    September 14th, 2011 @ 7:36 pm

    Clusterfuckery and denial…Ass meet hand.

  4. Peregrine
    September 14th, 2011 @ 7:51 pm

    Truth may not yet have quite had its say (though it appears to be arriving with the subtlety of a runaway freight train), and there are certainly crucial battles to come; but as the lies and myths fall down, I for one have a raging schadenboner.

  5. Anonymous
    September 14th, 2011 @ 7:57 pm

    “Liberals seem to think themselves endowed with telepathic powers enabling them to know the real motives of their opponents”

    Worse.  They believe they possess god-like (little g, they don’t believe in big G) powers that also enable them to delve into the “souls” of all living creatures (fauna and flora).  There’s no contradiction (for them) in believing in souls.  Ancient Egytians believed.  Didn’t the Druids?

    I picture stone altars.  Torches.  The proglodytes gathered around as their head priests, read the entrails of their latest sacrifice (NYT is today’s version).  The “signs” always suggest the same remedies.

    The faithful start chanting:
    Litigate and Regulate.
    Borrow, Tax, and Spend.

  6. MrPaulRevere
    September 14th, 2011 @ 8:01 pm

    Women, minorities and Charles Johnson hardest hit…

  7. Matt Lewis
    September 14th, 2011 @ 8:03 pm

    You’re so wrong, terrorist.  Big-G is everything!

    Government

  8. Michael Smith
    September 14th, 2011 @ 8:15 pm

    Wrote this back in April…

    Why will they protect him in light of what is obvious to rational Americans?

    Because all the chips are riding on him – they went all-in hoping to
    draw to a royal flush, the unbeatable hand. He was the hole card, the
    ace of spades (no pun intended, spades is generally recognized as the
    highest suit and the ace completes the A-K-Q-J-10 royal flush). If Obama
    is recognized as a failure, all that he represents – socialism, big
    government, social programs, Keynesian economics, welfare, destruction
    of corporations, redistribution of wealth, elitist academia, what is
    left of media credibility and above all, liberalism, all go down with
    him.

    http://therionorteline.com/2011/04/30/the-hole-card/

  9. The Hole Card « The Rio Norte Line
    September 14th, 2011 @ 4:19 pm

    […] Stacy McCain has a relevant post here. […]

  10. Dustin
    September 14th, 2011 @ 8:39 pm

    This is right.  Democrats are going to have to face the reality they should have noticed even before the 2010 elections when the Tea Party rallies were really underway.  LGF may have mocked their size (with early morning pictures of rallies taking place a few hours later), but they were pretty damn big, and full of normal folks who really need a powerful reason to go protest.

    Yet some of them NEVER will face reality.  They will conclude, even from the failure of a trillion bucks in stimulus, that it only proves Keynesian stimulus is right, and we needed 1.5 tril or 3 trill or 10 trill.  They would always say that until the day the country collapses.  Actually, they’d say it the next day.

    Because some of these guys are taking a slice of that stimulus and are rotten crooks.  And the others are too obsessed with fear of the GOP borne of derangement that they don’t really care about the truth or even this country.

    We have a long time to go before the election, and it’s going to be uglier than anything we’ve ever seen.  They really went for broke (literally) on democrat policies, and as some realize the game is ending, they are going to loss self control.

  11. Charles Johnson
    September 14th, 2011 @ 8:39 pm

    Republicans are being very quick to trumpet this as a sign of trouble for Barack Obama: Bob Turner Wins Anthony Weiner’s House Seat.But despite the right wing crowing, the reason why Turner won has little to do with the President:Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said the district’s large concentration of Orthodox Jews made it unusual and meant the race had few national ramifications.

    “In this district, there is a large number of people who went to the polls tonight who didn’t support the president to begin with and don’t support Democrats — and it’s nothing more than that,” she said in a telephone interview.
    And of course, there’s an obvious backlash against Anthony Weiner after his embarrassing escapades.But I really don’t understand this kind of thinking:“I am a registered Democrat, I have always been a registered Democrat, I come from a family of Democrats — and I hate to say this, I voted Republican,” said Linda Goldberg, 61, after casting her ballot in Queens. “I need to send a message to the president that he’s not doing a very good job. Our economy is horrible. People are scared.”
    The people she should be “sending messages” to are the Republicans who obstruct and attack everything Obama does. It’s beyond me how anyone thinks this kind of “message” does anything but further strengthen the deranged Republican Party.

  12. Bob Belvedere
    September 14th, 2011 @ 9:01 pm

    Dead solid perfect, Joe…and don’t forget revoking the tens of thousands of regulations and those damn Executive Orders!

  13. Anonymous
    September 14th, 2011 @ 9:02 pm

    One day that particular downfall video will get old, but not today.

    What I find remarkable is that the NYT possessed enough honesty to run that headline. Despite losing the NYT do they lose heart, read the writing on the wall, nyet, never say die, but instead they trudge on believing in there own mythology. They have a New Electoral Plan (NEP)! CREEP and it’s Cheka is recruiting now! Spy on your neighbors report the scurrilous misleading attacks against Dear Leader.

    http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/09/14/attaaaack-waaaaatch/

  14. Peregrine
    September 14th, 2011 @ 9:07 pm

    Go figure.  All they have left is the flush.

    Though I have to say, hardcore libs have been rejecting him for years already as not nearly lefty enough.

  15. Anonymous
    September 14th, 2011 @ 9:09 pm

    That’s SOB, racist, terrorist.  to you.  I’ve worked hard for my nicks.  OK, it’s better than “Mam”.  🙂

  16. Video: The Keynesian Twilight Zone Starring Barack Obama « Nice Deb
    September 14th, 2011 @ 5:14 pm

    […] Other McCain: Democrats Discover the SCOAMF Factor: Paul Krugman and the rest of the neo-Keynesian cargo cult continue to insist that what could not […]

  17. Anonymous
    September 14th, 2011 @ 9:29 pm

    Just remember – Flush twice.  It’s a long way to the Dim-Union-Trial lawyer-corrupticrat/bureauocrat-MFM dining hall.  No silly, it’s not what they feed on.  It’s what they feed us.

  18. Tom Callow
    September 14th, 2011 @ 9:44 pm

    Twitter is melted, 5:40 Eastern can not get to it, all other sites ok

  19. McGehee
    September 14th, 2011 @ 10:24 pm

    I’d offer you a tissue but I paid for them, they’re mine, and you can’t have any.

  20. McGehee
    September 14th, 2011 @ 10:25 pm

    Barack Obama is a Stuttering Clusterf**k of a Miserable Failure.

    The perfect product of his party.

  21. Anonymous
    September 14th, 2011 @ 11:05 pm

    That’s right, blame it on the JOOOOOOOOS! That always works!

  22. Christy Waters
    September 14th, 2011 @ 11:16 pm

    Ahhhh, A more accurate description, one would not be able to find for Dear Leader. Wordsmiths rejoice!

  23. Anonymous
    September 14th, 2011 @ 11:33 pm

    The Left always does.

    Anti-Semitism is the last refuge of the intellectually bereft.

  24. DaveO
    September 15th, 2011 @ 12:13 am

    There’s more: an audit trail.

    At some point someone is going to ask who and where all the TARP/Porkulus/Obamacare money went. GOP needs to play this question very silent as it is the only thing that will motivate Obama’s base to get out there.

  25. AngelaTC
    September 15th, 2011 @ 12:39 am

    Obama might well lose, but the rest of it? 4 years from now, some liberal blogger will be writing, “In the 21st-century American socio-political environment, these tactics might very well have put the Democratic Party on the road to extinction, if only the newly ascendant Republicans could produce smaller government and popular policies.” Like that’s gonna happen. 

    Before the election rhetoric started, the GOP was already  making noise about fixing Obamacare instead of repealing it.  Either the GOP voters are going to end up looking like Charlie Brown believing that Lucy isn’t going to yank the football away this time, or they’ll simply end up defending Obamacare as an essential and popular entitlement, much like they now vehemently defend and protect Social Security and Medicare. 

  26. Anonymous
    September 15th, 2011 @ 1:01 am

    Every potential GOP candidate has sworn to repeal that bill, none of them are stupid enough to squander reelection in their first week in office even if congress is.

  27. Adjoran
    September 15th, 2011 @ 5:42 am

    The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.

  28. MrPaulRevere
    September 15th, 2011 @ 7:29 am

    Apologies to the memory of the late and most of the time great Joe Sobran.

  29. Anonymous
    September 15th, 2011 @ 9:57 am

    #attackwatch is the gift that keeps on giving…to conservatives. 🙂

  30. AngelaTC
    September 15th, 2011 @ 12:28 pm

    Sure, but that’s the core of the issue.  They can swear to repeal it, but they’ll never get it through Congress.  As soon as the election is sealed, we’ll start hearing that some parts of Obamacare are good, and there’s a need to preserve key elements……

    Like most of the Contract With America, and Bush’s Social Security reform, the GOP will put out a weak effort, say “Oh well, we didn’t have the votes,” and get back to collecting their checks from the insurance company lobbyists. Which means that the GOP will either have to radically reform from the inside, or embrace the policy as the latest definition of conservatism. 

  31. Anonymous
    September 15th, 2011 @ 4:23 pm

     I love the word ‘proglodytes’.

  32. Anonymous
    September 15th, 2011 @ 5:24 pm

    If that’s the case it would certainly lead to the destruction of the Republican party.

  33. Divin’ for The King Penguin 15 September 11 | adeliemanchot
    September 15th, 2011 @ 3:36 pm

    […] Democrats Discover the SCOAMF Factor Nothing is sweeter in politics that those occasions when you deliver a victory so shocking in its implications that it sends the opposition into an existential crisis. Tuesday’s special election in New York’s 9th District — echoed by the lesser-noted GOP landslide in Nevada’s 2nd District — was such an occasion and, as the commentariat rushes to analyze and interpret this historic event, conservatives need to avoid liberal efforts to distract from the real message: Barack Obama is a Stuttering Clusterf**k of a Miserable Failure. […]