Barack Obama, Republican?

After suffering an historic repudiation in the last election, the Democrats are in a tizzy. Should they move further left? Should they just throw tantrums? Should they block everything? What would Barack do? Oh oh, Barack’s moved to the right, further right than even the RINOs. What’s worse, he keeps undercutting the Democrats. What is going on?

When the Democrats got blasted in 1994, Bill Clinton realized pretty quickly that he had to move to the center to survive. The strategy was called triangulation. And what it entailed was to let the Republicans have their way, and then claim ownership of their best ideas. Occasionally, Clinton would also criticize his own side, but rarely in stark terms and he never undercut them. Essentially, he became everyone’s friend.

Obama is now faced with a similar dilemma and he’s opted for triangulation as well. But Obama isn’t like Clinton, and his triangulation isn’t the benign sort Clinton tried. His version of triangulation involves undercutting the Democrats over and over. Indeed, things are getting ugly!

The first obvious example of triangulation occurred right after the election when Obama endorsed the idea of extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich. The Democrats intended to play hardball on that issue and were already staking out a typically nasty class-warfare position, when Obama suddenly announced he would agree to extend the tax cuts in exchange for more stimulus spending. The Democrats were beside themselves with rage. “He’s undercut us!” they scream, along with a few profanities. In fact, the House held a closed-door meeting of Democrats where they took turns swearing at, blasting, and lampooning Obama.

The next instance of triangulation involved Obama’s retention of Bill Daley as his replacement for “center-right” (**chuckle, chuckle**) Rahm Emanuel. The selection of Daley, a noted non-leftist Democrat with massive Wall Street ties, was seen as an attempt by Obama to get back into the good graces of big business. The Democrats were despondent.

Then came the Tucson shooting. As the left wound up their hate machine and began calling for the blood of their critics, all under the guise of whining about the atmosphere of hate their critics created, Obama came along and told everyone that rhetoric had nothing to do with the shooting. Once again, he cut the legs out from beneath them and there were furious.

Now, Obama has stolen the idea of Paul Ryan and Darrell Issa to go through the Code of Federal Regulations (“CFR”) and identify for removal any regulations that are hindering economic growth. What makes this all the more interesting is that (1) this has the potential of crippling years of Democratic legislative victories, (2) doing this won’t stop Issa from embarrassing the Democrats through his hearings, where businessmen will come and blast the regulations they’ve put in place, and (3) this provides a tremendous amount of cover for the Republicans from Democratic attacks that they’re undermining government. Wow!

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Obama has suddenly become a Republican. There were political reasons for each of these acts. The Republicans simply weren’t going to cave in on the tax issue, so why not get what he could and declare victory. Obama needs to reconnect with Wall Street to finance his billion dollar campaign, and Daley is the man to do that. By the time he spoke about Tucson, it was increasingly clear the shooter was a leftist and a backlash was growing against the left’s attacks. And Obama knows that economic growth is his only chance to get re-elected. So these decisions were political, not principled.

But in each instance, Obama could have achieved his goals without so ruthlessly cutting the legs out from under the Democrats. So why do it this way? I think the answer lies in the difference between Obama and Clinton. Clinton was a master at following the crowd. He had no principles whatsoever, so he stuck his finger into the wind and went where it led him. But more importantly, he was savvy enough to chart the safest course to the front of the bandwagon for himself and his friends.

Obama lacks Bill Clinton’s savvy, and he is not and never has been a team player. So now that he finds he need to chase a few bandwagons to get re-elected, he doesn’t even bother thinking about his friends and allies. It’s every man for himself. And that’s why the Democrats keep finding themselves stranded as Obama runs off and shells the land he had led them to.

So this has led Obama to tax cuts, deregulation, spending cuts, and stopping attempts to stifle gun rights and free speech. If Obama keeps this up, he may actually end up being one of the better Republican presidents before his term is over. . . and what’s left of the Democratic Party is going to hate him.

Finally, let me throw this out there for you to chew on. Putting aside our natural and well-earned cynicism for dealing with Democrats, it's also just possible that Obama's change of heart on these issues is an indication that he's grown wiser and he's starting to understand that the destructive class-warfare preached by the Democratic Party is no way to run a country? Wouldn't that be interesting?