Why Obama Doubles Down: Conservative Views

“The essence of contemporary liberalism is the illiberal conviction that Americans, in their comprehensive incompetence, need minute supervision by government, which liberals believe exists to spare citizens the torture of thinking and choosing.”

--George Will

Liberals, as we have seen, believe Obama—Democrats in general—know what’s best for the American people. Conservatives mostly agree liberals think they think better, and therefore are entitled to rule over the rest of us. Conservatives, however, don’t agree liberals should run the show. Liberals and Democrats, after all, live in a country where “the rest of us” actually have the votes.

Jay Cost, a “RealClearPolitics” numbers cruncher:

[Democrats] will lose [their] majority because of President Obama's divisiveness. We have seen hints of things to come with GOP victories in Virginia, New Jersey, and most recently Massachusetts—as the difference-making voters for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008 turned to the Grand Old Party. Either Mr. Obama and his advisors are blind to this, or they don't care, or both. I think it's both; call it willful blindness, a self-serving belief that 2008 was indeed a liberal realignment, and that the numbers will eventually reflect it. . . the 44th President. . .has made pretty clear his belief that, when he and the people disagree, the people must be in error.

Commentary's Peter Wehner on Obama’s “State of the Union” speech:

What we are seeing play out on a very large stage, it seems, is a man of extraordinary self-regard having to deal with punishing political set-backs, with the fact that his high hopes have come crashing down around him. The nation has turned against his agenda. They are turning against his party. And they are tiring of him as well. This is something he cannot seem to process. So the president marches ahead, pretending up is down and east is west, embracing an agenda the country has rejected and that is doing terrible damage to his own party.

The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan talked to:

a Republican who bears [Obama] no animus. Why, I asked . . ., did the president not move decisively to the political center? Because he is more "intellectually honest" than that, he said. "I don't think he can do a Bill Clinton pivot, because he's not a pragmatist, he's an ideologue. He's a community organizer. He mixes the discrimination he felt as a young man with the hardship so many feel in this country, and he wants to change it and the way to change that is government programs and not opportunity."

Mark Steyn, in the conservative Washington Times:

Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland because the rules are known to all parties. You don't go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state's whims happen to be that morning. That's why Mr. Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new employee? The . . . [Obama] message is clear: more Washington, more regulation, more spending and no rules [emphasis added].

Jeffrey H. Anderson, Weekly Standard writer:

“Incremental gains” is a phrase foreign to [Obama’s] vocabulary, as is the notion of having Washington solve problems by getting out of the way and unleashing the initiative of individuals or communities. Rather, problems must be solved all at once, [an] approach. . . largely divorced from practical considerations or. . . from compromise. [His] is the approach of the theoretician, not the practitioner; of the academic, not the statesman; of one who prefers to decree or to gain acquiescence, rather than to negotiate or to persuade.

[As Obama said to Katie Couric,] “I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, you know, academically approved approach to health care [that] didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that’s not how it works in our democracy.”

Quin Hillyer, senior editor of the conservative American Spectator:

The American republic was designed to give a minority a way to slow down major changes buoyed by popular passions. It was not designed to give a minority the power to implement major changes against popular passions. The Obamites are doing the latter. They are turning American checks and balances on their heads. They are using temporary parliamentary advantages for a permanent power grab. The Obamites are dictating to Americans rather than representing them. Revolutionizing, not just evolving. Ruling, not serving.

Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson:

Obama's greatest achievement during the 2008 campaign was to combine soothing reassurance with a message of transformational change in a single political persona. Governing, however, has required a choice between reassurance and transformation. Because Obama has chosen liberal transformation, the political outcomes are now limited: He can appear radical in victory or weak in defeat.

A kinder view of Obama, from New York Times in-house conservative David Brooks:

Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. . .[H]e always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.