RICH BAEHR: THE OBAMA NARRATIVE COLLAPSES
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=10081
The Obama narrative collapses
Several sophisticated polling analysts, including Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com and Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium are hinting that Republican prospects for the fall midterm U.S. congressional elections are improving. This is occurring despite significant advantages in money raised and spent by Democratic candidates and the various campaign organizations that support their candidates as compared to Republican candidates and their support organizations.
One key issue that seems to have bolstered Republican prospects is the collapse of support for the president’s immigration reform proposal or proposed executive action on immigration. President Barack Obama promised various lobbying groups for immigration reform that he would take action independent of Congress, as he has in so many other areas, including allowing 5 million to 6 million illegal immigrants (about half the total number in the country) to remain in the United States, without fear of prosecution or deportation, and with the ability to work legally. While presidents have some discretion in implementation of laws passed by Congress, the proposed changes made even Democrats nervous, enough so that the president decided he would delay his action until after the November elections. Why get voters even angrier at him, so that even more Democratic candidates for House and Senate seats go down to defeat?
The president has always been far more concerned with electoral politics than immigration reform itself (never introducing the subject in his first term in office) and when Congress did not act, the president showed his disdain for the constitution’s separation of powers with his promised executive action. It is supposed to be Congress that legislates, the president who executes the law (and gets to approve or veto acts of Congress), and the Supreme Court that interprets the consistency of law or executive actions with the constitution.
The second key policy issue on which the bottom has fallen out from under the president is his management of foreign affairs. The two subjects are in fact related for many Americans.
Obama’s current approval scores are at the lowest levels of his presidency. But rather than reflect on why he has lost the support of the majority of the American population, the president seems committed to doubling down in his last years in office — convinced that his way, as always, is the only way. The president’s speech to the United Nations this week was further evidence that Obama seems immune to the concept of reflection and is unable to acknowledge failure or counterproductive policy decisions.
As several commentators have noted, as in pretty much every speech to the U.N. or other international bodies or foreign audiences, Obama made sure to:
Call on Israel to be more reflective and thoughtful, and to do more to achieve a two state solution to which America was committed
Avoid criticism of the Palestinian Authority, which obviously has no responsibility for the failure to achieve peace and a two-state solution
Praise the religion of Islam as peaceful, and argue that the dozens of bloody conflicts involving Muslims around the world were an aberration, and committed by those who did not understand the real nature of Islam. In prior centuries, it was the Christian world that was the focal point for many conflicts, so for Obama what we are seeing now with Islamic violence is nothing more than a few bad weeks (months, years, decades, centuries?) for a religion that is, in fact, something very healthy and positive.
Criticize his own country for all its historical misdeeds, as well as its own divisive conflicts, evidenced most recently by the shooting by a policeman of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, an action that may well have been a justified action in self-defense. In a tragic irony, Muslim beheaders may now be in Ferguson.
Point to the really serious threats the world is facing — led of course by global warming or as it is now called — climate change, and this month, Ebola.
Call on large nations to stop bullying small nations
Persuade Iran that a deal on its nuclear program was possible if it were willing to compromise, and if it wasn’t, not to worry, for the West will keep trying, and keep sweetening the deal.
The president is a redistributionist. That word defines both his domestic and foreign policies. The rich are too rich, the United States is too rich and too militarily strong compared to others, the Western nations need to sacrifice more to help the poorer nations (including helping them survive climate change), and governments needs to grow ever larger so that they can do more to help those left with the short end of the stick. Always, take from A to give to B. That is what is fair. Equality and justice requires equal results and shares of the pie. Equality of opportunity is not enough since it ignores inherent privilege that exists for some.
That worldview, in addition to a need to push up Hispanic turnout in the 2012 presidential election (then the cause was amnesty for the so-called “dreamers”) and for the 2014 midterm elections, was part of the reason the president decided to press for congressional action on immigration, and failing that, to do it through executive actions. But the president seems to have guessed wrong on how the American people would react to the pictures and stories of a flood of young impoverished immigrants coming across the border from Mexico — many of them from Central America, many of them ill, and some apparently from other areas, including people fleeing from conflict areas across the oceans. This has occurred at a time when the Ebola outbreak in several African countries is front page news, unusually vicious Islamic jihadists are decapitating American and European prisoners, and the possibility of homegrown jihadists either fighting abroad or acting up in the United States appears more real.
This week, a Muslim in Oklahoma, Alton Nolen, decapitated a former co-worker, apparently because he had lost his job, or was unhappy with the failure of his co-workers to sign up to join Islam’s fighting forces with sufficient speed or enthusiasm. So far, the authorities are characterizing this latest attack as “workplace violence” just as they did the massacre at Fort Hood perpetrated by Major Nidal Hassan several years back in 2009. Under no circumstances will the president or his Justice Department feed any concerns that maybe, just maybe, radical Islam is a real problem, for America, Western nations, and most of all, the Islamic world.
The president put his faith from the start of his administration in what he considered good Islamists, like the Muslim Brotherhood, to help in the fight against the bad jihadist Islamists, like al-Qaida. This explains why the administration helped undermine then-President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, welcomed the Muslim Brotherhood as its successor, and made its displeasure clear with the new government led by President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. It explains the administration’s seeming love affair with Recip Erdogan’s anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, pro-Hamas, pro-Muslim Brotherhood government in Turkey, with similar canoodling offered to its ally, Qatar, the funder for pretty much every fundamentalist anti-Western Sunni government or terror group in the region.
The emergence of the Islamic State group has been a huge embarrassment since it has emphasized how the killing of Osama bin Laden did not contribute to any easing of the long-term jihadist threat. The continuing or growing disaster in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya, among other countries in the region, has put the lie to the Obama administration’s attempt to paint a rosy picture of withdrawal, disengagement, and now peace with many lives spared since the threats were largely gone. The administration’s intensely hostile reaction to a picture on the cover of Economist magazine is telling as to the White House’s sensitivity to the complete erosion of the primary Obama narrative that helped get him elected — “I am not George W. Bush, and that is a good thing.” Obama in Bush’s “mission accomplished” flight suit is about as far as the Obama narrative can sink.
Obama will be gone in a bit over two years, but he has left his mark. One way is through legal immigration, which has greatly increased the number of new Americans, including a much larger share of Muslims among them — both through refugee status and family reunification programs. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iraq have been among the countries supplying many more legal immigrants. These are countries where residents do not fit anyone’s definition of “moderate Islam” on display. The American Muslim population has grown by over 50 percent in 10 years, and may double in the next 10 years.
It may soon be the case that the immigration reform favored by an increasing number of Americans will be to shut the door, or at least change the allocation formulas. It does not take a high percentage of the Muslim population, now over 3 million in America, to create havoc. The Justice Department does not want to profile Muslims in mosques and the administration is clinging to its “religion of peace” rhetoric. The threats rise, and the administration is concerned primarily with not being perceived as Islamophobic.
A few beheadings in Iraq galvanized an American population largely uninterested in foreign conflicts, to shift quickly and support military action against Islamic State. The president was forced to give up golf for a bit and pay attention. What type of disaster needs to occur on the homefront before the country begins to understand that its borders are now wide open to those who want to come here for the right reason and also those who want to come here for the wrong ones?
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