In response to the excellent article below, one thing I will never be able to understand about Obama, is that in a time of crisis level unemployment, and terrorism, Obama’s determination to leave our borders open and existing laws against illegals in our jobs, unenforced. Only Obama’s banksters donors have done better under his administration than ILLEGALS!
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Whatever the outcome of today's election, this much is clear: It will be a long time before Americans ever again decide that the leadership of the nation should go to a legislator of negligible experience—with a voting record, as state and U.S. senator, consisting largely of "present," and an election platform based on glowing promises of transcendence.
OBAMA THE PERFORMER
In the nearly 24 months since Mr. Obama's election, popular enthusiasm for him has gone the way of his famous speeches—lyrical, inspired and unburdened by the weight of concrete thought.
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But it was about far more than health-care reform, or joblessness, or the great ideological divide between the president and the rest of the country. It was about an accumulation of facts quietly taken in that told Americans that the man they had sent to the White House had neither the character or the capacity to lead the country.
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But it was about far more than health-care reform, or joblessness, or the great ideological divide between the president and the rest of the country. It was about an accumulation of facts quietly taken in that told Americans that the man they had sent to the White House had neither the character or the capacity to lead the country.
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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Why Obama Is No Roosevelt
Roosevelt: 'Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst without flinching and losing heart.' Obama: We don't 'always think clearly when we're scared.'
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
Whatever the outcome of today's election, this much is clear: It will be a long time before Americans ever again decide that the leadership of the nation should go to a legislator of negligible experience—with a voting record, as state and U.S. senator, consisting largely of "present," and an election platform based on glowing promises of transcendence. A platform vowing, unforgettably, to restore us—a country lost to arrogance and crimes against humanity—to a place of respect in the world.
Deputy editor Daniel Henninger, editorial board member Matthew Kaminski, and WSJ.com columnist John Fund analyze tomorrow's referendum on Obama-Pelosi governance.
We would win back our allies who, so far as we knew, hadn't been lost anywhere. Though once Mr. Obama was elected and began dissing them with returned Churchill busts and airy claims of ignorance about the existence of any special relationship between the United States and Great Britain, the British, at least, have been feeling less like pals of old.
In the nearly 24 months since Mr. Obama's election, popular enthusiasm for him has gone the way of his famous speeches—lyrical, inspired and unburdened by the weight of concrete thought.
About the ingratitude of Democratic voters the president brooded in a September Rolling Stone interview. "If people now want to take their ball and go home," he declared, "that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place." His vice president, Joe Biden, had a few days earlier contributed his own distinctive effort to seduce Democrats back to the fold by telling them to "stop whining."
The results of this charm campaign remain to be seen. What's clear now is that we've heard quite enough about the "angry electorate"—a peculiarly reductive view of citizens who've managed to read all the signs and detect an administration they were not prepared to live with.
Nothing wakened their instincts more than the administration's insistence on its health-care bill—its whiff of totalitarian will, its secretiveness, its display of cold assurance that the new president's social agenda trumped everything.
But it was about far more than health-care reform, or joblessness, or the great ideological divide between the president and the rest of the country. It was about an accumulation of facts quietly taken in that told Americans that the man they had sent to the White House had neither the character or the capacity to lead the country.
Their president was the toast of Europe, masterful before the adoring crowds—but one who had remarkably soon proved unable to inspire, in citizens at home, any belief that he was a leader they could trust. Or one who trusted them or their instincts. His Democratic voters were unhappy? They, and their limited capacities, were to blame.
These are conspicuous breaks in the armor of civility and charm that candidate Obama once showed—and those breaks are multiplying.
At a Democratic fund-raiser a few weeks ago, the president noted, in explanation for the Democrats' lack of enthusiasm, that facts and science and argument aren't winning the day because "we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared." The suggestion was clear: The Democrats' growing resistance to his policies was a product of the public's lack of intellectual capacity and their fears.
Decades ago another president directly addressed Americans in a time of far greater peril. "Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst without flinching and losing heart," Franklin Roosevelt told his national audience. The occasion was a fireside chat delivered Feb. 23, 1942. No radio address then or since has ever imparted a presidential message so remarkable in its detail, complexity and faith in its audience.
It was delivered just a few months after Pearl Harbor, a time when the Allied cause looked bleakest. It would be known to history as "The Map Speech." The president had asked Americans to have a map at hand, "to follow with me the references I shall make to the world- encircling battle lines of this war." He took them through those lines, the status of battles around the globe, the enemy's objectives, centers of raw material and far more. By the time they had finished poring over their maps with him they had had a considerable education.
It is impossible to imagine what might have been the effect if the current president, who is regularly compared to FDR—always a source of amazement—had tried anything like a detailed address explaining, say, the new health-care bill. Though this would have required knowledge of what was actually in the bill (a likely problem) and a readiness to share that news (an even greater one).
Election Night at Opinion Journal
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Despite the ongoing work of legions grinding out endless new and improved proofs that FDR was a despoiler of democracy and our economic system, it is worth remembering the reason virtually all serious historians rank him among the top three of our greatest presidents.
Franklin Roosevelt led the nation through 12 years begun in incomparable national misery virtually to the end of the war. When he died, an anguished country mourned as it had not done since the death of Lincoln. Americans trusted him. The story is told of a man found weeping when Roosevelt's funeral train went past, who was asked if he had known the president. "I didn't know him," he replied. "But he knew me."
The times are now vastly different—no one expects a candidate with the powers of an FDR these days. But the requirements of leadership don't change. Despite charm and intellect, Americans have never been able to see in Mr. Obama a president who spoke to them and for them. He has been their lecturer-in-chief, a planner of programs for his vision of a new and progressive society.
Plenty of suggestions, none of them feasible, are in the air now about how he can reposition himself for 2012, and move to the center. Mr. Obama is who he is: a man of deep-dyed ideological inclinations, with a persona to match. And that isn't going away.
The Democrats may not take a complete battering in the current contest, but there is no doubt of the problems ahead. This election has everything to do with the man in the White House about whom Americans have lost their illusions. Illusions matter. Their loss is irrecoverable.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
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Voters send message to Democrats: We've had enough
By Steven Thomma
WASHINGTON — Two years ago, Barack Obama promised change.
Tuesday, the voters made a change of their own.
In a tidal wave of anger and anxiety, they voted President Barack Obama's Democrats out of office from coast to coast, sweeping them out of power in the House of Representatives and slashing their once near-invincible numbers in the Senate.
Democrats succeeded in holding a narrow Senate majority.
The vote changed the balance of power in Washington, slammed the brakes on Obama's agenda and ignited anew the central question of what the country wants from its government. It also reopened debate over whether either major political party is anywhere near forging a durable majority coalition.
One passionate phenomenon more than any other colored the politics of 2010 — the Tea Party grassroots rebellion, aimed first at establishment Republicans, then at the Democrats who controlled Washington until Tuesday. Tea Party-backed Senate candidates won in Florida and Kentucky — holding those seats for the GOP — but fell short in Delaware, where Republicans hoped to pick up the seat once held by Vice President Joe Biden.
Ultimately, though, Tuesday's vote was most about Obama, and about the country that sent him to the White House with great hopes, then watched in mounting frustration as unemployment increased despite his massive expansion of government spending and debt.
"This president has overpromised and underdelivered. People expected more change than they got," said Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "Americans are trying to issue a midterm correction to Obama, to nudge him back to the middle, where they thought he was when they elected him. They're surprised he's as liberal as he's been."
Most presidential parties lose seats in the House of Representatives in the president's first midterm election; since 1960, the average loss has been 22.6 seats.
Over the past 80 years, only two presidents have seen their party gain House seats in their first midterm elections — Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 and George W. Bush in 2002. Each had unusual circumstances — voters rallied to FDR's Democrats as he marshaled the federal government to fight the Great Depression and to Bush's Republicans in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
However, the wholesale rejection of Obama's party Tuesday was deeper and more emphatic than average.
Why? One key reason is the economy. Although it's rebounded weakly from its collapse, the recovery has been painfully slow, and unemployment remains high at 9.6 percent.
For voters, the economy eclipsed all other issues Tuesday, according to exit polls; more than 80 percent of voters said they're worried about the country's direction and about half said they think that Obama's policies are hurting the country.
"We need change in a conservative way. Stop the spending and stop the taxes," said Olivia Quintana, 46, a financial analyst voting in West Kendall, Fla.
Any president should expect to be punished in a bad economy. Facing his first midterm elections during the recession of 1982, Ronald Reagan's Republican Party lost 26 House seats.
"If the unemployment rate were 6 percent, we wouldn't be having this conversation today," said Lee Miringoff, the director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Obama also overpromised, encouraged by an often enthusiastic news media that greeted his candidacy and election with comparisons to Abraham Lincoln and FDR. The self-proclaimed apostle of "hope" and "change" set himself up to disappoint voters.
Expectations were great.
He said, for example, that his $814 billion stimulus package would keep unemployment from topping 8 percent. It quickly topped 10 percent and remains near there.
He promised to change how Washington works, but he eventually resorted to backroom deals to push a health care overhaul through Congress.
He kept troops in Iraq, escalated the war in Afghanistan, and kept open the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — to the disappointment of young and liberal voters who helped propel him to the White House.
A second major factor: Obama and Democrats in Congress overreached. After winning control of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, Democrats thought the country wanted a sweeping expansion of government programs, as in FDR's New Deal in the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s.
Liberals surely did. But most independents didn't, and conservatives rejected it as socialism.
Obama never successfully sold the health care law to the American people, and he fell short in convincing the country that his stimulus package was well-d
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