The polling data on these voters released last week by John Zogby may have confirmed what many of us had suspected for months - - that millions of Americans who supported the Obama candidacy knew essentially nothing about him - - but that doesn’t dismiss the fact that Obama sold people on the idea of “change.” And based on the left-wing reaction to the Clinton re-emergence, “change” was taken to mean not merely a reversal of the past eight years, but an un-doing of the past couple of decades.
This has left-wingers outraged. Obama spent much of the past two years vowing to end the “senseless war in Iraq.” As he stood on stage with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards for those seemingly never-ending Democratic debates, he took every opportunity imaginable to remind us that he was the only candidate who had always opposed the war in Iraq. Yet, now he may be about to appoint a “war supporter” to head up the Department of State. That’s not “change,” and it’s not hopeful - - at least not to those who have been caught-up in the Obama trance.
Similarly, Obama spent a lot of time and energy earlier this year brutalizing Mrs. Clinton in front of fearful blue collar workers, assuring them that “free trade,” and Mrs. Clinton’s previous support of the “N.A.F.T.A.” agreement, were the reasons that jobs were moving overseas and their futures were uncertain. He also assured voters that “N.A.F.T.A.” would be reigned-in when he became President. Yet now, Obama has appointed as his Chief Of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a man who, along with Bill Clinton, bucked the Democratic party’s wishes, and helped bring about the N.A.F.T.A. agreement in the 1990’s.
And then there is Obama’s selection of Timothy Geithner for Treasury. When the news broke last Friday afternoon that the New York Federal Reserve Chairman had been tapped for the new administration, Wall Street surged upward and ended in plus territory. Seemingly, Obama’s choice provided some calm and assurance to a financial world gripped with the fear that Obama would actually attempt to radically realign America’s economic structures, as he promised from the campaign trail.
Yet once again, Obama’s selection of a man who arguably has ties to both the Bush Administration, and the centrist policies of the Clinton Administration, is a slap in the face to those who were hypnotized by his campaign rhetoric about impugning “the rich.”
And after months of running against the “failed policies of George W. Bush,” Geithner’s selection painfully suggests to the Obamanicas that maybe, just maybe, Bush 43 wasn’t such a failure after all.
It would be reassuring if Obama were not the radical his past has suggested, but it will be way more fun watching liberals defending what they've opposed for eight years.
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