Thursday, November 08, 2012

The Obama win

It's not as if I think Obama has been an outstanding President, but looking at the current state of the Republicans, he certainly deserved re-election over them.

There's a lot of good commentary about this around with which I agree:  William Saletan shows how Obama has really acted like a moderate Republican of the past; Thomas Friedman correctly predicted that the election would show that Americans want centrist governments; and even Ross Douthat said that the Republicans failed to take Obama seriously as an opponent because of their belief that their cause was just obvious:
 You could see this belief at work in the confidence with which many conservatives insisted that the Obama presidency was not only embattled but self-evidently disastrous, in the way so many voices on the right sought to raise the ideological stakes at every opportunity, in the widespread conviction that the starker conservatives made the choice between left and right, the more votes they would win.
 As for how the Right is reacting in the blogosphere:  well, it seems to me a significant number are currently playing the extraordinarily unwise game of "blame the voters".  Take Roger Simon at PJ Media for example:
But even with that luck [Hurricane Sandy] you would think the electorate would have the brains (self-preservation really) to put him out of office.

So we have a problem with democracy. It’s not working or, more specifically, has been turned on its end, with the masses manipulated against their own self-interest, creating power elites similar to those described in Milovan Djilas’ The New Class.

How did that happen? I think many of us know there are three pillars of our own destruction: the educational system, the media and entertainment (the popular arts).
 See, the problem is not the Right, it's that the masses have been brainwashed by schools, the media and movies to just not be able to understand how magnificently correct the Right is.  The same attitude is currently also on abundant display on the allegedly "centre right" blog Catallaxy, where, as it happens (if Florida goes to Obama, as appears likely) I correctly predicted the final electoral college Obama tally of 332.

One thing is for sure:  it the Right doesn't become more evidence based and pragmatic, it is on the path for future irrelevancy in the US.  


2 comments:

Jarrah said...

Congrats again on getting the EV tally spot-on. I knew the long-term trends in Virginia and Florida were reaching tipping points, but I didn't think they had arrived yet. I was wrong.

Anonymous said...

I would've preferred a Romney win but the way the usual suspects on the right are going about condemning people for voting Obama as 'damaged women' and so forth is just revolting and unbearable to read so I don't.

Some normal people were scared shitless by morons talking nonsense about abortion and rape. It's regrettable but the Republican party has no one to blame but itself. Pity a great technocratic brilliant mind like Romney who would've been a fantastic President had to take the fall for it

Jason