Too Late For Obama To Turn It Around?

by Camille Paglia - September 9th, 2009 - Salon

By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done. At this point, Democrats' main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate. Given the GOP's facility for shooting itself in the foot, that may well happen.

Though I have been aware that the extreme left wing feminist Camille Paglia was (like Christopher Hitchens) prone to take stands that alienate the liberal faithful, this article is still something of a surprise. I doubt that we share any solutions to the health care problem, yet it is interesting how unhappy she is with some of the current leaders of the Democrat Party.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism. How has "liberty" become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals?

It is sentiments such as these that have led me to include this article here. I am not normally in favor of providing links to leftist organizations like Salon, but this article certainly proves how complex the health care debate has become. It also proves that those who are conservative have a real opportunity to speak for the heart and soul of America again. Camille does not hesitate to take a few cheap shots at Republicans (she is after all a professional liberal) yet she gets in some pretty good digs at Democrats first.

We really must throw the crony capitalists out of the Republican Party first if we are going to truly appeal to independents and discouraged liberals. The Wall Street and Big Corporation mentality of some in our party is no longer truly our thing. No matter how much it used to represent conservative beliefs, Wall Street does not represent free enterprise any more. Wall Street, with its mergers and acquisition attitude to create corporate monopolies "regulated" by Democrats (who are bribed to turn the other way as long as profits are shared) is neither capitalism nor conservative. With some of the smart people like Christopher Hitchens and Camille Paglia tuning away from the tyranny of the Democrat Party, Republicans need to pay attention to how we stay the party of freedom and win some of them to our side. Of course right now these people would be smeared as RINOs if they joined the party, so maybe a new third-way party focused on freedom is our only chance to save America.