Could the Cons Be Right?

As conservatives amp up their attacks, Barack Obama has only three choices if he has any hope of being reelected in 2012: Succeed-Succeed- Succeed.

Rush Limbaugh is absolutely right. Conservatives need Obama to fail -- and fail miserably -- if they are to reimpose anytime in the next quarter century their malevolent corporate oligarchy based on ravishing the country's resources, exploiting the powerless and living high by strangling the commons of tax revenue. Of course they wouldn't phrase it in such, shall we say, candid terms, but what else is it? I don't want to ever live in that kind of country ever again. But that is the downside of "transformational" that the public in its adoration of Obama is pretending can't happen.

The numerous GOP obituaries from the MSM are about as accurate as their end-of-the-known-world coverage of the Swine Flu Pandemic. Republicans were reviled for decades following the Crash of 1928, and then Americans tired of Democratic hubris, dog-eared policies and left-wing crazies and brought back a revitalized Republican Party to power in 1980. It will happen again! Americans have long memories -- not necessarily accurate nor informed -- when it comes to their presidents and political parties.

Just as the saying goes regarding homeland security: We must be perfect every time; the terrorists need only be perfect once. So too, anything short of perfection on any of Obama's transformational initiatives -- energy, health care and the economy -- not only will erode support for these important ideas but will make them politically toxic. Look at the Clintons' healthcare fiasco. It took universal healthcare off the table for 15 years and even now it's used as the measure of how not to proceed.

Another example. One terrorist attack, in the middle of Kansas, that kills mostly cows, following Chaney's bellowing that Obama's policies are making the country unsafe and Democrats couldn't be elected dog catchers. It doesn't matter that Obama is right in exposing, and expressing regret for, the actions of the Bush administration or that any al-Qaida attack was years in preparation and would occur regardless of Obama's actions on Guantanamo, torture memos and rendition. No attack for eight years under Bush! Attack under Obama! You decide.

The Republicans may be a mob of disgruntled, unimaginative troglodytes at the moment but give the Democrats a chance and they can make them look like a rational and viable alternative. For instance, Democrats label as "investments" in the nation's future the trillions of dollars added to the nation's debt to salvage the banking system and heavy industry, initiate healthcare reform, undergird state budgets, create jobs and rebalance the socioeconomic metrics. But we've just seen what can happen to investments. What if the cons are right? What if the spending doesn't work? What if projected deficits don't turn around? What if the whole vision thing is just the Obama Bubble!

Obama was roundly blasted by Hillary Clinton during the primaries for acknowledging that Reagan had been a game changer, most assuredly because Bill had not been. But the Reagan Revolution that turned the New Deal on its head doesn't even come close to what Obama is proposing. You don't have to be a right-wing whacko to foresee the consequences of failure. What if we're past the tipping point? What if America simply can't recover from the damage of the political, economic and sociological paradigm imposed on it for the last 30 years? What if the country can't live without its dependence on oil? Its massive, debt-based consumer spending? Its unhealthy lifestyles, monopolistic markets and Wall Street greed?

Barack Obama isn't just another number on the White House Occupants' List, initiating a couple of pet partisan schemes that might or might not backfire. This will not be a do-over. The trillions of public and private dollars spent will be gone! The debt so massive further borrowing will be impossible. If Obama's plans don't work, the current financial crisis will seem like a weekend cold. Not only will we be broke but there will be no resources nor resolve left to start over. Which brings us back to the necessity for Obama to Succeed.

Every Occupant, with the possible exception of Calvin Coolidge, showed up with an agenda he hoped to see enacted. Some, like those of LBJ and Reagan, mostly worked and nudged the country in one direction or another. Some bombed but were fairly innocuous so no harm, no foul. With Obama, however, it's unlike anything the nation has seen since the 1930s. Like his policies or not, Obama has set America on a course that can't afford to fail, not if his Democratic Party expects to again win another presidential election or control of congress anytime in the foreseeable future, but even more critically if America is not to become another Argentina.

Eight, possibly four, years from now, if America is not prospering on Obama's plans for renewable energy, green technology and capped carbon emissions, it's not just a case of simply reversing some obscure EPA regs to get the country back on track. We will have lost years of potential oil exploration and the decade required to launch new drilling operations; spent billions on wind farms and solar panels that proved to be inadequate to support the economy; retrained the workforce for dead-end careers in the eco-economy; bankrupted corporations with environmental mandates; and accrued vast amounts of debt in a futile pursuit that could break the bank.

America definitely will be a different place in 2016. But will Obama be venerated as a Roosevelt or despised as a Hoover?