Was it good politics?
the president’s demagoguery did agitate the constituencies that matter most: the pro-Obama media, the even more pro-Obama media, and Europeans (who, let’s face it, are just more soignée than we are). Judging by my Facebook feed, he’s doing a pretty good job of getting his rank and file followers to mouth the appropriate slogans as well.
But I think Pruden is missing a piece of good news in all this. Obama has also demonstrated the limits of propaganda that was perfected in the era of totalitarianism. It was easy for FDR to make a crude campaign against the court stick because (sorry, Greatest Generation) Americans back then were across the board less educated and less skeptical, and they had access to a universe of information so small that, by the standards of 2012, it can barely be said to have existed.
Last month, an ABC News/Washington Post poll indicated nearly 70 percent of Americans believed the Court should strike down the individual mandate or the entire PPACA. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll also showed majority belief that the mandate was unconstitutional. I don’t read too much into that. (Among the many ways we’re smarter than our ancestors is that we’re more skeptical of opinion polling.) But if you had taken a similar poll taken in 1935, the majority of responses to a question about judicial review and constitutionality under either the commerce clause or the necessary and proper doctrine would have been “Huh?” That Obama is out of his depth just shows again that he’s everything Bill Clinton wasn’t: inflexible, intellectually lazy, and tied to a vision of America the rest of the country stopped caring about decades ago.
We’re just not as stupid and ignorant as they wish we were. Or they are.
Obama’s spent his whole life being told how he’s smarter than everyone else, and how anyone who disagrees with him is stupid and evil. He actually believes all that crap.
There’s a tendency among conservatives to imagine all of Obama’s actions are part of some incredibly deep game, like he’s playing four-dimensional chess or something. No, it’s much, much simpler: he really is that stupid and ignorant. The liberals elected a fool because the color of his skin made them feel all proud of themselves.