The next twenty-six months are fraught with danger. President Obama is as isolated as Lyndon Johnson when Vietnam fell apart or Richard Nixon as Watergate mushroomed. Like those two men, Obama is vain and self-centered, and has made the pursuit of power his life’s ambition. Johnson and Nixon both came up the hard way and they could catch as well as pitch political hardball. Abhorrent as many of their tactics and machinations were, they were tough-as-nails pragmatic and resilient. Part of that pragmatism was recognition that their power derived from the support of a substantial percentage of the electorate, and they left office when that support evaporated. Obama is more brittle than Johnson or Nixon, lacking their up-from-the-bottom toughness, and when pragmatic recognition of political reality threatens his fragile ego, it’s a good bet ego wins. Therein lies the danger.
Republicans have never liked Obama. Democrats have cause to loathe him. There were no relief valves or escape hatches for them this last election. Obama’s attitude was: If I’m going down, you’re going down with me. Obviously the results were a repudiation of Obama, and he did indeed take his party with him. His petulant defiance on immigration, his challenge to the Republicans to send him legislation acceptable to him lest he wield the presidential pen, will be an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats if he carries out his threat. They’ll pick up some votes from new citizens, but his arbitrary high-handedness will be long remembered, even by voters sympathetic to some sort of immigration reform. Such tactics are like braggadocio by athletes that gets posted in their opponents’ locker rooms. Nobody forgot the dubious congressional maneuvers and lies that were employed to pass Obamacare. Nobody will forget an executive-ordered amnesty that bypasses the legislature entirely.
Democrats are the crew of Obama’s sinking ship for the next twenty-six months and he has nothing but scorn for their plight. Unless one counts sycophants and Hollywood celebrities, he hasn’t got a lot of friends. The presidency in good times is a tough gig; what if financial markets and the economy were to nosedive or more of the world’s hot spots erupted? Obama could be the Democrats’ Herbert Hoover, a politician who dooms his party not just for an election, but for a generation. You can bet they see the possibility and knives are already coming out.
In Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, dooms his city (but for the intervention of Gandalf) by failing to prepare it for inevitable war, tries to incinerate his still-living son on a funeral pyre, and ultimately commits suicide, attaining the death he so clearly desires. Nobody, perhaps not even Obama, knows if he has a death wish, but his indifference to his party’s fate and his insouciant refusal to take any responsibility for its electoral disaster hint of blind nihilism. What is truly frightening is the possibility that if he goes down, in his consuming resentment he might try to take the rest of the country with him. Ordinary people see a small fraction of what goes on behind the scenes in our government. It would be an unexpected act of wisdom and statespersonship if Republican and Democrat congressional leaders quietly got together and agreed: we need to keep a close eye on this guy. Even if they don’t, the rest of us should.
