George Rebane

Fouad Ajami is an American academic of Lebanese descent who writes regularly about our body politic.  In today’s WSJ Ajami offers us a reasoned and penetrating analysis of the first six months of Obama’s presidency that contains one of the clearest assessments of how we got to where we are, and where Obama wants to take us from here.  In ‘Obama’s Summer of Discontent’ he states

…It is odd that American liberalism, in a veritable state of insurrection during the Bush presidency, now seeks political quiescence. These “townhallers” who have come forth to challenge ObamaCare have been labeled “evil-mongers” (Harry Reid), “un-American” (Nancy Pelosi), agitators and rowdies and worse.
 
A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the “loudest voices” are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.

It was true to script, and to necessity, that Mr. Obama would try to push through his sweeping program—the change in the health-care system, a huge budget deficit, the stimulus package, the takeover of the automotive industry—in record time. He and his handlers must have feared that the spell would soon be broken, that the coalition that carried Mr. Obama to power was destined to come apart, that a country anxious and frightened in the fall of 2008 could recover its poise and self-confidence. Historically, this republic, unlike the Old World and the command economies of the Third World, had trusted the society rather than the state. In a perilous moment, that balance had shifted, and Mr. Obama was the beneficiary of that shift.

In his review of Obama’s campaign and subsequent rush to alter America, Ajami points out that such attempts to play ‘the man on a white horse’ run into a fundamental problem on our shores –

American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the “mandate of heaven” is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.

These are thoughts to ponder as we contemplate the coming political season when the Democrats will attempt to re-ignite their legislative bum’s rush to turn the country into a socialist mess before anyone knows what’s going on.  Perhaps they should reflect on Ajami’s words else they inadvertently abbreviate their moment in the sun.