Did you feel it? The political ground shifting beneath President Barack Obama since his speech last week to Congress? It's been downhill since and I'm not referring mainly to the Dow Jones record-setting dive. The pivot point of the shift was the speech, or rather what the speech did to the evolving public narrative of Obama.Let's review:
* Since the first of the year, Rush Limbaugh's audience has exploded , according to Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post, even as his daily assaults on Obama have intensified. The conservative Talk Radio maestro has become quite possibly the most listened-to radio personality in America since before Paul Harvey (God rest his soul).
Demand for his air time hs suddenly become so intense, Limbaugh told The Examiner's Byron York earlier today, that his network sold 80 percent as much advertising in January 2009 as it did in all of 2008, and expects to sell-out the year by the end of March. That was before Obama and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel launched an explicit counter-attack against Limbaugh that seems only to be making him bigger.
* Glenn Beck's eminently forgettable presence on CNN has been transformed, according to The Los Angeles Times, by his move to Fox News where his main theme has been variations on this question - Wake Up! Wake UP! What in Heaven's name does Barack Obama think he is doing to America? Beck has a tough time slot from which to win big ratings because he's in the middle of evening drive-time. Even so, in a very short period of time at Fox, his audience has grown to the point that it is now exceeded only by those of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity.
* Obama remains personally popular with the public, but worries and even outright opposition to some of his cornerstone proposals are growing. Democrats in Congress are even beginning to express in public print their worries that Obama has reached too far with the $787 billion economic stimulus package, the $410 billion omnibus spending bill and the $3.6 trillion budget proposal (and the trillions more senior aides whisper are coming in further bailouts, loan guarantees, "tax cuts" that are really just grants, and other spending accountrements of Leviathan Unleashed.)
* Paralleling these developments, a potentially devastatng conservative case against Obama is coming together rapidly. Two influential columns this week tell the tale: On Thursday, Daniel Henninger offers this crucial observation in a WSJ piece otherwise devoted to asking why Republicans aren't more eagerly and quickly taking advantage of the fact the Obama Democrats have all but declared war on the 75 percent of the U.S. economy that is private and therefore productive of the nation's wealth:
"Beyond the stock market, there is a reason why, despite much goodwill toward his presidency, the Obama response to the faltering economy has left many feeling undone. There isn't much in his plan to stir the national soul. It's about 'sacrifice' now so that we can live for a future of small electric cars and windmills. This may move the Democratic Party's faith communities, but it cannot revive a great nation. If the Democrats want to embrace market failure as a basis for their ideology, let them have it. As politics, it's a downer."
The second column appeared today in The Washington Post and was written by Charles Krauthammer. Obama's mastery of public speaking has heretofore served to deflect attention away from the details of what he is actually proposing. And there is in those details, according to Krauthammer, a fundamental deception: Obama summons visions of catastrophe that are the result of too little government regulation of the financial markets and he offers as a solution vastly more government regulation of .... health care, energy and education...
The deception proceeds from the fundamental contradiction in the Obama strategy - talking like Ronald Reagan but walking like the second coming of Norman Thomas - and indeed that of all Washington liberals. Sensing the political fragility of the moment, they are racing to enact as much of their statist agenda as possible before the 2010 election puts the brakes on what, God willing, will ultimately be seen as an unfortunate interregnum between Republican Bush and a genuinely conservative regime to come...
The magnetism of his historic moment began fading once the economic stimulus, the omnibus and the budget were on the table. As people focused more on the details and how they didn't square with what they thought he had promised during the campaign, the soaring rhetoric lost much of its power. It may even now be approaching a net negative because it throws so much more light on the inaequacies of the policies.
And so the ground has shifted and the essential narrative is changing. Before, supporting Obama was an act of personal and national affirmation made all the more pleasant and attractive by the seeming reasonableness of his policy proposals and the winsomeness of his public personality . He succeeded admirably in making himself a comfortable and reassuring choice, thus making it not merely "safe" to vote for him, but positively compelling.
Now, though, the mask is off and the disconnect between rhetoric and reality is emerging as the dominant driver of the Obama narrative. The contrast is no longer between the young, personable, historic candidate Obama and a creaky, cranky old Republican White Guy, it's between what America thought it was getting in a President Obama (cool, reasonable and beyond partisanship) and what it now sees as the reality of a President Obama (government spending out of control, an uncertain hand on foreign policy, broken promises, more bureaucrats, etc. etc.).
Put another way - what we see now is neither what we were promised, nor what we expected.
Forgive me, please for saying so, but, if you read my Valentine's Day column on why Obama seemed locked in on a strategy that was likely to make him a one-term occupant of the White House, none of the above would come as a surprise to you. My only surprise today is that the shift has begun so quickly.