Did you believe in “Hope?” Millions of American obviously did, including 99 percent of the media, as they elected Barack Hussein Obama II the 44th President of the United States in the fall of 2008.
Despite the loss of “Teddy Kennedy’s seat” in Massachusetts, the collapse of “health-care reform” and really ugly poll numbers, some members of the official Media Cheerleading Squad apparently still do, and nothing to the contrary is going to convince them otherwise. Here’s Frank Rich over the weekend in the New York Times, head still firmly in the sand:
It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America. It was not a rejection of universal health care, which Massachusetts mandated (with Scott Brown’s State Senate vote) in 2006. It was not a harbinger of a resurgent G.O.P., whose numbers remain in the toilet. Brown had the good sense not to identify himself as a Republican in either his campaign advertising or his victory speech.
Pivoting to the new, Axelrod-dictated meme — that the people are still angry about the Bush years, which accounts for their lashing out for yet more “change” — Rich ladles on the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger new criticism, which is that Obama’s problem is that he‘s not progressive enough:
Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.
Meanwhile, bubbling down below the mandarin heights of Eighth Avenue, in the strange and wonderful precincts of the Internet, this video has gone viral. Pace Frank, it looks like many of the people who drank the Obama Kool-Aid 15 months ago now want their “Change” back:
So who are you going to believe — Frank Rich or your lying eyes? The former theater critic or your fellow citizens, the voters of Massachusetts?
Do you have Obama buyer’s remorse yet?