The 16 Year Cycle of Presidential Politics

I have long held the theory that each new generation of Americans has almost a genetic need to experiment with liberalism/leftism/progressivism/socialism or whatever '–ism' is being attached leftist ideology in this country these days.  Thus, every 16 years or so, as a new generation of American voters comes of age and the people begin to get bored with whatever moderate-to-conservative administration happens to be in power at the time, the country elects a leftist to the presidency, and waits to see what happens.

It generally doesn't take too long for the public to collectively recoil in horror at the terrible mistake it has made, and to then begin the process of correcting things at the polls.  It's very easy to go back in history and observe this apparently unavoidable cycle of American politics.

Let's begin in 1960, when a public tired of 12 years of boring prosperity under Truman and then Eisenhower elected the young liberal John F. Kennedy to the presidency.  Kennedy's liberal social policies and feckless, amateurish conduct of foreign affairs had his public approval rating on a downward trajectory by late 1963, and the country was well on its way to a correcting election the following year.  But then JFK was assassinated, and the public turned to Lyndon Johnson in a sympathy vote.  The Democrats were turned out of office in 1968, but not until Johnson had saddled the country with the massive escalation of the Vietnam conflict, and a set of Great Society programs that are still wreaking damage on the population to this day.

Fast forward 16 years to 1976, and a new generation of voters tired of the Watergate scandal turned to a liberal peanut farmer from Georgia.  The most incompetent presidency in the nation's history followed, resulting in the Reagan landslides of 1980 and 1984.  When George H.W. Bush prevailed over leftwinger Mike Dukakis in 1988, it looked as if the public had learned a lasting lesson from the Carter debacle, and might well avoid another disastrous flirtation with leftism.

But it wasn't to be.  In 1992, the magic 16 years after 1976, a public furious at Bush for breaking his "no new taxes" pledge in a shameful deal with congressional Democrats turned leftwards again, elevating Bill and Hillary Clinton to their co-Presidency.  This time the public caught on far more quickly than it had following the mistakes of 1960 and 1976, recoiling in terror as the Clintons attempted to socialize the healthcare system and implement a massive new BTU carbon tax.  Voters were so appalled by these and many other Clintonian initiatives that they awarded the Republicans with a massive congressional sea change election in 1994, turning both houses of congress over to the GOP for the first time in almost half a century.

Many anticipated that a personal repudiation of the Clintons would follow in the 1996 presidential contest, but Bill Clinton was smart enough to shove Hillary and her hard-core leftism aside, choosing instead to adopt the strategy of "triangulation" suggested to him by pollster and then-White House aide Dick Morris.  Thus, throughout 1995 and 1996, Clinton co-opted Republican positions on everything from military policy to welfare reform, and ended up being re-elected and presiding over a successful presidency for the most part.

All of which brings us forward now to 2008, sixteen years after Clinton's 1992 victory.  Another new generation of voters grew tired of 12 years of moderate-to-conservative policy, and also tired of a war in Iraq that had dragged on for 6 years.  Predictably, another lurch to the left occurred, this time elevating a true leftist radical to the presidency.

This time the public learned even faster than it had following the 1992 mistake, beginning the process of turning the Democrats out of office in November of 2009, as it recoiled in horror at the radical leftist, even fascist, policy pursuits of President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats in congress.  All indicators today point to the likelihood of another sea change election coming this November.  True, there are still more than six months between now and Election Day, but it's hard to see what could happen between now and then that would turn back this growing tide.

Should such a sea change take place this November, the question will then become whether President Obama will choose to moderate his worst impulses as Bill Clinton did following 1994?  At this point, there is no indication whatsoever that this President has a moderating bone in his body.  Bill Clinton was all about Bill Clinton, and was willing to do whatever it took to secure some sort of positive legacy for himself in history.  Leftist ideology was Hillary's deal, not his.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, is all about ideology, and transforming the country as he promised repeatedly to do during his election campaign.  Given that, there appears little chance he will divert himself from the Jimmy Carter-esque path to a one term presidency he currently finds himself treading.  Such a fate could not happen to a more deserving person.

The 6 Step Cycle of Leftist Rationalization

In a column last week, E.J. Dionne, our favorite whiney, slobbering leftist nitwit columnist, complained that the Obama/Pelosi fake stimulus bill was “if anything, too small”. This is invariably the final rationalization of those on the left when their programs turn out to be unmitigated disasters for the nation – they would have been successful had they just been larger, and if anything, they were just too small.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal? If anything, just too small. Thus, over the decades, Democrat-dominated congresses enacted constant expansions of the benefits of Social Security without enacting corresponding expansions of worker contributions, leaving the system today basically bankrupt.

Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society? If anything, just too small. Trillions of wasted dollars later, the poverty rate today is higher than it was in 1965, the African American family has been decimated by the perverse incentives contained in Great Society programs, and liberals continue to contend it all would have worked if only we’d have spent more.

Johnson looked at John F. Kennedy’s minimal interventionist policy in Vietnam and said it was “if anything, just too small.” Out of that keen observation, the U.S. presence in that country soon grew from a few hundred advisors to more than half a million handcuffed-by-political-considerations troops, and the mother of all quagmires was born.

FDR, at Yalta, looked at Stalin’s plans for annexing much of Eastern Europe into his growing communist bloc and said it was “if anything, just too small.” Ok, he really didn’t do that, but he might as well have, as Stalin got everything he wanted out of that conference, ensuring communist domination of Eastern Europe for half a century.

Last year’s $100 billion 2-year increase in the budget of the soviet-style Department of Education? If anything, just too small. The result of this and the other enormous increases in the baseline budgets of a vast array of wasteful socialist federal programs is that the nation now faces a structural annual deficit in excess of $1 trillion as far as the eye can see.

A cap and trade bill that would waste $2 trillion taxpayer dollars over the next decade to marginally decrease man-made carbon dioxide emissions? If anything, just too small. With the failure of this human atrocity of an idea, the Obama Administration now pursues the wrecking of the U.S. economy by seeking soviet-style command-and-control regulation of “greenhouse gases” by the Environmental Protection Agency under the auspices of the Clean Air Act.

A bill to socialize the finest system of healthcare delivery in the world? If anything, just too small. Most of those on the political left will tell you that the bills currently before congress are too timid, and achieve their goal of a federal takeover of 1/6th of the economy over too long a period of time. They’d much prefer that their Democrat heroes in congress and the President commit outright political suicide by passing an outright, immediate single payer system into law and telling an adamantly opposed public to shut up and take it.

Harry Truman at least was correct when he looked at the bombs that were used in the fire-bombing of Dresden and said “if anything, they’re just too small.” Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed shortly thereafter, and a world war was ended. Then again, Truman may have been a Democrat, but he wasn’t a leftist.

We could go on and on here, but the point is obvious: liberals will never admit to the failure of their consistently failed policy ideas. In their minds, the only reason for the failure of their socialist experiments is that they just weren’t well-funded enough. In other words, if anything, they were just too small.

And so, we invariably end up with the same 6-step cycle of rationalization we have seen from President Obama and his lapdogs in the media like Mr. Dionne.

Step 1: Pass a hideously ill-considered, shamefully wasteful program into law. This step is known as Abject Stupidity. Step 2: Stand idly by as the program utterly and completely fails to produce the results you misled the public into believing it would produce. This step is known as Inevitability of Outcome. Step 3: Look on as the people slowly wake up to the reality of what is happening in Step 2, and public opinion turns radically against you. This step is known as Uh-Ohhhh. Step 4: Begin the process of pointing fingers of blame at anyone else who happens to be standing nearby in order to deflect attention away from yourself. This step is known as Desperate Responsibility Avoidance. Step 5: When Step 4 doesn’t work, team up with your fellow liberals to develop a common set of lies to try to convince the public that they simply misunderstood what the program was intended to do, and that it is really producing exactly the intended results. This step is known as Joe Biden Will Say Literally Anything.

Step 6: Finally, when all else fails, and your party is now facing an enormous repudiation of everything it stands for at the polls next November, try to shift blame to the Republicans, painting them as obstructionists and blaming them for making your program, “if anything, just too small.” This step is known as The Last Refuge of a Leftist Nitwit, and is ably personified by E.J. Dionne.

So, to summarize, here is the 6-Step Cycle of Leftist Rationalization:

Step 1: Abject Stupidity

Step 2: Inevitability of Outcome

Step 3: Uh-Ohhhhh

Step 4: Desperate Responsibility Avoidance

Step 5: Joe Biden Will Say Literally Anything

Step 6: The Last Refuge of a Leftist Nitwit

A sincere word of thanks to Mr. Dionne for playing the role of this week’s Poster Child for the slow-motion suicide of the tired, dying, dinosaur leftist news media.