Well, someone had to be.
Anyway, it’s odd that all Americans are apparently supposed to suddenly fall into line behind the president. Sure, we all want the country to succeed -- but many of us (Limbaugh included) think Obama’s policies would take the country in the wrong direction. It’s unclear why anyone would support, for example, the socialization of health care. It hasn’t worked in the U.K. or Canada, so why import it?
It’s also worth remembering that, during the Bush years, liberals not only wanted the president to fail, they actively worked to bring about his failure. That’s called “politics.” In fact, they even declared he’d failed when he hadn’t.
Remember Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s announcement in April 2007 that, “this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday”? That came as Americans were fighting and dying in Iraq, so the stakes were slightly higher than they are today when we wonder whether the president will succeed in his attempts to federalize the health care system.
If we’d followed Reid’s advice, or that of his then-fellow Sen. Barack Obama, the U.S. would have lost the war in Iraq. Instead, it’s generally accepted that, because of the surge, we’ve won.
One thing is clear: the White House listens to Limbaugh. It was only after Rush criticized Obama for failing to talk up the markets that Obama suddenly decided to remind people that this might be a good time to buy stocks. Coincidence?
But it’s also a pleasant and necessary change from a few weeks back, when the president stumped for his supposed “stimulus” bill by proclaiming that our economy was in free-fall and might never recover unless his massive spending bill became law.
So who’s more important?
Any president can command the front page any time he wants. “The Constitution gives me relevance,” as Bill Clinton explained (irrelevantly) in 1995. An entertainer such as Limbaugh can achieve relevance only if his ideas deserve it. The Washington Post, for one, seems to think they do -- more so, maybe, than the president’s own ideas.