No More Evasion: Mr. Obama Chooses to 'Scare the Bear'

Roar, bear, roar!

February 13, 2012
By James G. Wiles

Excerpt:
Evasion as a Democratic strategy dates from a famous academic paper published in 1989 by William Galston and Elaine Kamarck. The "politics of evasion" is captured in the expression: "don't scare the bear."

The bear is the American people -- who are not liberal, let alone Marxist.

Democrats, Galston and Kamarck wrote in 1989, ignored the bear at their peril. Don't scare the bear! Instead, they argued, Democrats should fly under a false flag -- rather than arouse the opposition of the American majority.

George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984 showed their true colors. Both were crushed in historic landslides.

Bill Clinton and the generation of Democrats spawned by the Democratic Leadership Council heeded the advice. They rode the strategy of evasion to victory in 1992 and 1996. It's embodied in the so-called Third Way (also copied by the U.K.'s Tony Blair and his New Labourites) and in political strategist Dick Morris' famous tactic of "triangulation."

Barack Obama, greatly helped by the MSM black-out on his socialist past, engaged in a little evasion himself to win the presidency in 2008.

Hence Peter Beinart's prophetic warning in March 2010. Mr. Obama and the Pelosi-Reid Democrats, he wrote, were abandoning the "politics of evasion" to pass ObamaCare. "By pressing ahead on health care," Beinart said, "President Obama is ending a decades-long internal debate within his party -- and the Democratic Party will never be the same."

ObamaCare passed. And, six months later, Beinart was proved right. The bear roared -- with the rise of the Tea Party and the results of the November 2010 election. the rest image

Could the New Obamacare Mandate Reinvigorate the Tea Party?