Daniel Greenfield
Obama and his media poodles have announced that a new crisis is upon us. Voter apathy. Naturally the apathy is only a crisis because it affects Democratic voters. If voter apathy threatened to keep Republican or Independent voters home, the media would suddenly be running stories about how voting is overrated. But since voter apathy might actually cost the home team, it's the enemy.
The plans for fighting voter apathy are as varied as they are stupid. A Chicago advocacy group is unveiling "Vote Naked Illinois", a gratuitous attempt to spice up absentee ballots. Considering that this is Chicago where interesting things happen to ballot boxes and their contents, a more honest name might be "Votes Missing in Illinois".
Then there's the usual pop culture appeal. Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will trudge over to Washington D.C. to pep up the youth vote, as only two white millionaires on the cusp of turning 50 can. Depending on their musical guests their rally might draw a few thousand college kids, but will get a hundred times the coverage that Beck's Restoring Honor rally did. The timing of the Liberal Ivy League Snots rally may actually undercut the Democratic party's election program, but you can't have everything. Or anything at all.
The real problem for Democrats isn't apathy, and it can't be jumpstarted with celebrities and viral campaigns. You can try waving shiny things at an audience that is old enough to vote, but not old enough to drink, but they get bored easily. Worse yet they grow up, start looking for jobs, paying taxes and looking at their IRA's. And then unless they can get a job smirking into the camera while speaking in a bored monotone on a comedy channel aimed at viewers half their age, they're going to have to grow up. But the Democrats' liberal agenda is incapable of growing up with them.
After some time at a party with Obama, a lot of the country would like to put the adults in charge. And the portion of the country that doesn't care and is incapable of voting intelligently, call it the Meghan McCain vote, or the "Obama is Gonna Pay My Mortgage" vote, is either too distracted or too bogged down by the challenges of the real world to show up. And the Democrats are frightened like hell of facing voters who actually own property, work for a living and don't read Doonesbury. They're so frightened that they're running in the other direction, and trying to associate themselves with Bush, or at least disassociate themselves from Obama.
But why haven't the other voters shown up? Because the Obama administration doesn't have a whole lot to offer anyone who isn't an insider. The unions will come out for because they got paid. The pols will come out because they got paid. But why should the average Obama 2008 voter bother? That's the real voter apathy that Democrats are afraid of. And they should be.
To many of those voters Obama is the one who is naked. The progressives and their dimmer college counterparts who thought that voting for Obama meant ending the War in Iraq and killing all the policies they don't like, think they've seen the emperor naked. Some of them will show up, but grudgingly. They will show up to vote against the Tea Party, more than to vote for anything relating the Democrats. Which is why the media keeps tossing out the red meat, as much to motivate their own ranks, as to smear a populist opposition movement.
But relying on the countervote, only testifies to the basic weakness of the Democrats on the issues. They have nothing to sell themselves on, so they're stuck stirring up hate like junior league klansmen. Their only signature piece of legislation is ObamaCare, and it has vanishingly few fans. That means instead of running on their accomplishments, they're back to telling spooky stories about Republicans and right wing extremism. What they've forgotten though is that going negative says more about you, than it does about the other candidate. If your only campaign plank is, "My opponent is a monster who eats babies", even if you're right, it still doesn't do anything to sell your own candidacy.
And so the Democrats are stuck with no defining issue. For seven years, the Republicans had national security. Obama was supposed to have the economy, but now the economy has him. After 9/11, most Americans wanted an administration that would go after the terrorists, and that's what they got. After the onset of the recession, most Americans wanted an administration that would fix the economy. Instead they got irresponsibility and bailouts of everyone who gave the Democrats money. And a healthcare government takeover that they never asked for. If Bush had responded to 9/11 by focusing on farm subsidies and gay marriage, the Republicans would have been in for a major disaster in the midterm elections. And that's exactly what the Democrats are in for.
The ugly truth about voter apathy is that it's one sided. The voters who are apathetic are Obama supporters. And there's a reason that they're apathetic. It's because Obama, Pelosi and Reid have been apathetic to everything but a narrow agenda, that was heavy on the pork, and light on the substance. For anyone who wasn't a UAW or SEIU member, or a Wall Street banker or involved in Green Technology, there was nothing on the table.
The media wants those voters to care about burning issues like judicial appointments and the makeup of congress, but those are power issues, not policy issues. There's no policy on hand. Just about who gets to drive the car and who has to ride in the backseat. For hard core liberal policy wonks, this is their bread and butter. But most of them are already employed by D.C. or waiting till the next primaries when candidates will be bidding for their support. For the average worker, all this is a non-issue.
With the Meghan McCain vote too busy watching the Jersey Shore, the election may well be decided by the hard-working Americans who have suffered the most. And they're not going to vote in response to pop culture pressure from Saturday Night Live or famous musicians. They're going to vote based on what will help insure they can put food on the table and shoes on their kids' feet. The Ivy League may fume, but it can't compete. And the sad spectacle of Zoe Lofgren taking Colbert's snotty Harvard Lampoon material off campus and in front of congress, while ordinary hard-working Americans were waiting to hear about tax cuts, only highlighted the huge gap between the liberal elite and the rest of America.
Liberals frame apathy as the opposite of their own state of self-righteous outrage. In their worldview there is only room for the apathetic and the outraged. And those who are apathetic, they insist just haven't woken up to realize what the country will be like when it's just like one of those movies in which we all live in a totalitarian state which looks like an office park, and only has two colors, blue and blue-gray. But most voters who don't have full time jobs drawing weekly comic strips for alternative papers don't embrace such apocalyptic fantasies, and instead cut through all the chatter to the bottom line. The media successfully elevated Obama to the Man of the Hour, but they haven't been able to keep him there, because you can fool the people once by selling them a pig in a poke, but you can't fool them once the pig is out in the open.
Now the pig is out, the emperor is naked, and his base is apathetic. Why shouldn't they be. Most of them are trying to earn a living too, and only have so much time to waste on maintaining a takeover that isn't paying them any dividends.
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