Mitt Romney wasn't a bad candidate. He ran a fairly strong race. He made a few errors. And he made many good moves.
Certainly
he was adequate. And he was probably the strongest Republican candidate
among the primary field of contenders. That is, he was the best man
available to run against Barack Obama.
And he did a pretty good job.
Obama,
on the other hand, was a horrible candidate. He was mean and
vindictive. He was contemptuous and superficial. He ran on irrelevancies
like abortion and a fictitious Republican war against women. He didn't
give his supporters any reason to feel good about themselves.
Instead, he used class warfare to stir them to hatred of their countrymen.
In
retrospect it is possible that the race was over before it began. A
strong case can be made that Obama secured his reelection in 2009 when
he bailed out the US auto industry and so temporarily stanched the
hemorrhage of jobs in Ohio and Michigan. And maybe, with the youth of
the 1960s now the Medicare recipients of the 2010s and '20s, there are
simply too many Americans dependent on government handouts to care about
what happens in the future.
An equally strong
case can be made that Romney lost the election before he secured the
Republican nomination. He may have squandered his chances when he took a
strong position against illegal immigration in one of the early
Republican primary debates and so arguably made winning Florida, and
perhaps Colorado, a mathematical impossibility.
Many have argued that demography is destiny.
And
the American electorate has changed tremendously in the past decade.
Government dependency among the white working class has grown.
Government dependency among an aging population and a rising tide of
single-parent families has grown. And the Latino share of the vote has
grown. Today some are arguing that Republicans today simply cannot win
the presidency, regardless of their candidate.
All
of this is important because for the past four years, most Republicans,
and most non-leftists throughout the world, had been hoping that the
Obama years would be an aberration. They had hoped and trusted that he
would be a one-term president. All the policies he enacted during that
term, on domestic and foreign policy alike, would be reversed by his
Republican successor, elected by voters who understood they had been
taken in by a huckster in 2008. The US economy - the anchor of US power
and the engine of the international financial system - would come
roaring back.
In international affairs, the US
would reverse course. It would stop supporting the rise of its enemies
from the Middle East to Asia to Latin America. It would embrace its
allies. The former would be weakened. The latter would be secured and
strengthened. America would be safe and defended.
Alas,
apparently it could not be. The American spirit has been overwhelmed by
the European model of social democracy at home and appeasement and
treachery abroad.
But all the dependency
champions who celebrated on Tuesday night cannot stop the coming storm.
The greatest advantage Obama had going into the election was not
demography but the fact that the full consequences of his statist
economic policies and his pro-jihadist foreign policy have not yet been
felt.
Nationalized healthcare will only be
fully implemented in 2014. Americans will only begin watching old men
and women die because the federal government denied them lifesaving, but
expensive, treatments a year from now. They will only lose their
doctors due to dwindling Medicare reimbursements in a year.
College
students who got out the vote for Obama will only find themselves
doomed to low-paying jobs and a life of indebtedness as they fail year
in and year out to pay off their college loans, in a year or two. And by
the time they realize what it means to be saddled with a national debt
of $16 trillion, they will be locked into a government-controlled
economy that requires them to keep their silence or lose their
livelihoods.
THEN THERE are the consequences of
Obama's foreign policies. The attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi
exposed the failure of his strategy of appeasing jihadists and had the
potential to sink his presidency by turning suburban voters against him
in places like Pennsylvania. But lucky for him, the Benghazi debacle was
small enough for the media to hide from the electorate.
Sure a US ambassador and three others were murdered. But four is not a very large number.
And it was over in a day.
It
will be harder for Obama to contain the damage of his foreign policy
when Iran gets nuclear weapons and begins molesting US shipping in the
Persian Gulf as gas prices rise to $10 a gallon. It will be harder for
Obama to hide the effect of his foreign policy when American tourists in
Egypt are massacred or held hostage and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood
government demands the release of the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman,
the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, in exchange for
intervention.
It will be harder for Obama to
hide the dangers of his foreign policy when the Taliban return to power
in Afghanistan and al-Qaida rebuilds its training camps. It will be
harder for Obama to blame his failure on hapless American filmmakers
when Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is controlled by a Taliban-aligned
government that seeks a nuclear war with India. It will be harder for
Obama to protect America with a gutted, demoralized military,
demobilized under his command.
Rather than
contend with these calamities, Obama and his statist, pro-Islamist
supporters and advisers will blame their critics. Just as they blamed -
and jailed - an American filmmaker for Ambassador Stevens's murder, so
they will blame overworked doctors, struggling hospital administrators,
"partisan" lawmakers and "Islamophobic, neoconservative warmongers," for
the domestic decline and international mayhem Obama's policies will
necessarily cause.
With the critical election
lost, Republicans have a very hard and thankless task before them. They
have to do the hard work of opposing his policies with dwindling
resources. They have the job of energizing, inspiring and expanding a
base that is demoralized. They have the job of explaining to wavering
citizens why the Republican alternative puts America on the right track.
Conservatives
need to prepare the ground for their return to power. They need to make
the arguments for ending the welfare state. They need to make the
arguments for destroying the ascendant - and politically savvy - forces
of jihad at home and abroad. They need to argue against defense cuts
even as the Obama-appointed Joint Chiefs of Staff abandon strategic
reason for personal promotions.
And they need
to write the books, produce the movies, found the television stations,
and prepare the school curricula that will enable a future resurrection
of the American dream.
AS MOST people know,
Israel, as the forward base of freedom in the Muslim world, is the first
target of the Obama-supported, ascendant forces of jihad. As a
consequence, Israel will be the first to feel the repercussions of
Obama's policies of appeasement and empowerment of Iran and the Muslim
Brotherhood.
Certainly, this is a horrible
situation. But just as demographics have changed America, so they are
changing Israel. Rising anti-Semitism and economic decline in Europe
have dramatically increased immigration rates to Israel, and those rates
will only grow as the situation on the continent worsens. In contrast
to the rest of the West, Israelis have become more religious, readier to
embrace the free market and more eager to compete in talent and
productivity. While Americans have joined Europe in dwindling fertility
rates, Israelis have matched the fertility levels of their Arab
neighbors.
Israel's demographic and economic power have been largely ignored and undervalued.
But
the time has come to use them for all they are worth. As America enters
its age of dependency and decline, Israel must end its age of
dependency on America and begin to depend on itself. That does not mean
that Israel won't cooperate with America. But as America's foreign
policy becomes indistinguishable from Europe's, Israel will increasingly
need to take its fate in its own hands.
We need to expand the size of the IDF ground forces. We need to expand the size of the navy.
We should reinstate the Lavi jet fighter project.
We
need to expand our independent offensive missile programs, developing a
serious cruise missile arsenal. And we need to promote a new generation
of generals that is not psychologically dependent on their American
counterparts.
As for the Palestinians, and the
international, leftist anti-Israel cottage industry that supports and
feeds off of them, the time has come to take our demographic advantage
for a spin. As we decrease our psychological dependence on America, we
need to increase our trust in ourselves.
We
need to staunchly defend and assert our rights to our land. And we must
exercise our right to defeat those who deny our rights and seek our
national destruction.
In other words, we need to begin applying Israeli law in Judea and Samaria.
True,
talk is cheap. We can expect - indeed we were warned to expect - for
Obama to turn on Israel immediately after the election.
Obama
can be expected to dispatch his political advisers to Israel to run the
Left's electoral campaign with the goal of defeating Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu and paving the way for the return to power of the
socialist, appeasement-crazed Israeli Left. We can expect the State
Department, (under the guidance of New Israel Fund alumni) to renew its
attacks against Israel's religious institutions and the Jews of
Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. We can expect the US to abandon us at the
UN. We can expect the US military to undermine any Israeli strike
against Iran.
No one said any of this will be
easy. But difficult is not the same as impossible. Within a year, the
consequences of Obama's failed domestic and foreign policies will make
him weaker rather than stronger than he was in his first term. He will
be hard pressed to pressure Israel when the US loses its leadership role
in the Muslim Brotherhood- dominated Middle East. And Israel's
independence of action will consequently grow.
Our side suffered a massive loss on Tuesday.
But
as long as we keep our minds and hearts focused on the fundamental
goodness and truth that guide our path, we will not be defeated. We will
endure, persevere and in due course, we will be vindicated.
Note
to my readers: I am currently writing a book in which I describe the
strategic course Israel and the US should take in relation to the
Palestinians. To complete my work in a timely fashion, I am taking a
leave of absence from my column until next spring.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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