| Dear Reader (and those of you who subscribe to this "news"letter just for the exotic punctuation), I need to keep this quick. I'm writing this from a sort of lounge area on the sixth floor of the Water Tower Inn. This is a hotel in St. Louis that used to be a hospital and sort of still is. If you've spent much time in hospitals, you know that they are battlegrounds for the war between the medicinal scents and various human odors. My room smells a bit like David Axelrod these days, by which I mean it has the vague scent of urine, desperation, and failure to it, damped down by too little Lysol. The whole place has a slightly creepy vibe to it, maybe because they still run a major sleep-disorder clinic here and half the people I've met are zombified or suspect that I am. I was down at the little breakfast area this morning and a guy had a really hard time getting the cereal in the bowl, even though the distance between dispenser and bowl was, roughly, one inch. "Are you doing the program?" he asked me sort of as an explanation for the huge cornflakes spill over the counter. When I announced on Twitter that I was staying here, one follower advised something like: "Don't go to the basement! It used to be a morgue! It's haunted." I assumed he was joking. But when the young lady from the College Republicans came to pick me up to go to dinner with the kids, she apologetically asked me about the hotel. I told her I've stayed at nicer places, but it's fine. She then asked me what floor I was on. I said six. She replied with a shweeeoooo sound, "Oh good. I was worried they put you on five." "Why?" I asked. "Oh, because the fifth floor is haunted." She then recounted a story about how her father and brother stayed here once and heard footsteps going by their room all night, but never saw anyone out in the hallway. "I'm pretty sure it's not really haunted," she added. Personally, I'm almost positive it's not haunted. But I do suspect that there's some disgraced East German scientist conducting hideous experiments on people here. I'm not sure exactly what he's doing, but if I had to guess, he's trying to create centaurs of some kind. Again, that's just a hunch, derived mostly from the fact that so many people are walking around here with horse legs instead of arms, struggling to get their key cards in the little slots. That and the fact that there's hay everywhere. So It's Going To Be Like That, Is It? It's not exactly a new or interesting insight to note that 2012 Barack Obama (and for that matter, the 2011, 2010, and 2009 Barack Obamas) has completely betrayed 2008 Barack Obama. The unifier who once claimed his greatest strength was his ability to work with people who disagree with him; the reformer who would usher in an age of transparency, good government, and fiscal rectitude; the redeemer who would wash away America's racial and political sins like so many Augean piles in the halls of power: That guy -- who almost surely never existed -- has certainly never occupied the Oval Office. His 2008 campaign was like one of those radio ads for some miracle pill that will burn away your fat, make you look younger, restore your virility, and get rid of the pesky horse hooves where your hands used to be. Sounds great until you hear the guy at the end explain, without taking a breath: "these-claims-have-not-been-evaluated-by-the-FDA-or-by-any-medical-experts. We are-not-responsible-for-impotence-weight-gain-rapid-aging-gigantism-or-worsening-of-equine-appendages." The problem was that the mainstream media was supposed to be that guy with the disclaimer. Instead, they served as the announcer who says: "But wait there's more! If you vote for Barack Obama right now, you can get an extra order of Secular Messiah, and free healthcare! If your erection lasts more than four hours, ask Chris Matthews what to do." In 2008, Obama said: I know there are those who dismiss such beliefs as happy talk. They claim that our insistence on something larger, something firmer, and more honest in our public life is just a Trojan horse for higher taxes and the abandonment of traditional values.
And that's to be expected, because if you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters.
If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things.
And you know what? It's worked before, because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn't work, all its promises seem empty. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it's best to stop hoping and settle for what you already know.
But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the naysayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me; it's about you.
It's about you.
For 18 long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said, "Enough," to the politics of the past. You understand that, in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same, old politics with the same, old players and expect a different result. You have shown what history teaches us, that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn't come from Washington. Change comes to Washington. In a properly ordered society we would see any number of one-hour specials from NBC or PBS keying off precisely this passage. They would compare and contrast all of the high-minded piffle Obama and his supporters offered in 2008 with the guy who today is basing all of his reelection hopes on motivating people who get their news from Comedy Central and Rolling Stone magazine. You have to wonder how a guy who thinks he's smarter than everyone feels about the fact that in order to keep his job he needs the support of the least informed voters (no offense Us Weekly readers) and people who actually take this "Republican binders will eat your face!" rhetoric seriously. Lionel Trilling once defined conservatism as an "irritable mental gesture." If the contemporary liberal establishment could get outside its own bubble, it would recognize how fully liberalism has become a patchwork of irritable mental gestures (By the way, my column today is on how Obama's "bayonets" barb shows the extent to which "liberalism has confused sneering for intellectual confidence."). Watching the Obama campaign these days -- Romnesia! Binders! Big Bird! Romnesiac Big Birds binding the 47 percent! -- you get the sense that Obama can't see that his closing argument is pathetic because every time he checks his twitter feed or turns on the TV to MSNBC he gets nothing but kudos. The condescending contempt from the likes of Lawrence O'Donnell, Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Bill Maher and the "everything conservatives say is a joke" tone we get from the comedy shows, liberal bloggers, and magazines has in effect simply become the voice of liberalism. And liberals hear it everywhere and parrot it back, confident that it must be true. Indeed, that voice is Barack Obama's voice, and it is a shrill, tinny, pathetic whine of a voice that mocks the Barack Obama of 2008 every time we hear it. The Perils of a Mass Culture That Ain't That Massive I've been noodling a theory. I think one of the reasons why liberalism is retreating into a mocking defensive crouch -- other than their policy failures and all that -- is that this kind of liberalism is its own class, with its own culture. If you're a smug liberal who has contempt for anything that smacks of traditional society and traditional values, you can live your whole life without ever running into a contrary point of view, save as a set-up for a punchline on the Daily Show. Now, obviously, something like this has always been true for a minority of people -- take it from someone who grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And you could argue that in the 1950s and early1960s it was worse. So-called "vital center" liberalism controlled almost everything back then. But that old liberalism was both confident in itself and in America. Today's liberalism is confident only in its own cultural superiority. About America its confidence extends only as far as the proposition that this country could be great if liberals were allowed to do what they want. The America of the past? Not so great, except when liberals got to do stuff like the New Deal. The future? Great, but again, only if Obama & Co. are allowed to "fundamentally transform" it. Liberalism is not only a magical force that fixes everything, liberals increasingly act as if they're in on a joke the rest of aren't. It's a kind of cultural esoterica, a winking, nodding, smugness that says in effect, "We know we're right because we're us, and we don't have to actually explain it to the rest of you." Anyway the point is that they are so sure about their own status as a gnostic class with secret knowledge of their own superiority that they've become resentful and nasty to anyone who isn't in on the gnosis. ("I'm not sure I gno what you mean" -- The Couch). What's fascinating is that this subculture has now gotten large enough that it mistakes itself for something like the majority culture. That's what we saw at the Democratic convention: a Democratic party utterly confident that there was no reason to dilute, or apologize for, their liberalism in any way. After all, their president never felt the need to pivot to the center -- why should they? Julia's First Time I suppose if you pressed members of the new smug class, they'd admit they're not a majority, in no small part because to claim majority status would be to surrender the pose of cultural insurrection, particularly for young hipster types. And that's the weird contradiction. It's not that everybody is like them, it's just that everybody who matters is like them. "We're rebels! Even though we've never met anyone who disagrees with us!" It is that sort of culture, that sort of cocooned narcissism that produces a political ad like this. If you've never watched HBO's Girls -- created by Lena Dunham, the young girl in this ad -- it's hard to appreciate how perfectly the show fits into the above rant (the one about a smug subculture, not the stuff about horse hooves). Comprised mostly of unpleasant, unhappy young women who think mindlessly aping male sexual lust is the high-water mark of liberation, the show is a celebration of ignorant narcissism. For months now, I've been saying in speeches that one of the creepiest things about that "Life of Julia" bit put out by the Obama campaign is that a bunch of smart people got in a room and said "This is a great idea!" The same applies, in more ways than one, to this ad. Dunham, in effect, is Julia. The "Life of Julia" thesis is that this fictional young woman is essentially married to the government. "Under President Obama" the government takes the place of a traditional male provider and instead of calling it statist paternalism, liberals call it liberation. In this Dunham ad, she playfully tries to suggest that voting for Obama is tantamount to consummating the relationship and losing your virginity. It's of course ridiculous since we were all screwed by this guy plenty of times already. More seriously, it's not cute or clever, but Obama doesn't care about cute and certainly isn't looking for clever. He's looking for votes -- and he'll take them wherever he can find them. Various & Sundry I'm about to head for the airport. So I'll keep this short. The pre-election speaking gigs have almost dried up. The last one on my calendar is at Southwest Missouri State on November 5. After that, I will dedicate myself full time to my Hummel collection. I have a piece in the new issue of NR on the demise of Newsweek. After you read it you'll see why some of the above was on my mind. Oh, I meant to tell you: Balloon-animal dinosaur! Even though it's becoming difficult to type with these hooves, I had a great time out here at SLU. I want to thank all of the NRO/G-File readers who came out for my talk. It's always great to see you guys, and to have friendly faces in the room. Oh, I'm scheduled to be on Special Report with Bret Baier on Monday. "The calls are coming from inside the cow!" Feel free to send me this. Who would win in a fight, modern man or a Neanderthal? But before you read that, the answer to that question is here. This cat will get in your head and stay there. Six college pranks you'll wish you'd thought of. Good -- clipetty -- bye -- clop. | 
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