from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 06 Sep 2009 07:07 PM PDT

Obama is falling and contrary to what anyone might have
expected, it was not the marginalized Republican party under the inept
leadership of Michael Steele or its stable of Congressional Republicans
providing nothing but token opposition, who gave him that big push. While
the official Republican leadership sat in the corner, information flew
back and forth between bloggers, activists and talk show hosts and the
result was an authentic grass roots movement.

"The Mobs" that panicked Democratic politicians and their media
press corps decry represent the one thing that a phony grass roots
movement like the Obama campaign fear the most... being confronted with an
authentic grass roots movement. Their campaigns against radio and TV hosts
like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck reveal that they cannot understand what
is going on as anything but some top down operation. After all they are
supposed to represent "The People", but the only people they could find to
represent them at the Town Halls were the SEIU goons they packed the halls
with. And there's nothing like a "grass roots movement" that you have to
bus in, which consists purely of people who are set to profit from your
legislation.

The Republican leadership is almost as nervous, torn
between seizing the moment or standing aside to avoid being accused of
"extremism". The same folks who thought the best way to run a Presidential
campaign was by being as inoffensive as possible, who think Meghan McCain
represents the future of the Republican Party and that public opinion is
determined by the op ed page of the New York Times and the Washington
Post, naturally have no clue how to respond to the situation. The
Republican leadership has become detached from its base and increasingly
has no idea how to connect to the concerns of ordinary Americans. By
stepping back from the fight, they lost the chance to set the agenda, and
now the agenda is being set for them.

But as appealing as populist
rhetoric about fiscal conservatism may be, the whole power of being a
congressman rests in handing out pork. Even Ron Paul who tried to brand
himself as a leader in fiscal conservatism turned out to have his share of
earmarks and family members on the payroll. And that unfortunately is the
default standard for politicians, and though some may hide it better than
others, a politician is a man who works on your payroll to spend your
money on behalf of his supporters, which is why expecting fiscal
conservatism from congress is like expecting a lion to go
vegetarian.

Politicians listen to their constituents when
they say they want lower taxes, less regulation, less immigration and no
NAFTA. Sometimes they even mimic the rhetoric or even get out front to
lead the parade, but when they're in the Senate cloakroom, it quickly
becomes a whole different ballgame. But politicians can't do anything
except on behalf of the people-- and rarely has there been such a showing
of the people coming out to denounce a policy supposedly being enacted on
their behalf. The Town Hall protests tore away the philanthropic facade
behind ObamaCare. It was not some imaginary wealthy "Brooks Brothers
Brigade" that went into the Town Halls, but ordinary working class
Americans who firmly and vocally said, "No Thanks" to the ObamaCare
boondoggle. And that has become a major gamechanger.

Obama and his
cronies were counting on fighting the Republican party. They were counting
on taking swipes at Limbaugh or Beck. They were not counting on serious
public opposition. Denouncing the health care protesters as right wing
extremists did not help. Trying to claim that the Obama socialist
photoshop was racist was a desperate move that jumped the race card shark.
By their very presence, the protests made ObamaCare controversial, and
simply denouncing them was not going to be able to reverse that. The more
the media denounced them and the more SEIU thugs attacked them; the more
the general public came to see ObamaCare as a controversial program.

While the Republican party may have been neutered for
now, Obama finds himself in the very uncomfortable position of playing,
"Obama vs the People". The Obama Administration was counting on being able
to run up the tab by the trillions with no serious congressional
opposition. But while that worked long enough to subsidize UAW auto
companies and bailout Obama's Wall Street buddies, after two thirds of a
year in which the economic situation kept sliding downward, the American
people began grumbling about his lack of results.

Like most
politicians, Obama did not understand that the voters did not put him into
office so that he could run up a deficit of trillions of dollars composed
of pork, giveaways and senseless centralization. Obama ran for office
promising hope and change. The only things he delivered were payoffs to
Wall Street donors and UAW union featherbedders. And just as he was about
to deliver a whopping payoff to his SEIU union Marxist buddies, the whole
thing collapsed because the American people reached the point where they
had enough.

Obama's egotism and immaturity let him gain power,
without understanding that being in charge, also means being responsible
when things go wrong. And in his increasingly pathetic attempts to try and
blame Bush for his own deficit spending, Obama showed that he did not know
how to function without someone like Bush up top to blame the whole thing
on. But now Obama is Bush, stuck with the big chair that he doesn't
actually know how to use, and clueless about what it takes to pass
legislation, because between photo op appearances and running for office,
he had never really passed any. The State Senate assigned him credit for
other people's legislation. In the United States Senate, he ran for higher
office after only a 100 days in the chamber. Like a precocious third
grader who suddenly finds himself in college, Obama had no idea how to
work with congress to get legislation passed. And the same media which
sneered at McCain's claims that he had the experience that Obama didn't,
was now forced to admit that the lack of focus and credibility at the
White House level was a serious problem.

While Obama was still
coasting on his "historic election", a lot of congressmen were getting
ready for their nerve-racking midterm elections. The Republicans were
still shellshocked, and liberal Democrats were arrogant, but the
conservative Democrats who had given their party the majority in 06 and
08, felt vulnerable. Cut out of the loop by an increasingly radicalized
White House and congressional leadership, and threatened by midterm
elections that traditionally cut down seats belonging to the ruling party,
they became the legislative weak point in ObamaCare. And once the Town
Hall protests made it safer to do nothing, than to do something, ObamaCare
hit an invisible brick wall.

Using the media, Obama squashed
most opposition by established politicians, but he has now come face to
face with a vocal popular revolt at the Town Hall protests and a quieter
but vaster sense of dissatisfaction by the American electorate. Republican
and Independent approval is peeling away, followed by that of many
Democrats, leaving the naked emperor cloaked only in his own base and
without a national mandate for change. And even his own supporters are
beginning to suspect that Obama may have nothing more to offer beyond
magazine covers and high minded rhetoric.

The White House has tried to fight back by targeting first
Limbaugh and then Beck, demonstrating a profound contempt for the views of
the grass roots opposition, which they imagine will go away if a few talk
show hosts will just stop "inciting it." But what the left fails to
understand is that if Limbaugh and Beck went off the air tomorrow, the
situation would not change in any significant way. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn
Beck are not some sort of aberrant phenomenon, they are a reflection of
the views, fears and concerns of their listeners. And those views and
concerns are not going away. The battle is a battle of ideas, and while
the Democrats occupy the executive and legislative castles, they are
finding that those positions may give them power, but also invest them
with responsibilities in the middle of a crisis that they are simply not
capable of living up to.

Throughout it all Obama has relied on his
media manufactured charisma to shield a multitude of sins. But
incompetence is one sin that cannot be covered by magazine covers. In the
Senate, Obama could have gotten by easily enough. As a Vice President, he
could have posed endlessly for magazine covers while accomplishing
nothing. But in the Oval Office, he had to deliver, and the only thing he
delivered was the hijacking of America at the hands of his radical legion
of czars. Now is the moment of truth where Obama faces the people, and
begins to deal with the consequences of the disaster he has created, the
deficit, the lost jobs and the economic crisis he tried to exploit for
political gain. The case of Obama vs the People has just begun.