K*****2
发帖数: 9308 | 1 在美新版发这个被吞了
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732443980457810347
后面的评论很不错，都是老美的反思
Barack Obama presides over an America more divided than at any time in 50
years. A country that was riven back then along racial lines gathered itself
in 2008 to elect its first black president. That president has spent four
years dividing the country on the basis of economic status. The campaign
revealed no evidence that Mr. Obama will close the chasm he has created
between his voters and those he attacked and vilified.
It may be true that Mitt Romney failed to respond adequately to the $100
million advertising assault the Obama campaign waged on his years at Bain
Capital and in private equity. Maybe a response would have turned some
voters. But could it overcome the four-year assault waged not by campaign
surrogates, but by the president himself, on bankers, Wall Street, the oil
companies after the Gulf spill, insurance companies and the "millionaires"
whose family income starts at $250,000?
So yes, maybe nominating a former businessman to run through the president's
poisoned wells of public opinion was a mistake. Interesting to ponder,
though, that in the United States "business experience" is now a political
liability.
So we default to the professional politicians. Assuming anyone could survive
the GOP's clown-car selection process, one of the most attractive
alternatives would have been Mr. Romney's running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan. A
Ryan campaign would have consisted of a principled articulation of the case
for reforming Medicare and Social Security before they collapse the national
fisc, a simpler tax system and a bipartisan compromise on the deficit.
But this space has repeatedly drawn attention to what happened the first
time, in April 2011, that Mr. Ryan and the GOP leadership offered a detailed
policy compromise on the deficit. Days later, Mr. Ryan and the others sat
in the audience at George Washington University, as did the press and the
Washington policy community, expecting to hear the White House's
counterproposal as the basis for a compromise on the deficit. Instead, this
is what they got from Barack Obama:
"There's nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by
spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.
There's nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can
least afford it and don't have any clout on Capitol Hill. And this is not a
vision of the America I know." And on it went for 40 minutes.
It was not a policy response; it was demagoguery. Had Mr. Ryan been the
nominee, he could have expected rivers of this.
Similarly, Mr. Obama's passage of such a monumental social entitlement as
the Affordable Care Act with zero bipartisan votes displayed muscle but was
madness for our political system.
After the Obama campaign's ads saying Bain Capital sent jobs overseas ("
outsourcer in chief") were widely exposed as false, the Obama spokestotum
replied: We're right and you're wrong. It was clear then that Messrs. Obama,
Axelrod, Plouffe and Messina were running a propaganda campaign for the
presidency. With success.
This strategy of using a presidential term in office to propagandize
particular blocs of voters also included enlisting the Department of Justice
, when Attorney General Eric Holder began intervening in state efforts to
establish voter-identification laws, a state function validated by several
recent Supreme Court decisions. No matter. In 2011, Mr. Holder intervened
against voter ID laws in South Carolina and Texas. In a July speech to the
NAACP, with the presidential campaign on, Mr. Holder said of these statutes:
"We call those poll taxes," invoking pre-1965 racial divisions.
The 2012 Romney-Obama vote result divided along white-nonwhite racial lines
for everyone age 18 and older. The racial divide also holds for women who
voted. What a win.
Some hard-bitten members of the Republican side argued that the party should
have dumped Mr. Romney and wonks like Paul Ryan in favor of their own
skilled demagogue, specifically New Jersey's Gov. Chris Christie. The
problem with pols, even one as verbally facile as Mr. Christie, is that in
crunch time, their loyalty reverts to No. 1. Exit polls show that 9% of the
electorate decided who to vote for just days before Tuesday; and among all
voters, 42% said Mr. Obama's Hurricane Sandy response—that's the Christie
photo-op—was an important factor. Of those, more than 65% voted for Mr.
Obama. We'd say Mr. Christie is one favorite GOP politico who is done.
Yes, Republicans have proven across two presidential elections that there
are political limits to how crudely one can argue an issue like illegal
immigration. Blowing up the party is only fun if you thought watching
Tuesday's results was fun. (Incidentally, what exactly does the press mean
when it refers to "the white vote"?)
The Republicans' self-inflicted wounds, however, pale against the
willingness of an American president to use his office to blow up the
country itself. That, too, has a price. Drill down inside the details of
that electoral map and its votes, and you find a nation severely divided.
With every election, the southern and central states drift further from the
coastal sophisticates obsessed with social issues, and from the heavily
unionized industrial states around the Great Lakes. But open up those Obama
states and you'll discover divisions: Their big-vote city centers sit like
blue moats of minorities and comfy singles who are surrounded by red
counties of married couples trying to cope. California's passage of
Proposition 30, which jacks up state taxes to subsidize the moats, is a
harbinger. More red voters (and companies) will move out, deepening the
divide.
There's that famous saying: Is this a great country or what? With the way
Barack Obama achieved his re-election, that's a good question: Or what? |
