Politics and Culture

1. Let's say that Obama succeeds with his health plan. Hospitals remain privately owned and doctors are more government contractors than employees. As predicted, companies drop their health coverage and everybody goes for the government plan. Then...dissatisfied with the poor care and/or rationing and/or sky-high societal/private cost, people demand the government get mostly out of the health care business. Voila! Private, portable, deregulated health care. Thank you Mr. Obama.

2. If Obama gets everything he wants and conservative predictions come true, and with the help of talk radio and the internet, not available in 1980, conservatives can come roaring back.

3. People think of Obama as FDR because they think that Bush is Hoover. Obama is both Hoover and FDR if you understand both of them to be interventionists who prolonged the depression or even caused it, in the case of Hoover. Obama, like Hoover, took a bad situation and made it much worse with protectionism and higher taxes. If Obama is perceived as such, he's toast.

4. If Bush is perceived as Hoover, and Obama succeeds in building constituencies loyal to him and his programs become permanent like Social Security, then he has a chance.

5. Obama resembles another president, Jimmy Carter. This time in foreign policy. Jimmy Carter supported Communist enemies of the United States in Ortega in Nicaragua and Castro in Cuba. It's Obama's turn to support Ortega and Castro, now (plus Chavez' Venezuela). Friends to our enemies, enemies to our friends: it's the American leftist's way.

6. Leftists have taken to saying that Sarah Palin "abandoned her post." It's a military reference, of course, and is used when a guard goes to sleep or leaves his duty, allowing, then, the enemy to exploit his absence. Since Sarah Palin was relieved by Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell, this is an asinine line of attack. Keep the tradition alive, lefties!