The year 2012 saw the triumph of cold reality over pie-in-the-sky dreams.
Barack Obama in 2008 won an election on an upbeat message of change in the hope that the first black president would provide a redemptive moment in American history. Four years later, the fantasies are gone. In continuing dismal economic times, President Obama ran for re-election neither on his first-term achievements — Obamacare, bailouts, financial stimuli and Keynesian mega-deficits — nor on more utopian promises.
Instead, Mr. Obama’s campaign systematically reduced his rival, Wall Street financier Mitt Romney, to a conniving, felonious financial pirate who did dastardly things, from letting the uninsured die to putting his dog Seamus in a cage on top of the family car.
Mr. Obama once mused that he wished to be the mirror image of Ronald Reagan — successfully coaxing America to the left as the folksy Reagan had to the right. Instead, 2012 taught us that a calculating Mr. Obama is more a canny Richard Nixon, who likewise used any means necessary to be re-elected on the premise that his rival would be even worse. We know what eventually happened to the triumphant, pre-Watergate Nixon after November 1972. What will be the second-term wages of Mr. Obama’s winning ugly?
The so-called “fiscal cliff” offers more examples of 2012 dreams giving way to reality. Mr. Obama appears to be getting his long-promised taxes on the rich. So what? There are not enough caricatured “millionaires and billionaires” even to make a dent in his administration’s fifth consecutive $1 trillion-plus deficit.
Read more: http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/1/the-year-when-dreams-died-2012-instructed-on-the-d/#ixzz2GpX7YMDc
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