The Great Divide in the Democratic Party

There may be friction within the Republican Party between "moderates" and conservatives, Tea Partiers and the establishment, but it is nowhere close to the division in the Democratic Party.  Indeed, chasm exists between the President and much of the Party's base.  The President's policies have not led to an economic rebound, but rather a decent into deeper hardship, debt, and confusion.

 

Peggy Noonan of the WSJ highlights this divide in the Dems, commenting on Obama's statement about his base not having a right to be apathetic about what the upcoming elections:

At first I thought this was another example of the president's now-habitual political ineptness, his off-key-ness. You don't diss people into voting for you, you can't lecture them into love. The response from the left was fierce, unapologetic—and accusatory. Mr. Obama had let them down, he'd taken half measures. "Stop living in that bubble," shot back an activist on cable. But Jane Hamsher of the leftist blog Firedoglake saw method, not madness. She described the president's remarks as "hippie punching" and laid them to cynical strategy: "It's about setting up a narrative for who will take the blame for a disastrous election." She said Mr. Obama's comments themselves could "depress turnout."

Take the blame? Disastrous? Setting up a narrative?

Further division exists in the Congress between the Blue Dogs who support extending the Bush tax cuts and the hard-left like Pelosi and Reid.  Never mind Afghanistan where Obama has increased troops for no apparent reason other than to show he's not a complete coward while being completely inflexible on the withdrawal date next year regardless of what the situation is in the country.  The Taliban now know, as does Patreaus and other Dem politicians, that they merely need to wait out Obama before resuming their onslaught to control the country.

 

With the economy in shambles, an uncertain war, a weak foreign policy, and sliding poll numbers, Obama is leading the Democrats into oblivion.  The voters certainly know that more government is all they'll get from Obama and that strategy will only exacerbate the economy's woes.  Obama's blame game on Bush is backfiring and he has no plan to revive the US economy.  The transformational president is learning what America truly values, and it's not a progressively larger and more powerful government.