Looking back at the historical record, Jonah Goldberg reminds National Review print-edition readers that “Barack Obama ran for president insisting that his chief opponent ‘is not other candidates. It’s cynicism.'”
After three years in office? The president appears to have mended fences with his erstwhile adversary.
President Obama and his defenders claim that he has failed in his efforts to begin an era of new politics solely because his opponents refused to grant him everything he wanted. The hubris of the argument is breathtaking. The president’s expectation that in a properly functioning constitutional democracy he would win every battle bespeaks an ignorance and an arrogance the likes of which we haven’t seen in the Oval Office for a century.
And now our president has become a champion for cynicism. His triangulating proposals are designed entirely to conceal his desires and priorities. He’s streamlining government, promising savings that amount to 0.0081 percent of the 2012 budget. He once campaigned on unity and idealism, and is now in every breath spitting the bile of demonization and disunity.
