Commentary: Democrats and Carnival Barkers Are Going Extinct

Remember the gravelly voiced woman in Cleveland who bragged about having an “Obama phone” during the 2012 Presidential Election Cycle?  “Everybody in Cleveland got an Obama phone!” is what she told a reporter.  She was a member of a labor union and at a campaign rally expressing her gratitude for the President playing Santa Claus.  Conservative media aired it so often you would’ve thought it would’ve turned the tide of the election.  Liberal media hunkered down and claimed the phones were a Reagan era program, which is partly true.  President Reagan attempted to secure old fashioned land line service for people in isolated pockets who still lacked telephones a century after the introduction of the device.  Democrats expanded the program to give telephones to the “needy” while you and I still pay usury fees to providers.  I cite the story not so much to rub salt in any wounds but because I think we missed something larger.

The woman in Cleveland was a person of color.  People we would define as “black” constitute about 13 percent of the population.  In 2008 it’s said they gave President Obama his margin of victory.  He also picked up the lion’s share of the Latino vote and a good chunk of the Asian, Jewish and Muslim voting blocks.  The latter two are no longer a given for Democrats and Muslims altogether may boycott future elections or create their own slates of candidates.  Which is bad news for Democrats.  And so is the fact next year’s Democrat Party nominee for President will be white.  Back in 2009 as Mr. Obama opened his Presidency with a unified government (his party controlled both Houses of Congress) we were offered the spin that Democrats would have a 30 year lock on all major offices if not permanent majority.  I was somewhat skeptical.  Just a few years before we were hearing about a Republican ascendancy scheduled to last for decades, however.  What if the Obama years were just a blip in the GOP Century?  Mr. Obama’s appeal to minorities was as obvious as John Kennedy’s appeal to Catholics.  He was a first.  Kennedy has been dead 53 years and no other Catholic has mounted the Presidential throne.  Our current leader had a meteoric rise but his own party has been home for many years to names such as Clyburn, Waters, Lewis and Cummings and party leaders haven’t seen fit to give those faces a larger role.  As for Latinos, they are a mostly conservative block when it comes to religion and values and just because a family has been in what is now New Mexico for 400 years doesn’t mean they’ve an affinity for fence jumping across the southern border.

Media called Obama cool and portrayed him as a jazz musician on a riff and running circles around his competition.  Now as the Middle East burns and he parlays with Iran his image in media and his own party suffers.  Perhaps if they had been less interested in cool and more interested in competence we wouldn’t be here.  Obama’s failures cast a shadow over affirmative action as it appears media paved his way not because he was ready or most qualified but because they wanted to check a box for federal compliance.

The other day a friend sent me a link from American Thinker and it calculated Electoral Votes in 2016.  As you can see here the country has been trending Republican at the local and state levels for many years and Congress is now a GOP bastion if not exactly right-of-center and, yet.  The party is the sum of its parts and the once rowdy Tea Party Brigades have slowly been taking over at county levels.  Despite media caterwauling and calumnies against the people who’ve kept this country treading water there is hope of an upward takeover versus top-down management and it won’t be an Alinskyite Revolution.

The party of the President gets blamed for economic woes and foreign policy embarrassments.  By liberal logic if it’s racist to criticize Obama then the man and his media sycophants are anti-Semites.  To top it all off the left is going to learn shortly hell hath no fury like an economy in flames.  October 2008 could look like a church picnic by this time next year.  The day is coming when the free phones are no more and the government trough is empty.  The Democrats are out of tricks and about to go extinct.