Combs: Advice for Obama

This year's election has returned Republicans and Democrats to almost precisely where they were in 1992. An unpopular Bush is struggling to maintain his dignity while preparing to vacate the premises; both houses of Congress are run by convincing majorities of Democrats; and a new and largely untried Democrat president-elect, a generation younger than his predecessor, is fixing to take up residence.
There the similarities end, however. The president-elect is faced with crises Bill Clinton never had to fool with. The earlier Bush managed to wrap up both his foreign wars quickly, mopping up Panama and Iraq almost before folks got used to the notion that we were at war. The brief recession of 1991-92 had been mild and was pretty much over.
What's more, there's a generational component that may figure in broadly to tie Obama's hands.
When Clinton came to Washington he, like Obama today, had a Democrat Congress. But unlike Obama, Clinton had a lot in common with that Congress. They were, by and large, products of the hippie culture of the 1960s. They studied under the same Marxist professors, attended the same protests, used the same drugs, went to the same rock concerts and poetry readings, traveled the country together in the same Volkswagens, singing the same protest songs.
They all shared the same class resentments and belief in a world united by banning all private property and private enterprise.
While Clinton's memory has largely faded into a haze of dope smoke and free love, his counterparts in Congress are still, by and large, running Congress. They are still committed to the agenda they graduated college with back in '68, still bitterly angry at "the Man," still committed to nihilism -- the belief that everything must be destroyed to make the world a paradise, that a utopia would emerge from the ashes of the revolution. Their philosophy has not been altered or informed by 40 years of real world experience because, for the most part, they have had none. They went directly from college to Washington.
In short, they are committed to a religion whose tenets, like those of any religion, cannot be seen or felt, cannot be scientifically observed, which must be taken on faith. At the core of that faith is the belief in a coming apocalypse and a holy war.
Because that religion is fairly new and has no central priesthood, the rallying cry of the holy war changes from "Power to the People," one day to "No blood for oil" or "Save the circus donkeys" or "Free healthcare for sub-prime borrowers" the next.
These are the folks who seized control of the federal government after Nixon's crackup and managed, in six short years of unmasked contempt and loathing for the American people, to so fully alienate the electorate that Ronald Reagan was swept into power almost without even trying.
And these are the same congressional leaders who, within minutes of Clinton's inauguration, gave us vast tax-increases, "don't ask, don't tell," NAFTA and permanent most-favored nation trading status for China.
These folks now are having a fine time imagining that they have a mandate due to the Obama landslide. They do not have a mandate; Obama has. Americans voted for Obama, not because they have seen the error of their ways and now desperately want to see equality of outcomes for all by force, but because they, once again, were flamboozled by a charismatic carney promising to be a new kind of politician, a uniter, not a divider.
Obama won the election for two important reasons: One, the Republicans deserved to lose. Two, his story is so compelling that people the world over and throughout America wanted to see him succeed.
Congressional Republicans are now uttering pathetic platitudes about how they hope the president will seek bipartisan solutions and reach across the aisle. That is, of course, hogwash. They have made themselves into an irrelevant minority and the new president should treat the as such.
Now, as MoveOn.org and all the Nancy Pelosis and Harry Reeds of the world issue their demands to deliver a coup de grace in the class war, it is up to Obama to rein them in. He must establish himself as the leader of his party.
He can have the most successful administration in decades if he can grasp that the voters' rejection of Republicans was not an endorsement of 1960s radicalism.
The electorate rejected yet another Vietnam vet because the older ones have never trusted that generation, and the younger ones have matured into leadership. Come January, we will have our first Generation-X president.
He has a mandate to preside as a Democrat and that's what he should do. In the process, he should reject the politics of rage and all the failed, mid-20th century nihilism that animates Congressional Democrats, because the voters never have, and do not now, want it.