The Obama administration and its Democratic allies started making the excuses months ago, when they first started to see the electoral tsunami headed their way. It is typical of the arrogance of the central planner that our president seems to genuinely believe that the strong majority of Americans -- who have now clearly demonstrated their opposition to his policies -- are suffering from what Friedrich Engels called false consciousness. His condescending view is that Americans who disagree with him must not understand what’s best for them.
He needs to get over it, now, because if he fails to listen to the American people and chart a more fiscally responsible course, the country is headed for an economic disaster and he is headed for a political one.
At a recent Democratic fundraiser in Boston, Obama made the false consciousness argument this way:
“And so part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared, and they have good reason to be.”
Obama has blamed groups like mine for his party’s troubles. We are, apparently, the bourgeoisie misleading the working class in his false consciousness theory of the 2010 election. He attacked us by name at least 18 times this year, most recently in Rhode Island, where he said: “We are getting snowed under by unsupervised spending, undisclosed spending through these front groups that so many of you have read about: ‘Americans for Prosperity’ and ‘Moms for Motherhood’-- that last one I made up.”
But his joke about our name ignores that prosperity depends on economic freedom, as I previously explained here in Fox News Opinion.
The American people understand this, and they made it crystal clear in the election. They weren’t misled. They weren’t deceived. They weren’t “snowed under” by advertising. The idea that somehow the election was bought is insulting to voters and a sad excuse for continuing to ignore the strong majority of American who are demanding fiscal responsibility. An excuse to ignore our fiscal problems and condemn us to slow growth that will inhibit Americans achieving all of our hopes and dreams.
President Obama was still making excuses in his post-election press conference on Wednesday. He deflected questions about the implications of the election for his far-left policy agenda, and insisted that the election had nothing to do with precisely the central policy issues voters rejected: health care, stimulus spending, and cap-and-trade energy taxes.
Obama claimed, without evidence: “we’d be misreading the election if we thought that the American people want to see us for the next two years relitigate arguments that we had over the last two years.” Then he went on to argue for, astonishingly, even more stimulus spending.
Nobody is more in denial than Speaker-un-elect Nancy Pelosi, who recently claimed “Everything was going great and all of a sudden secret money from God knows where - because they won't disclose it -- is pouring in.”
Going great? In Pelosi’s delusion, the 2009 summer of discontent never happened. The American people, in her mind, weren’t outraged that she ignored them to jam Obamacare through using procedural trickery to sidestep the Massachusetts election. Pelosi is willfully blind to that fact the American people have been in open revolt against out-of-control spending for the better part of two years. She is even actively campaigning to retain her post as House Democratic Leader. Talk about a false consciousness.
In reality, all sides were well-funded in the major policy debates running up to this election and in the election itself. Supporters of big government lavishly funded their advocacy groups (as has become the norm) while, for the first time, supporters of limited government (including our 85,000 donors) stepped up and came close to matching them.
The Democratic committees outraised Republican committees about $560 million to $497 million, while Republican candidates narrowly outraised Democrats $503 million to $465 million. In House races, the New York Times reported that Democrats and left-leaning groups outspent Republicans and right-leaning groups on television advertising $142 million to $119 million.
This cycle included well-funded parties, candidates, and groups across the political spectrum that had every opportunity to get their messages out. Every voter had an ample opportunity to hear all of the arguments and make up his or her own mind. The result was clear. Now is the time to stop making excuses and start delivering fiscal responsibility.
Mr. Kerpen is a vice president at Americans for Prosperity.
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