President Barack Obama and his advisers, who had to do a rushed rewrite of the State of the Union following the victory of Republican Scott Brown in the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race, have evidently taken a page from the script of “Dallas” in their efforts to revive his flagging presidency.
It ranks as one of the strangest moments in American television history, the May 1986 episode of “Dallas” when a supposedly dead Bobby Ewing showed up in his wife’s shower.
The previous year, Patrick Duffy had left the long-running series and was killed off in a fiery auto crash. The show’s 10th season began to flounder in the ratings, and the producers and CBS managed to lure Duffy back.
But how to resolve the fact that he had died at the end of Season No. 9? Bring him back at the end of Season No. 10 and explain at the beginning of Season No. 11 that the previous season had all been wife Pam having a bad dream.
And now the president is trying to convince his fellow Democrats and the nation that 2009 and the political debacle it became was really just a bad dream, the fault of average citizens who didn’t get “The Message.”
Obama’s 2009 address to Congress focused on his broad, far-reaching social agenda for the nation, specifically his plans for a far-reaching, top-to-bottom “reform” of the nation’s health care system. The reach of government grew as Washington bought General Motors and Chrysler and all but took over the nation’s financial institutions.
His fellow Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and would soon gain the magical 60th seat in the U.S. Senate, giving them a filibuster-proof majority.
The sky was the limit, they and the president thought, but their overreaching soon brought them back to Earth with a resounding thud.
Actually, a series of thuds: the Republican gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey, Scott Brown’s stunning win in Massachusetts to replace the late Ted Kennedy, plummetting approval ratings, a jobless rate of 10 percent and a resurgent GOP that just might snatch control of Congress this November in the mid-term elections.
Oh, of course, the president blamed himself for his administration’s woes — We didn’t effectively communicate with the American public, he said — but the subconscious message was “The public was just too dense to understand the good we’re going to do for them.”
No, Mr. President, the American people know full well what your administration has tried to do — exponentially expand government’s reach — and have said “No.” They don’t want you to push forward with your flawed agenda; rather, they want you to live up to your campaign promises and change how Washington does business ... for the better. Not just business as usual.
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