The Emperor Has No Close

Four years ago, candidate Obama closed the deal with the American people by promising hope and change, peace as the Long War continued (is it our fault the jihadis still want to kill us?), the end of partisan gridlock, and prosperity in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Today, as President Obama tries to close the deal on 4 more years of his vision of guiding America to European style social democracy, he finds the voters less eager to believe in Unicorns:

Round about this time in the election cycle, a presidential challenger finds himself on the stump and posing a simple test to voters: "Ask yourself – are you better off now than you were four years ago?"

But, in fact, you don't need to ask yourself, because the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances has done it for you. Between 2007 and 2010, Americans' median net worth fell 38.8 percent – or from $126,400 per family to $77,300 per family. Oh, dear. As I mentioned a few months ago, when readers asked me to recommend countries they could flee to, most of the countries worth fleeing to Americans can no longer afford to live in.

Which means we'll just have to fix things here. How likely is Barack Obama to do this?

Mark Steyn doesn't think the President can make the case that he can do this to a nation that no longer believes that fake Greek columns make a community organizer an emperor whose tastes and policies are made of the finest rules and regulations:

Self-pity is never an attractive quality, and in an elected head of state even less so. Obama whines that his opponents say it's all his fault. One can argue about whose fault it is, but not, as my colleagues at National Review pointed out, whose responsibility it is: It's his. He's the only president we have. And he made things worse. He increased the national debt by some 70 percent, and what do we have to show for it? No dams, no railroads, no moon shots. Just government, and bureaucracy, and regulation, unto national bankruptcy.

This is a problem for the President. But it is not insurmountable. President Obama has the power of incumbency, a sympathetic media (whose annoyance with him seems only to reflect their frustration that he isn't better at persuading people to follow him), and legions of the "reality-based community" who live in their own private Idaho where George W. Bush can still be blamed for everything that is wrong. These supporters truly believe they are better off now than they were 4 years ago--if you factor in how much worse we'd be if Bush policies had continued the last four years.