Casablanca Moment

Liam Julian, writing at National Review Online, describes a feeling of deja vu all over again. It seems Obama’s aides are desperately trying to tamp down the hopes of their followers regarding change.

There is a famous scene in Casablanca in which Captain Louis Renault, searching for justification for ordering the immediate closure of Rick’s Café Américain, discovers it in a memorable line: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” Of course, Captain Renault is not shocked at all, having long been a fixture at Rick’s backroom roulette table.

What’s old is new. We read in the New York Times that President-Elect Obama is now shocked, shocked to find that Americans are reacting so emotionally to his win. His aides, according to the Times, are “startled, if gratified, by the jubilation that greeted the news of Mr. Obama’s victory” and are “looking to temper hopes that [Obama] would be able to solve the nation’s problems or fully reverse Bush administration policies quickly and easily.”

Well, now. That’s odd.

Tough to recall other instances over the past two years when Obama tried so diligently to “temper hopes,” (inflaming hopes was his thing, I thought) or to communicate to the thousands — sometimes hundreds of thousands — who attended his rallies the honest truth that politics is a daunting and unglamorous field in which bone-dry policy papers, not soppy tears, are the true beginnings of change.

Instead, Obama stuck to bits like this: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” But today, his staff claims to be startled, startled that their man’s preaching hit home.

Soaring campaign rhetoric gets sucked into the intake of the jet engine of harsh political reality. This is one of the reasons I have been telling folks not to panic, not to start up a circular firing squad. Obama’s aides are clearly facing the harsh reality that Obama simply can not possibly deliver all that he promised. If the Republican party spends the next two years diligently building a strong, modern message based solidly in the bedrock principles of conservativism and runs very, very hard at the state levels, a huge turnaround can be made.

It is utterly certain that the Pelosi-Reid-Obama triumvirate will overreach – badly – and provoke a backlash. It is also utterly certain that Obama’s policies in the next two years will badly disillusion his true believers.

The next two years, concentrate at the state levels (this includes House and Senate), the two after that, aim higher. But first, get that message put together. And pull together as a group. I’m betting we’ll have plenty of disillusioned former Obama supporters hoping for a change real soon.