I think George Will may be just a tad optimistic, but he does have a point: Obama will implode. It remains to be seen if the so-called “conservatives” will be able to take advantage of the implosion. Says Will:
Happy days are not here again, but they are coming for conservatives. Barack Obama — with the lowest approval rating (according to Gallup, 50%, four points lower than that of the National Rifle Association) of any re-elected president when inaugurated since the Second World War — has a contradictory agenda certain to stimulate a conservative revival.
First, there’s the increasingly obvious false meme of global warming. Will is banking on Obama’s continued pushing on this failed meme despite increasingly persuasive evidence that man has little to do with changes in the climate, nor that those “changes” are all that significant and outside the norm: “The absurdity of the Kyoto approach … is now obvious even to most former enthusiasts.”
However, Obama will charge ahead anyway, true to his totalitarian ideology: If you don’t at least try, nothing will happen. Well, nothing is likely to happen even as he charges ahead. Writes Will: “Obama can propose cutting U.S. fossil fuel emissions (just 16% of the global total) with a carbon tax or cap-and-trade scheme, but Congress will pass neither.”
He takes pains to blow up the meme:
The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins, who has concisely posed the actual climate policy choice (“How much should we spend on climate change in order to have no effect on climate change?”), has noted that although 2012 was 2.13 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than 2011, “2008, in the contiguous U.S., was two degrees cooler than 2006.”
And “2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were all cooler than 1998 by a larger margin than 2012 was hotter than 1998.”
And Obama’s anti-energy agenda is fraught with danger as well. It’s increasingly obvious that a large part of the economic recovery is due to growth in energy extraction, i.e., natural gas and oil shale development through fracking. Notes Will:
Obama’s wariness about the pipeline suggests that he subscribes to some environmentalists’ stupendously weird theory: If the pipeline is not built to carry oil from the (supposedly dangerous) development of Canadian tar sands, Canada will leave those sands undeveloped rather than sell the oil to China.
And then there’s the increasingly obvious failure of Obamacare. The closer we get to it the worse it looks: “Many businesses are avoiding hiring a 50th employee, or are replacing full-time employees with those working fewer than 30 hours a week, to avoid ObamaCare’s costly requirements regarding provision of health insurance. Some colleges and universities are reducing to 29 the number of hours adjunct professors can teach, which is condign punishment for those professors — most of them, surely — who favored ObamaCare.” (my emphasis)
And then there’s the economy. Will concludes that regulatory burdens and subsidies have kept 14 million people from working: “more than the combined workforces of 18 states.”
We’ll see if the stumbling bumbling “conservative” Republicans will be able to make anything out of these. But at least Will sees an opportunity to do so.
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