Politics Is Not a Soap Opera

It is not just that Americans are beginning to lose their health-care plans in droves, with tens of millions staring at the prospect of prohibitively expensive coverage that will force them to tighten their already cinched belts, further depressing our stagnant economy. A jaw-dropping 91 million working-age Americans have dropped out of the labor force. That number is significantly bigger than the entire population of Germany (82 million) — the country with Europe’s largest, and the world’s fourth-largest, economy.
While our nation appears to atrophy before our eyes, Obama is enabling the nuclearization of Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism. As National Review’s editors detail, China senses Obama’s indifference and moves aggressively, hegemonically, in the Pacific. Putin is reeling in Ukraine and muscling his way into Egypt, having taken Obama’s measure and found no obstacles to his Soviet-reconstruction project. The president’s delirious base may convince themselves, assuming they follow these developments at all, that America must be at fault or that it’s nothing a few “Coexist” bumper stickers can’t address. But our enemies do not wish to coexist, and they are on the march.
In an increasingly perilous world, politics has to be our response, not our entertainment. Today’s events are not episodes. They are threats, foreign and domestic; and they are no longer on the horizon — they are clear and present dangers. Politics is how we perceive our national interests and take effective action, not how the president manages to weather storms of his own making.
The star of a soap opera can alter his character with every new script. In real life, no one is a fraud on Monday and Wednesday but a pillar of rectitude if you catch him the rest of the week. In real life, it is no surprise that the guy whose autobiography is chock-full of fiction turns out to be a full-time charlatan, that the guy who gets indignant at the “birthers” retained an agent who represented that “he was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister.”
In real life, the guy who looks you in the eye and promises that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan, period” can be expected to tell you, cross his heart, the Benghazi massacre was caused by an anti-Muslim video, and that everything possible was done to save Americans under siege. He can also be expected to run an administration that assures you, even as things fall apart, that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate, largely secular organization committed to democracy; that Obamacare is not a tax and will dramatically reduce your premiums while cutting spending; that we are experiencing the most transparent administration in history; that the criminally reckless Fast and Furious program was begun by the Bush administration; that the president has cut spending and debt even as he piles trillions more on our tab; that he has excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs; or that an “interim agreement” that explicitly allows Iran to enrich uranium — and that anticipates a final accord establishing a permanent uranium “enrichment program” for Iran — somehow does not recognize an Iranian right to enrich uranium and so portend a revolutionary jihadist regime possessed of nuclear bombs.

Though never desirable, presidential fraud might be tolerable if this were 1995 again. But it is not — our times are grave. Unlike the days of the Clinton bender, the question is not how the president is going to survive another fine mess he’s gotten himself into. The question is how we are going to survive this president.