Battlegrounds of Resentment

STAUNTON, Va. – Whether it is called General Lee Highway, as in Virginia, or Molly Pitcher Highway, as in Pennsylvania, the lives and economic strain along U.S. Route 11 tell of a country’s disappointment with Washington – specifically, with President Obama.

The north–south highway, created in 1926, extends more than 1,600 miles from New York to Louisiana. It is one of those blue lines you find on a gas-station road atlas, obscured by the bold red lines of the dominant interstates.

Woodrow Wilson’s home is along this road in Virginia, James Buchanan’s in Pennsylvania.

In between those presidential homes is a very critical battleground in next year’s election, along with a whole lot of resentment that began building early in 2009.

“I used to be a Democrat,” said a quiet older gentleman who declined to give his name, sitting with his wife outside Wilson’s home. “I come from a long line of Democrats. I have to say I couldn’t be more disappointed in this president’s job so far.”

Not so long ago, populist-Democrat rhetoric was popular here and farther up the road, in West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Americans along such roads all across the country are struggling economically. They are consumed with uncertainty. And they have tuned-out the president.

Obama had a rocky start with American voters outside major cities almost immediately, according to Chris Kelley, a political science professor at Miami University of Ohio.

“Think back again to 2009 – where did he begin to get in trouble?” Kelley asks. “By engaging in hyper-government activism to reform health care, save the environment, make government transparent, while rarely to never talking about jobs.”

Now, Democrats’ strongholds in states such as Pennsylvania and Virginia are quietly walking away from him.

Out here, the sting of dissatisfaction pulls people away from Obama. Yet it doesn’t exactly pull them to the far right; many have settled comfortably at center-right.

Late last week, the president hit a new low in Gallup’s tracking poll, with 38 percent approval. He blamed “certain” members of Congress for that slide in popularity.

“I have to say, I am tired of the constant blame on everyone but himself,” said John Dattilio, strolling here on a summer evening with his wife and children as they balanced melting ice cream cones.

So far, he has blamed the stagnant economy on ATMs, ditches, Slurpees, corporate-jet owners, the Tea Party, Republicans, Japan’s earthquake, the Arab Spring, the Arab Summer, George Bush, and “fat-cat” Wall Street something-or-others. The kitchen sink may be next.

His numbers are tumbling in the critical battleground states of Pennsylvania, Virginia Florida, North Carolina and New Hampshire – states he must win in 2012.

RealClearPolitics crunched the numbers based on the electoral-college vote: Total from states giving Obama 51 percent or higher approval, 166; from states at 49 percent or lower, 320.

Here is what White House strategists don't get: As Americans struggle with uncertainty, they believe Obama is not providing real solutions – and they also believe he is part of the partisan bickering, or is using his “bully pulpit” to instigate it.

Here is what strategists on both sides don't get about the 2012 election: It is not the same as the 2010 midterms.

That previous cycle was a collective outcry to lessen the power of one party and to halt the president’s policies. The next cycle is personal; it is about your home, your pocketbook, your family, and ensuring your future is less uncertain.

When an earthquake hit the Eastern Seaboard last week, presidential spokesman Josh Earnest said of Obama, who was golfing at the time: “(He) didn't feel the earthquake today.”

One reason why the president vacations on Martha’s Vineyard, which only the upper class can afford, and not in back-roads America, is that up there you can maintain the everything’s-alright bubble and the crowds adore you.

“I have NO liberal friends. Liberals are NOT and NEVER WILL BE my friends.”

I’ve tried not to think this way, but I have to agree with you in large measure. When people who are supposed to be my ‘friends’ support a government that will hurt me and my children, because they think it will benefit them, they have declared that they don’t really care what happens to me, my family, and those who think like me. They are thus, not really my friends. I have never in my life felt more isolated and separate from what is being featured as mainstream in my own country. Yes, I am resentful.

Be cheerful like Reagan. If they're not hardcore marxists, they have the potential to be converted and see the light.

The hamlets, once-thriving towns, and rural communities along Route 11 are not that different from many other communities along long and short roads in America. The gentleman who spoke of his affiliation with the Democrat Party was not that different from my father, or from many other citizens who never imagined that one day their Party would take a sharp turn left and leave forever the ideas they and their fathers thought it held deeply.

To paraphrase an old automobile commercial, that left turn meant even so-called 'blue dog' Democrats are "'not your father's' 'blue dog' democrats." Many of the seniors who grew up with their fathers' idea of Democratic philosophy believed themselves to be something entirely different than the Party which dominates today. They did not subscribe to European "socialist" ideology.

Many, even now, may not have paid close attention to the manner in which their father's Party has been "transformed" into what is euphemistically called a "progressive" philosophy, when, in fact, it fits another description entirely.

Winston Churchill, in 1908, in a speech entitled, "Liberalism and Socialism," laid out, with amazing clarity, the distinctions between the two and the dangers to liberty of the latter.

To so-called Independents and remaining "blue dogs" a reading of this speech might shock some into reality in understanding what is happening to individual liberty and the liberty of this Republic.

Another source for such analytical definitions of the two philosophies can be found in the Liberty Fund Library is "A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation," edited by Thomas Mackay (1849 - 1912), Chapter 1, excerpted final paragraphs from Edward Stanley Robertson's essay:

I.44
"I have put the question, how Socialism would treat the residuum of the working class and of all classes—the class, not specially vicious, nor even necessarily idle, but below the average in power of will and in steadiness of purpose. I have intimated that such persons, if they belong to the upper or middle classes, are kept straight by the fear of falling out of class, and in the working class by positive fear of want. But since Socialism purposes to eliminate the fear of want, and since under Socialism the hierarchy of classes will either not exist at all or be wholly transformed, there remains for such persons no motive at all except physical coercion. Are we to imprison or flog all the 'ne'er-do-wells'?
I.46
"Freedom is the most valuable of all human possessions, next after life itself. It is more valuable, in a manner, than even health. No human agency can secure health; but good laws, justly administered, can and do secure freedom. Freedom, indeed, is almost the only thing that law can secure. Law cannot secure equality, nor can it secure prosperity. In the direction of equality, all that law can do is to secure fair play, which is equality of rights but is not equality of conditions. In the direction of prosperity, all that law can do is to keep the road open. That is the Quintessence of Individualism, and it may fairly challenge comparison with that Quintessence of Socialism we have been discussing. Socialism, disguise it how we may, is the negation of Freedom. That it is so, and that it is also a scheme not capable of producing even material comfort in exchange for the abnegations of Freedom, I think the foregoing considerations amply prove." EDWARD STANLEY ROBERTSON

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