In my opinion this is going to take Obama down. Not because it is worse than smuggling guns across the border to Mexico, but because the left will grab onto it as an excuse to abandon Obama.
They are not wedded to the man, they are wedded to the idea of progressivism or socialism or communism. Just as the Soviet apologists used to say that communism never failed in the USSR because it was never tried, since Stalin took things ino another direction, the American left has to jettison Obama so they can say that true progressivism never was tried in the US. The easiest way to do that is to assail him for buddying up with billionaires and giving financial benefits to his supporters, since that is straight-up corruption by anyone’s definition.
I understand that John Kass is a conservative (I’m from Chicago and used to read him when I used to read the Tribune),and I am speaking more generally here about my prediction that this story is going to have legs.
I still don’t expect Obama to resign or to decline to run for re-election. I think he will torch the Democrat party to stay in office and seek vindication for his socialist agenda.
If you ask me (and I know you didn’t), I think the thing that has got him so depressed and enraged is that he grew up believing in the Cloward-Piven strategy, which argues that if we overload the system then the people will come running to the government for help and a socialist system can be imposed. Instead, it turns out that Obama “misunderestimated” the American people, who are calling instead for the jackboot of government to be lifted off of our necks. He can’t accept that, because that is the absolute strategic core of everything he has believed since young adulthood.
But, like the Chicago way, most of it will be swept under the rug, and the blame will be placed on a bunch of minor players while the real culprits will get away scott-free and rich.