Optimism and America

Here's a fascinating post from a right-wing "patriot":

My take: At least Jimmy Carter was "smart" enough to fool the voters with his toothy grin and pleasant countenance during most of the long 1976 campaign season. Obama, and for that matter his wife Michelle ("for the first time in my adult life, I'm proud to be an American"), have clearly not done so. They have turned "America has problems, and we can fix them," which is of course a common theme and perfectly defensible, into "America as a nation has declined," which is much harder to defend, and certainly harder for a fundamentally optimistic nation to swallow, especially when that message is delivered to a 7 year-old girl.

This explains why Old Media is giving Obama's statement the near-silent treatment.

He's responding to an off-the-cuff statement from Obama to a child that

"America is …, uh, is no longer, uh … what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don’t want that future for my children."

It seems to me that if "optimism" means always saying that America has never fallen or failed, then Ronald Reagan was an inveterate pessimist. His campaign in 1980 was premised on the notion that America had objectively declined as a nation under the hapless presidency of Carter. His optimism was about how to improve that. How, after all, could it have been "morning in America" if it had never been night?

Obama's position is exactly Reagan's in this respect.

He represents a repudiation of the past eight years in which America has clearly declined, its standing in the world reduced more dramatically than under any previous modern president. When the American president has shown contempt for the rule of law, when he launched a war without UN approval because of pressing evidence that turned out not to be true, when he mismanaged that war grievously for years, when he removed America from compliance with the Geneva Conventions, when he added over $32 trillion to the debt the next generation has to pay and turned a surplus into an annual deficit of half a trillion dollars, when he has squandered eight years without leading on the question of non-carbon energy, when he has revealed that his administration is not able to respond to a historic natural disaster ... then, yes, this country has declined. More precipitously than at any time since the Carter debacle - who at least was able to combine international fecklessness with a historic peace agreement in the Middle East and a stronger record on human rights.

To vote for the party that gave us the past eight years is not optimism. It's clinical denial.