Gerard Baker makes the case that Obama’s modest polling lead reveals the inherent conservatism of American political instincts:

Or put it another way: it has taken a mismanaged foreign policy that almost lost a war, a botched emergency response that almost lost a city, a Republican Party that almost lost its soul and an economic crisis that almost lost the country’s financial system to break the Republican stranglehold on the White House.

Let’s leave aside questions about the inevitability of an Obama victory. Are Baker’s accusations on the money?

As Baker notes, the U.S. didn’t lose that war. And it’s well-documented that John McCain is a big part of the reason why. McCain’s championing a winning strategy in a winning war hardly seems like a gift to Obama. Rather, it is the Iraq War itself that voters hate. But the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 enjoyed widespread bipartisan support, and if the Democrats had their way three years later, things would not have gone from bad to good, but straight to American defeat. The notion of Republicans as foreign policy blunderers stems from a few tragic, but since-corrected, mistakes that were distorted and amplified by a hostile media.

Similarly, neither the press nor the public seem to care that Hurricane Katrina was an act of nature that took out the decades-old infrastructure of a city built below sea-level. The botched response came exclusively from the municipal and state level. New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin, let the sick and elderly float to their deaths inside their own homes, while scores of empty school buses stood in parking-lots unused. The New Orleans Police Department abandoned their posts. And Louisiana’s Democratic governor Kathleen Blanco first stalled in her decision and then turned down George W. Bush’s offer to federalize the National Guard until it was too late. If the President wanted to force the Governor to accept the offer sooner, he would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act — and we can easily imagine how that would have been received.

Concerning the economic crisis, it’s a matter of public record that George W. Bush and John McCain had both called for strictly regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and were rebuffed by Congressional Democrats. More importantly, the profligate lending at the heart of the crisis cuts to the misguided core of present day Democratic philosophy. Add to this the simple unscrupulousness of Democrats who received exorbitant campaign donations from Fannie and Freddie (or who were personally entangled with members of those bodies), and it’s hard to see how the crisis can be blamed on Republicans. But as with foreign policy and Hurricane Katrina, the media found the narrative most hostile to the present administration and that became the official record.

The fact that writers as insightful as Baker take the veracity of such Republican foibles for granted says more about the country’s political constitution than do dubious poll numbers. (Baker is British, but he’s a close enough observer of U.S. politics to count as American in this context.) With a media that can’t let any bad news pass without pinning it on George W. Bush and a public that relishes the prospect of each supposed blunder, the question of our country’s political instincts seems obscured by the larger question of our country’s faith in an undeserving media elite.

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