Democrat Disillusionment

It's a regrettable fact of human nature that ridicule often works so well against one's opponents. Ridicule sounds cool and sophisticated to the masses, it saves the ridiculer the trouble of formulating arguments and saves his audience the trouble of thinking. That's why Karl Marx (and, sadly, Martin Luther in his later years) used it with great gusto against his opponents, it's why Saul Alinsky recommends in Rules for Radicals that it be used against one's political foes, and why Richard Dawkins calls for atheists to use it against Christians.

It's also a fact of political science that when the entertainment media starts making fun of a political figure, using ridicule against him or her, that figure is pretty much done for. Until relatively recently President Obama has had the media breezes at his back. Like the legendary dolphin ferrying the drowning child to safety, the media has carried Mr. Obama on its shoulders throughout his presidency, protecting him from scandal after scandal and blunder after blunder. No Republican would ever have gotten such deferential treatment and such uncritical press as has this one.

This, though, seems to be slowly coming to an end. Disillusionment seems to be growing among Democrats, who, like a young maiden awaking on the morning after a drunken seduction, are beginning to realize they've given themselves, body and soul, to someone who, had they been sober, would never have been allowed to first base.

The tip of the spear of ridicule, or it's less unkind cousin, satire, is often late-night television, and there President Obama is starting to feel the barbs. Jimmy Fallon's joke is funny but the reaction of the audience should be very disconcerting to the White House:

Actually, the growing disenchantment among rank and file Democrats is not just with the president, but with the party as a whole. A black Chicago pastor, admittedly a conservative but the leader of a large, mostly black congregation, recently made this observation:

We have a large, disproportionate number of people who are impoverished. We have a disproportionate number of people who are incarcerated, we have a disproportionate number of people who are unemployed, the educational system has totally failed, and all of this primarily has been under Democratic regimes in our neighborhoods. So, the question for me becomes, how can our neighborhoods be doing so awful and so bad when we’re so loyal to this party who is in power? It’s a matter of them taking complete advantage of our vote.

Nor has it been lost on people that cities like Baltimore, Detroit, New York, Chicago and numerous others, cities fraught with corruption, violence, decay and joblessness, have all been run for generations by Democrats. Apparently, more and more African-Americans are beginning to ask how much worse the Republicans can be than the Democrats who have given their communities little more than drugs, high murder rates, poverty, poor schools, and family disintegration.