Obama after the Deluge

Victor Davis Hanson reports that  Washington pundits have started playing a new game. Assuming that his presidency will be roundly repudiated next month, how will Barack Obama react? Link here.

Will he become Jimmy Carter in 1979 or Bill Clinton in 1995?

Those of us who accept Nassim Taleb’s theory of black swans know that the answer must be: none of the above. See his book: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility".

One thing we know about the future, counsels Taleb, is that what will be is not at all what we expect. Trying to use the past to predict future is a fundamental mistake.

This means that what will happen is what we least expect to happen… a black swan.

But before we plunge into the uncharted waters of the future, let’s take a quick dip in the present.

Recently, something extraordinary has been happening at the Obama White House. Every one of the president’s most important and powerful advisers has resigned. They have, in the metaphor everyone is using, abandoned ship.

From Peter Orzag to Christina Romer to Larry Summers to Rahm Emanuel to James Jones… everyone has quit. Whether they were forced out or had simply had enough, they have departed precipitously. Most of them seem to have just packed up and left.

At the very least, this means that Barack Obama does not inspire very much loyalty.

Not one of his most important White House appointees has even seen fit to wait until after the mid-term election.

Those who have worked most closely with President Obama seem to be trying to tell the world that they have no confidence in his ability to lead.

Having spoken with White House insiders, Democratic pollster and Obama critic Douglas Schoen recently stated that his top advisers believe that Obama does not get what the electorate is telling him.

Oblivious, obtuse, self-involved, this is the man who is going to lead the country for the next two years.

How will he react to a Republican victory? How will he react to the national will for reconciliation and the voter’s wish to roll back his agenda? How will he respond to the cries for freedom and the wish for economic recovery?

In my view, he might initially pay lip service to the election results. But then he will come out fighting. When Obama suggested that a Republican victory will bring hand-to-hand combat to the Congress, I think that he was announcing that he would react to an election defeat by declaring war on the legislative branch.

Call it a divide and conquer strategy. Obama will try to divide the nation even more than it already is: to set black against white, labor against capital, Hispanics against Anglos, blue state against red state.

When bad things happen to the economy, as they almost inevitably will, Obama will be at the ready to blame the Republican Congress.

When the Congress tries to roll back his signature achievements, he will veto their bills.

At a time when the nation needs a government that can create the conditions for economic growth, Obama will turn the governing process into an enduring conflict: the forces of light against the forces of darkness; the forces of good against the forces of evil; the forces of justice against the forces of intolerance.

Do you think that this is an impossible, overly pessimistic scenario? Perhaps so. But if Nassim Taleb taught us anything, he taught us that what we least expect is what is most likely to happen.

At the very least, allow me to confess that I hope I am wrong about this.

Obama is not going to learn overnight how to lead. He has never been much concerned about creating the conditions that would foster economic growth or job creation. He is probably not even capable of registering defeat as a vote of no confidence in him.

Barack Obama does know how to create a narrative, to make the country over so it will fit it into the terms of his narrative. He will bait and goad the Republicans; he will ignore or denounce their ideas; he will call them out and shout them down. And he will veto everything they propose.

The Republican party will quickly discover that governing with Obama is not like governing with Bill Clinton.

Obama will not be especially bothered by the fact that the economy will most likely enter a new leg down of the recession, because he will be able to blame the Republican Congress.

Unencumbered by a Democratic Congress and pragmatic, experienced advisers, he will become more and more demagogic.

Most people think that the economy will recover in 2011. The stock market seems to believe that 2011 will be another 1995. Some even fear that an economic recovery will propel Obama to victory in 2012.

But what if it does not recover? What if the markets are buying the prospect of a Republican takeover but are getting ready to sell the news? What will happen when the markets realize that Obama has no intention of becoming a new Bill Clinton?

What if the economy takes a turn for the worse? Wouldn’t a demagogic president see a suffering nation as an opportunity to teach people how to bring hand-to-hand combat to the streets of America?