Defective Hardware

I pointed out earlier that Obama's rebuke of voters for their "fear and anger" is really a scolding directed at independents and people "in the middle" rather than conservatives. Now John Podhoretz points out that the Democrat base is explicitly getting balled out by the Vice President and President Obama himself.

It's odd, to put it mildly, that the veep chose to go to New Hampshire on Monday and declare that Democrats disappointed with the president should "buck up" and "stop whining."

Vice presidents are at times tasked with issuing direct broadsides against enemies while the top guy stays above the fray. But never before has a vice president served as an attack dog against his own party's voters.

One might have chalked up these wild words to Biden's propensity to speak incautiously. But then Rolling Stone released excerpts of an interview conducted 11 days ago with Obama in which the president said almost exactly the same thing: "People need to shake off this lethargy," he insisted. "People need to buck up."

He went on to offer a prospective denunciation of anyone who'd voted for him in 2008 but might fail to turn out to vote in congressional races in 2010: "It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election."

Even worse, the president was promising he'd judge such "irresponsible" people harshly when it came to their seriousness of purpose: "If people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place."

I agree with Mr. Podhoretz that this goes against the proper way to view voters, i.e., people deciding who to hire for a job. But I think it's even worse than what he imagines when he suggests that Obama views himself as his voters' "boss". I think he sees them as gears in a damaged machine, and he thinks if he bangs the machine around a little it will do what he wants. Fortunately for us, he is not Fonzie. And these ain't no Happy Days.