Obama backlash – reality or rightwing wishing?

March 26, 6:17 PMDallas Libertarian ExaminerGarry Reed

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Atlanta tea party protest against the stimulus rip-off – signs of an
Obama backlash? (AP photo)

Is an Obama backlash already in the offing as news reports and surveys suggest? Or is it just an overwrought rightwing wet dream?

Rejection from the right doesn’t count. That’s a given. Only rebellion from within the ranks counts as backlash.

The theory goes like this.

The “rich,” as defined by the Obamacrats, includes the very Yuppies, Dinks, Bobos and socially progressive Edge City citizens who breathlessly supported him. When economic reality finally sets in and the head rush of fashionability fades, they will end up repudiating the man.

But first some definitions. During the never ending campaign, the “rich” were defined as anyone making more than $250,000 a year, or $200,000 a year, or $150, 000, or $100, 000, depending on whether it was Obama’s or Biden’s lips flapping on whichever campaign stop or TV sound bite you happened to hit on. With “stimulus” and “bailout” now household words, “rich” will likely end up being closer to $50,000 a year.

While the actual acronyms used above are mostly dated today (trendy terms are dated the minute the middleclass hears them) Yuppies (young urban professionals), Dinks (young married couples with dual incomes, no kids) and Bobos (bourgeois bohemians) are the people who populate the Edge Cities of today. Even Edge City is a shopworn idiom, but it still refers to a place and a concept that endures today. It’s that ring of high-rise high density highway hemmed conglomeration of commercial and condo developments that rose up around every city in the nation, just beyond the inner suburbs but not quite into the countryside.

In the Dallas area it’s places like LBJ freeway and Plano and Collin County and Frisco and The Colony and the 114 corridor and the Las Colinas planned community.

This is where the young Obama Generation, or whatever the culture-watchers call them, live and work and play. It’s close enough to the city to catch the great restaurants and the nightlife and the pro sports venues and the concert events. It’s close enough to the country to offer bike paths and golf courses and tennis courts and riding stables and the occasional organic fruit and vegetable stand.

The country is too hick to live in. The city is too dirty. The Edge City environment keeps the fashionably leftward liberal progressive twenty- and thirty-somethings far from the downtown core of the downtrodden poor and the “ethnics” whom they profess to care so much about as long as they don’t have to actually see them.

True, the hardcore left radical Vegan-Urban Planning-Anti Sprawl-Whole Food-All Natural-Mass Transit-Planet Saving-Obsessive Recycling true believers are moving back into the core city. But they have money, sporty cars, digital gadgets, and will be living safely in condo compounds and downtown developments effectively walled off from those very panhandlers and homeless inhabitants they philosophically empathize over.

These, proffer the pundits, were the voters who formed the core of the Obama bandwagon. They tipped the political scales. Their choice was to vote for a gruff old gray-domed conservative war bird or a fashionably young socially conscious politically correct black guy. Duh! No prob, dude.

So back to the Obama backlash theory: Once these Obama-bangers begin to discover that they, not just the Palin promoters and the business bores, form part of the vilified “rich” class, and start feeling the pinch of Obama’s taxes draining their comfy lifestyles away like a sucking chest wound, they’ll rebel.

They, after all, never thought of themselves as rich. They just thought of themselves as normal. They’re young, affluent, professional, successful, socially conscious, progressive, and have disposable incomes.

Or had disposable incomes. Now the government will be disposing of it for them.

And so they rebel.

But they’ll never become Republicans. Or even conservatives. Such is much too unhip for them.

So what, then?

So maybe they’ll wake up and smell the fair trade coffee. The only people on earth who will allow them to pursue their chosen lifestyles uninterrupted, untaxed, uncoerced, are the libertarians.

So maybe the Obama backlash is actually an overwrought libertarian wet dream?