Counting un-hatched chickens

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, 30, surprised me this morning. The young conservative thinker said, “Since Barack Obama took the oath of office, the country’s leftward momentum has reversed itself. In some cases, nearly 20 years of liberal gains have been erased in 20 months. Americans are more likely to self-identify as conservative than at any point since Bill Clinton’s first term.”

Say WHAT?

The “inevitable liberal epoch,” Douthat implies, now lies in ruins, like so much smoking rubble on the ash heap of history. Now Douthat is a smart fellow. He is usually intellectually honest. And though I’m prepared to give him the benefit of doubt and assume he is basing his conclusions on something, the evidence makes no appearance in his column.

Am I getting a whiff of Simple Jack’s Potion No. 9 on Douthat’s breath? Et tu, Ross?

Then, disappointingly, Douthat launches into the familiar “It’s All Obama’s Fault” litany:

Nor have Obama’s political instincts helped him through these difficulties. Presidents always take more blame than they deserve for political misfortune, but Obama’s style has invited disillusionment. His messianic campaign raised impossible hopes (particularly among Comedy Central viewers, apparently), and he has made a habit of baldly overpromising, whether the subject is the unemployment rate or the health care bill. Obama seems as if he would have been a wonderful chief executive in an era of prosperity and consensus, when he could have given soaring speeches every week and made us all feel tingly about America. But he’s miscast as a partisan scrapper, and unpersuasive when he tries to feel the country’s economic pain.

An opportunity has opened for the Right that would have been unimaginable just two years ago — a chance to pre-empt a seemingly inevitable liberal epoch with an unexpected conservative revival. Now they just have to seize it.

Yep, Douthat has definitely been taking furtive swigs of Simple Jack’s between paragraphs. Dammit – they never should have given him that GOP flask for his birthday last year.

Fortunately, young Mr. Douthat only has a mild buzz. He concedes that the midterms “will not be as grave a defeat as many conservatives would like to think: the health care bill may yet be remembered by liberals as a victory worth the price, the demographic trends are still with the Democrats, and the Republicans will return to power unprepared to wield it.”

That’s better. On the brink of clobbering the Dems in tomorrow's midterms, I think it is safe to say that giddy Republicans, including Douthat, have fallen victim to counting the proverbial chickens before they are hatched. The hubris is understandable. But there remains a wily animal standing adjacent to the hen house, one that is continually underestimated. His name is Barack Obama, and he’s been awfully good at playing Road Runner to the GOP’s Wile E. Coyote. Beep beep.

Pass me a little bit of that Simple Jack, partner. Like Jack Nicholson says to the ghost bartender in The Shining, "Hair of the dog that bit me, Lloyd." Heh.