Obama Won. What Happened To The Liberal Honeymoon?

The World According To Will
The Will Anderson Show M-F 6pm-8pm on 800 and 1230AM and 106.5FM WBHP

One of the delights of hosting a radio show is the immediate feedback afforded the host. Whatever I say, it best not be preposterous, or I’ll suffer the consequences from callers, if I choose to take the call, or e-mailers, if I decide to read their protests during the show (which often leads to calls backing up the e-mailer’s opinion that I’m a dolt).

During the fiscal cliff imbroglio that has obnoxiously occupied the headlines, conservative conventional wisdom seems to be that Speaker Boehner is going to cave in to tax rate hikes. The word “revenue,” brilliantly employed by the President, is euphemistic for rates, so that when Democrats say that we have to be balanced and address revenue, what they really mean is that we must raise rates.

The object, remember, is to reduce the deficit, which regularly weighs in around a trillion dollars a year these days. Raising rates won’t do it; cutting spending, and cutting spending only, will.

But no matter. Obama and the Democrats think they have us right where they want us. He won (the fact that they lost the House again doesn’t fit the narrative, so it ought not be dwelled upon), so it’s time for wealthy folks to ante up. If you’re a Democrat, you should be doing cartwheels.

Which is why the ongoing reaction among Democrats to Obama’s re-election is intriguing. It began—for me at least, as a talk show host who confidently predicted a Romney victory—with a sentiment that went something like, Will, how are you? Are you making it okay? One e-mailer to the show actually wrote to ask whether or not I had gotten over my loss, to which my response was that I wasn’t on the ballot.

After a few weeks of continuing to be happy despite the outcome, I’ve found, remarkably, that Democrats are angry with me for not being angry about the results. Disappointed, yes; all of us face four more years of policies from Manhattan to the Middle East which won’t work. But all of us have a choice about how to deal with it. We on the Right can pack up and head elsewhere (despite the fact that even with Obama at the helm, America remains the greatest nation on Earth), or we can continue to strive to be our best at raising our families, succeeding in our work, and giving of ourselves to our neighbors the way we’re supposed to—voluntarily.

On my show Tuesday night, I threw out a question to a caller: if Jimmy Carter had won a second term, and Reagan had never been president, would our republic have survived?

There’s no doubt that, given the direction the economy was headed and the incoherence of our foreign policy, already rough times would have gotten rougher. But we would have made it. We’re that resilient.

Today, the economy is as bad as it was then, and our foreign policy challenges are exponentially worse. As scary as the Cold War was, there was a comfort in the Soviets’ healthy fear of nuclear annihilation. The present nuclear concern is all ours. The other side celebrates with eager anticipation the acquisition of a nuke.

So why are liberals the angry ones? Perhaps because they rarely overcome obstacles with a smile on their face, and the fact that we’re already smiling again makes them jealous.