Should We Give Obamabots Succor Should Their Worst Fears Come True?

This is sheer brilliance from Roger Kimball. 

You’re seeing these sad people everywhere these days, especially in large East-and West-Coast urban areas and on college campuses. At parties they alternate between a melancholy, far-away wistfulness and a muttering “why me?”-belligerence. They’re touchy and quick to blame others, and they seem to suffer from night sweats and vague feelings of persecution.

Tom Wolfe exposed an extreme version of this cohort in his essay on the Black Panthers hosted by Leonard Bernstein in his elegant New York apartment. Wolfe contributed the term “radical chic” to the language to describe the Bernsteins and their wide-eyed guests. What we’re dealing with here is not quite radical (though Obama may in fact be plenty radical himself, the semi-beautiful people who support him are not), nor is it wholly chic. It is a sort of “consensus chic,” though I appreciate the aroma of contradiction the phrase communicates, since that which is genuinely chic exists self-consciously apart from the consensus of hoi polloi.

First time around, these people voted for Obama, giving themselves a little frisson of self-satisfaction when they pulled the lever and, even more, when the emitted condescension about anyone who happened to vote for John McCain — they didn’t encounter such people often, but it always gave them a little thrill of self-satisfaction when they did. It wasn’t long, however, before doubts began to accumulate. The seas didn’t subside, as promised, nor did the unemployment figures. By now, they’re thoroughly depressed. Their man has clearly let them down, and the inadvertent comedy of Joe Biden screaming that Republicans are going to “put y’all back in chains ^[2]” isn’t helping. Even worse is the news that team R&R, the Romney-Ryan express, is surging among young voters ^[3].  It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

Kimball thinks we should offer these people succor.

The deep problem now is how to help the vast regiments of disillusioned liberals.

I am not in agreement.  I want an admission of guilt.  The damage has been so great, the error of such world-historical proportions that I am in no mood to give quarter.  I am in mind of Colonel Nathan R. Jessup who told Danny Kaffee:  "I want you to ask me nicely...what I do want is for you to stand there in that faggoty white uniform and with your Harvard mouth, extend me some f**king courtesy."

Colonel Donny X. Baseball wants the "consensus chic" to admit they were wrong, that they were politically naive and unthinking, that they had an immature crush.  I want them to stand there in the Bay Area or East Village equivalent of the faggoty white uniform and with their Palin-sneering extend those of us who said from day one that Obama would be a disaster some f**king deference.