Danger, Will Robinson!

Obama's holiday from the election results is almost over after the G20 conference in South Korea.  It appears he will be coming home empty handed, though if anyone was actually expecting much of anything out of this trip, I missed it. Charles Krauthammer thinks Obama has at least stumbled into a little correct realpolitik in regards to India, even if all he's really done there is not break what G.W. Bush started.  Obama did get to bow a few times to foreign leaders and Michelle bought some stuff. All in all it was probably a nice little diversion for the prez, never mind how much it cost.

So soon he'll be back in the USA and we can watch the big question play out: what the hell is he going to do now?

The liberal soul searching/knife fight is beginning.   Some of the Democrat survivors in Congress are openly questioning the wisdom of following Stepmother Pelosi into the dark forest.  Liberal somebody Wendy Kaminer envisions David Axelrod impersonating Neville Chamberlain when he speaks of a possible compromise on tax cuts.  On the far left of their pack cartoonist Ted Rall has raised the possibility of violent revolution, though from the look of him I suspect he'll be a behind the lines guy if it comes down to actual shooting.

As John Boehner goes about teasing and intriguing us with the possibility that he might screw this up completely, conservatives wonder if the Obama administration is just another dead in the water ocean liner.  Geoffrey P. Hunt at American Thinker votes yes, and good for us:

What remains of his presidency? Where can he go from here?

With liberals desperately searching for any Lazarus scenario, Obama has neither the issues nor the votes to mount any revival. Is there any foreign policy issue that he can win? How will appeasing radical Muslims, continuing to prosecute a war he doesn't believe in, piling on further debt that leaves even European socialists gasping, devaluing the dollar by monetizing our debt, and happily denying America's greatness in the world be winning issues?

Is there a single domestic initiative remaining -- energy, labor, environment, taxes, or social justice -- where his brand of collectivist big government solutions will have the ear of the American people and the votes in Congress? And he doesn't have the votes in the Senate to name any more Supreme Court justices. 

We are a nation without a president...

The results of November 2 declared a presidency broken but more importantly asserted the primacy of self-government, locally owned and locally operated. A broken presidency, this time, is not to be mourned, but cheered.

Victor Davis Hanson spies the Democrats and finds them highly illogical:

So the most logical explanation of the problem [losing the election] is the most shunned, given its ramifications for liberalism: Even with a young, charismatic African-American president who rode to victory on the unpopularity of Bush and of the war, on the upheaval on Wall Street, and with the aid of the media — with all that, in just 21 months Obama finds himself well below 50 percent in approval and his agenda incurring the largest midterm legislative losses since 1938.

In short, the truth is unbearable, reason fails, and the self-described rationalists have become fabulists.

Mona Charen fears the twists and turns of fate might yet put Obama in the right place at the right time:

Ironically, Republicans might be the president’s lifeline. If they succeed in defunding or otherwise hobbling implementation of Obamacare; if they succeed in maintaining the current tax rates on all earners; and if they are able, through oversight functions, to prevent regulatory agencies from further intimidating businesses, the economy might improve. And to whom would credit for improved conditions flow? Yup, to Gandhi’s most important acolyte [Obama].

I think that between now and the beginning of the new Congress we'll get a good idea of how things will be going for Obama and the Democrats in the next two years.  The left is clearly in no mood for compromise, whether that hurts Democratic prospects or not. We've yet to see if that is how Obama himself feels.