While Barack Obama spends so much of his time on golf courses, some 14 million Americans are the ones who want to take a Mulligan.
Extrapolating from Obama’s record-low approval rating of 38 percent (via Gallup last week), compared with his 51 percent share of the vote in the 2012 election (he received nearly 66 million votes), that’s how many Americans actually pulled the lever for Obama but now think he’s doing a lousy job.
Americans would need to take a Clintonian number of policy Mulligans just to start putting the world and our country back in order. And since the real world doesn’t allow do-overs, we’ll need to “play the ball as it lies” — from the deep rough into which Obama has driven us. The question thus becomes what steps the United States should take — and will be able to take once Obama and Harry Reid are no longer standing in the way — to create a world more akin to what novelist Walker Percy once described as the “pleasant licit fairways and the sunny irenic greens” of peace and prosperity.
Herewith, then, a set of rescue clubs:
First, to take just the first step in countering a problem George Will reasonably calls “more dangerous than the Islamic State,” namely the emergence of Russian fascist hegemonism, the United States should take the advice of (amazingly enough) New Jersey senator Robert Menendez and arm Ukraine, very quickly, with “sophisticated weapons.” We should further arm the Baltics and other Eastern European nations, too, along with providing the missile-defense systems we once promised. And domestically, we should ramp up as many kinds of energy production as possible, as quickly as possible, while removing as many of Obama’s hindrances thereto as possible — the better to provide Europe cheaper, more abundant energy supplies so it can forswear oil from Russia. (A regime of sanctions won’t be effective against Putin unless Europe feels confident that Russia can’t do much, economically, to fight back.)
Second, the United States must begin treating the Islamist State as a mortal threat. Congress should officially declare war against it. (It calls itself a state, and it controls a large swath of territory, so we should treat it as a state actor via an official declaration of war, thus letting Congress assert its constitutional role in the process.) In addition to air strikes, we should send Special Forces against it. And we should use every arrow in our diplomatic quiver to pressure other Arab states (note: this excludes Iran) to use all their might, behind our leadership, to crush the barbarians out of existence.