Dear Reader (even those of you who whined about last week’s politics-free G-File),

The reviews from Obama’s Kansas speech are in. People who heard what they wanted to hear loved it. Everyone else . . . eh, not so much.

The consensus among those who loved it was that Obama has finally “found his voice.” Here’s the Newark Star Ledger: “In Kansas, Obama finally found his voice to make that case.” By the way, the “case” the editors are referring to is the same case we’ve heard for a long time: spend piles more money on education, infrastructure, etc., and tax the wealthy to pay for it. You know, the same “new ideas” liberals have been touting for more than ten decades now.

Howard Gleckman – yes, that Howard Gleckman! – of the Urban Institute agrees that Obama has found his voice. He tells Politico, “It is hard for me to believe Republicans are still making a fight of this. This is a total political loser for them. President Obama has finally found his voice on this. It is even hard for Democrats to screw this up.”

Yes, absolutely! Now that Obama has found his voice, it’s like he’s found the One Ring to Rule Them All and nothing can stand in his way!

Tom Brokaw – who, as we all know, spends his days slipping sawbucks to his vast network of shoeshine boys, newspaper hawkers, drifters down at the docks, soda jerks, and other snitches to keep his finger on the nation’s pulse – saw all this coming. He said on Meet the Press way back on October 30, “I think he’s beginning to find his voice. For the last nine months or so we have not known which Obama would show up from week to week. Now they seem to be on track to what the campaign strategy is going to be.” So that was it. After all, Brokaw is always the first to spot a political trend. I believe it was just days after the Tet Offensive that he was saying how public opinion was moving against the Vietnam War.

But . . . whoah, what’s this? U.S. News on September 20, 2011: “Obama appears to have finally found his voice in terms of dealing forcefully with the Republicans.”

And it appears that U.S. News was simply echoing the Washington Blade, which proclaimed in a headline five days earlier: “President Obama finally finds his voice.” That blade cuts deep!

Now, hold on, this is strange. Margaret Carlson announced in Businessweek in April that “Obama Finds His Voice on Cuts That Matter.”

April? Feh! Historian H. W. Brands noted that Obama had located his political chi back in January, after his speech in Tucson. “Barack Obama has found his voice again,” he announced on CNN.com.

This is getting ridiculous. Maybe Michelle should pin Obama’s voice to his sleeves like a little kid’s mittens, because that guy apparently loses his voice more than Jon Corzine loses billions of dollars.

On October 26, 2010, the Washington Post, reported that “in the final weeks leading up to Election Day, Obama has found his voice.” This voice was going to turn around the midterms – you know, the ones that turned out to be an electoral hot-tea enema that psephologists are still marveling at and which even Obama conceded was a “shellacking.” Ah, yes, but as Alec Baldwin might say, “Imagine how much worse the shellacking would have been if he hadn’t found his voice.”

More than a month earlier, Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute was sure that Obama had already found his voice. On September 24, 2010, he proclaimed: “Obama Finds His Voice – And America’s.” Twelve days earlier, the St. Petersburg Times spotted the same trend. “President Barack Obamafound his voice last week,” the editors insisted. “In a speech in Cleveland and at a news conference Friday, he fought back against Republican demands to extend all of the Bush-era tax cuts and resisted election-year pandering to antsy voters.”

I mean, who among us can forget Obama’s famous Cleveland Speech? Barely an hour passes on cable news without someone referencing that watershed moment in American politics.

But that’s not where the trail begins in the hunt for Obama’s voice. “So Julie,” NPR host Jackie Lyden began a conversation with health-care reporter Julie Rovner, “a lot of people are saying Barack Obama has found his voice on [Obamacare], quite a shift in strategy.”

Who was saying that? Susan Estrich, for one! “Democrats like me steeled ourselves for the bloodbath to come, wondering only how truly bad it would be,” Estrich wrote twelve days earlier. “But something seems to be happening on the way to disaster: Barack Obama has found his voice again.”

Okay, you get it already. All this represents a fraction of a fraction of the times the press and liberal pundits have proclaimed Obama has “found his voice.” (I didn’t even include David Gergen’s bold proclamations in this regard!) It’s amazing how hearing what you want to hear amounts to proclaiming everyone else has heard the same thing. When Occupy Wall Street materialized from the vaguely urine-colored mists, liberals instantly announced that a movement that speaks for the 99 Percent had arrived. When the filthy hippies battled the cops in Chicago ‘68, Tom Wicker immediately wrote in the New York Times that the “idealistic, demonstrably brave” kids were “our children.” The majority of Americans looked at the cops and said, “No, those are our children.”

This is a corollary to the White House’s longstanding “more cowbell” strategy (first identified by yours truly, I believe, long ago) which holds that all Obama needs to do is give one more “big speech” and everything will work because Obama is so super-terrific-awesome. It turns out it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Predict that Obama can fix everything with one big speech in which he says all the things you want him to say, and then when he gives it you proclaim “He’s found his voice!” even as his poll numbers continue to flounder, he fails to govern or lead, and the economy drifts further out to sea. Then, after a little while, repeat.

It’s Like They Never Want Liberal Fascism to Go Out of Print

Obviously, there’s more to be said about Obama’s Kansas speech. An excellent place to start is NR’s editorial. You might also want to see my column today. But here are a few more points in rapid fire:

1. Nationalism = socialism. I’ve been saying for years that the presumption that nationalism and socialism are opposites – an idea ingrained in many Marxist minds – is nonsense. Nationalism, in terms of public policy if not necessarily culture, is socialism. When we nationalize health care, we socialize medicine. Teddy Roosevelt’s “new nationalism” was a call for a “new socialism” – a point his advisers, Charles van Hise, Richard Ely et al., would have happily conceded.

2. President Obama has been shockingly nationalistic. Sputnik moments, “Beat China!” “We owe it to the troops to support green energy,” ”Kneel Before Zod!” And now he disinters Teddy Roosevelt’s “new nationalism.” In actual policy terms, he’s been vastly more nationalistic than George W. Bush was. The difference is that liberals hate cultural nationalism. They hate it so much they even see overt displays of patriotism as scarily nationalistic. But they love programmatic nationalism – Everyone shut up and build things liberal like! The danger is when you get cultural nationalists joining forces with socialists. In fact, that’s called national-socialism. Maybe you’ve heard of it?

3. Where the hell are the “new ideas”? Perhaps because I wrote a book arguing that liberalism remains loyal to the progressive philosophy first laid out over a century ago, or maybe because my next book is in no small part about how they try to hide this fact, I’m particularly vexed by the fact that conservatives are supposedly in thrall to “old ideas” but liberals are all about new ones. In his Kansas speech, Obama kept insisting that conservatives are beholden to the failed ideas of the past. Er, okay. And that’s why you dusted off a 101-year-old speech by a failed third-party candidate? Got it. Obama talks as if raising taxes on rich people so they can pay their “fair share” is a new idea when “let’s take more from that guy to pay for stuff I want” was an old idea when proto-humans were drawing stick figures on cave walls with saber-tooth-tiger scat. And yet somehow Republican politicians never turn the tables on this incandescently stupid argument. It vexes me. I am exceedingly vexed.

Looking Good, Democrats

Here’s something to noodle as we lament the sub-par Republican field. In 2008, the “major” Democratic candidates ran for president were: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, and Joe Biden (I’ve left Dennis Kucinich out largely because he’s Dennis Kucinich). John Edwards goes on trial in January and may end up in prison. Bill Richardson is under criminal investigation and could conceivably join him. Chris Dodd opted not to run for reelection because he was enveloped in a cloud of scandal thicker than the bong smoke at an Occupy Wall Street seminar in a panel van.

So a third of the field might be in jail at some point soon. Everyone who didn’t join the administration is an embarrassment to the party (and you can throw Kucinich in there if you like). And of those who joined the administration, two thirds of those candidates are Joe Biden or Barack Obama.

Does the GOP field really look that bad in comparison?

Not So Various and Not Much Sundry!

I love the news that Obama had his Hanukkah party two weeks early (a good sign that, contrary to talking points, he clearly expects to be in Hawaii soon). The best part was that he let all eight candles at once like it’s just another Jewish candelabra.

Canine stealth mode!

Odds are you do not exist.

I spoke to E. J. Dionne’s class at Georgetown last week. It was nice of him to invite me. (Do I get to say I’ve lectured at G-Town now? I’ve given speeches there before, but it sounds cooler to say “Goldberg has lectured at . . .”). It was also surprising. I’ve known E. J. for nearly 20 years. But I’ve been terribly hard on him in recent years – you know, because of the things he writes. Apparently he hasn’t been reading the Corner. For each class speaker, a student is assigned to do a thorough opposition-research file. The kid assigned to dig up stuff on me found all of the things I’ve ever written about E. J. “Your most recent post says ‘E. J. Dionne is not an idiot, but . . .’” the kid began. Awkward.

Last week I promised an intriguing announcement would be coming this week. I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell the truth. But, as Eric Holder would say, I lacked the requisite intent of actually telling a lie. Stay tuned.