Obama Deserves a Prize for Reminding Americans That Most of Us Are Conservative

So says Rich Lowry in the New York Post:

The Nobel committee may have chosen President Obama as the Peace Prize winner because of its hopes for his impact on the world -- but his top achievement so far has come at home. Indeed, Obama has been on a roll.

In nine months, he has breathed life into the Republican Party, boosted pro-lifers, tarnished the reputation of regulation, bolstered traditional values, increased the public's desire for immigration restriction and shifted independent voters rightward.

No, Obama hasn't turned back the oceans. But revivifying conservatism almost before books announcing its death could be published qualifies as a feat almost as miraculous.

The 19th-century author Nathaniel Hawthorne warned of the perverse effects of grand schemes: "We miss the good we sought, and do the good we little cared for." For Obama, proving that we live in a center-right country presumably isn't a "good" at all, but he's done it with a finality that the late sociologist Seymour Lipset -- a student of America's cussedly right-leaning attitudes -- might envy.

Obama's liberal grandiosity has reminded people why they tend to be conservative -- something they wanted to forget during the last four years of the Bush administration.

Read the rest of it here.