The President's New Clothes

I don't have a lot of patience for the "birthers," those con men of conspiracy spreading the unsubstantiated rumor that President Obama was born outside of the U.S. and therefore fails one of the Constitutional requirements to hold the presidency. On January 20, 2009 that ship sailed. End of story. I don't much care where he was born; he's our president now and let's move on.

On the other hand, I am intrigued about the lack of information about the President's scholastic achievements. During his meteoric rise to power we heard a lot about how brilliant he is. Stands to reason if he is so brilliant, he'd want to show off everything from his 5th grade runner up green ribbon in the spelling bee to a magna cum laude diploma, if he has one. But the door to his academic accomplishments is shut tighter than the door to the Oval Office when the Petroleum Institute comes calling.

So it was interesting to read today in the Wall Street Journal the observations of Richard Epstein. Mr. Epstein is a law professor at the University of Chicago. In the interest of full disclosure I hold a graduate degree from that university, although not granted by the law school. I knew neither Prof. Epstein nor Pres. Obama when he was an adjunct professor there.

Professor Epstein made his comments to Reason TV. Reason TV is a video service of a website called reason.com. Reason.com is a somewhat libertarian-leaning website. Prof. Epstein's observations are remarkable only because it's taken six years for someone to make them. He was speaking about the economy and comparing the differing approaches of Presidents George Bush and Obama. He noted that neither president could be called a "strong believer in laissez-faire principles."

However, speaking about Pres. Obama's tendency to try and muscle up for a home run, when a single might do, he had this to say: "The difference between [Presidents Bush and Obama], which is why Obama is the more dangerous man ultimately, is he has very little by way of a skill set to understand the complex problems he wants to address, but he has this unbounded confidence in himself." [emphasis added]

This is a former colleague of the President saying that 1) Barack Obama is more dangerous than George Bush; and 2) he (the President) isn't smart enough to understand the problems he's trying to solve. Remarkable. To my liberal friends, for whom no one was more dangerous than George W. Bush, nor stupider, it must come as a shock that a fellow law professor would essentially say that the current President doesn't have the chops to deal with the issues at hand. And furthermore, the fact that the Pres. thinks he does is an exercise in political hubris that poses a danger to the country.

Speaking personally, I never met more smart people in one place than at the University of Chicago. You'd think some of that intellectual karma would have rubbed off on the President (It didn't on me, but that's a post for another day). According to Prof. Epstein, apparently not.

He goes on to say in the interview that Prof. Obama was aloof from the other faculty members, and didn't much care for the intellectual give and take that goes on among faculty colleagues. Barack Obama apparently was so busy with what Prof. Epstein calls "collateral adventures" that he pretty much "kept to himself."

So maybe the future President was a shy, retiring academic, who kept kept his head down and minded his own business. Like the village librarian. What's wrong with that? Well, as Reason quotes Prof. Epstein: "The problem when you keep to yourself is you don't get to hear strong ideas articulated by people who disagree with you." [emphasis added] So if you're a professor who becomes President, maybe that's why you go two years without a business person of consequence in your cabinet, while at the same time racking up a reputation as the most business unfriendly president since FDR.

I don't know if the President was an A student or a D student. I suppose someday we'll find out. But I think it's interesting that his alleged brilliance seems to be called into question by a former colleague who in effect says the President isn't up to dealing with the complex tasks he faces, that his booming self-confidence in the absence of the required leadership skills poses a danger to the country, and that his personality apparently is to avoid listening to strong people who disagree with him.

Most conservatives, I think, have always felt this way about the President. But to hear a former colleague say the Emperor has no clothes, when his courtiers and he himself would have us believe otherwise is truly breathtaking.

Just thought you might like to know.

Whose Fault Is It, Really?

   President Obama continues to maintain that the reason his party was "shellacked" (his word) in the recent mid-term elections was that Democrats didn't "communicate" their messages well enough. Failure to communicate might account for a "spanking," or maybe a "drubbing." But a "shellacking" goes a lot deeper than blaming the electorate for not getting your nuanced brillance.

And diving deeper, a researcher from California now says that the president's legislative agenda, not his golden pipes, accounted for 32 seats of the historic losses suffered by Democrats on November 2.

Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California focused on the four most unpopular Obama initiatives: the TARP bailout, the failed stimulus bill, healthcare taxation-and-annexation, and the carbon tax known as cap and trade. He compared Democrats who voted for those four boat anchors to lawmakers who voted against them. The result? For each time a Democrat running for reelection lined up behind Pres. Obama on these four bills he or she lost anywhere from two-thirds of a percentage point to four percentage points in his election re-bid. Losses were obviously greater in the more moderate districts.

McGhee's conclusion is that Republican gains would have topped  out at 210 House seats, rather that the 242 they'll have in the next Congress, had the losing lawmakers not lined up behind the White House Pied Pipers.

Former Bush election engineer Karl Rove points out that McGhee's analysis demonstrates that legislators who buck the will of their constituents end up paying their own postage come January.

Meanwhile the fingerpointing of Democrat failure continues--it's the president's fault, it's Speaker Pelosi's fault, it's Harry Reid's fault, It's Fox News' fault, Rush Limbaugh's fault and on and on.  The real story is that a bunch of congressmen who at some point stopped listening to their constituents have only themselves to blame.

Just thought you might like to know.

Making Sense Out of Nonsense

The mid-term elections are a week away. It appears as if the Democrats will lose control of the House of Representatives; loss of the Senate to the Republicans is not as clear. But will it make any difference?

While Pres. Obama may tout his legislative accomplishments, the truth is that even with huge majorities in Congress, he struggled with his two main domestic goals: healthcare reform and punishing the American people for climate change. It took months of rancorous debate for him to pass healthcare and then by only a wafer-thin margin. His plan to tax American business for their productivity and success, euphemistically called cap-and-trade, couldn't get out of the Senate. If, holding large majorities in Congress, he couldn't rally the nation, it's hard to see him doing worse without them.

So in the next Congress it appears now that he will lose his majority in the House, and, while retaining the Senate, he will lose his ability to shut off debate in the upper chamber on proposed legislation. Expect Democratic party discipline to go out the window after the president and speaker Pelosi lead the troops over a cliff next Tuesday. The weak in politics are killed and eaten. Pres. Obama will be a weakened president.

That leaves him with two options. The first is to continue pressing his left-leaning agenda, despite the fact that poll upon poll shows the American people thinking that this is taking the country in the wrong direction. He's already said he'd rather be a one-term president (one can only hope) than compromise his principles. So the threat of his continuing to march into hell for a heavenly cause, becoming the Harold Stassen of left-wing domestic policy,  is real.

On the other hand he could steal a play from Bill Clinton's playbook, work with the Republican and position himself, as he did during his presidential run, as a centrist. The question is whether anyone will buy that the second time around.

However, George Friedman writes today in Stratfor that there is a third choice: shift his focus from the domestic agenda and make his case for a second term in foreign policy. As Mr. Friedman points out, "The founders created a system in which the president is inherently weak in domestic policy and able to take action only when his position in Congress is extremely strong. This was how the founders sought to avoid the tyranny of narrow majorities."

Foreign policy is another matter, with our system giving the president, in his role as commander-in-chief and head of state, pretty decent leeway without congressional interference. Ronald Reagan took advantage of this following his midterm election reversals in 1982 by basing Pershing missiles in Europe to blunt any Soviet thoughts of expansion. He also played party pooper with Libya's Colonel Ghaddafi, dropping a cruise missile in his tent in 1986. These acts energized his base and made him a stronger president.

But on this third rail Pres. Obama will also struggle, notes Friedman.  Despite plenty of opportunities to show his chops in Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan and with Iran, the president's M.O. up to this point has been conciliation, not confrontation. So it's as hard to see him blowing up Ahmadinejad's nuke plants as it is to see him extending the Bush tax cuts.

Second, the American public has settled into a war weariness--nine years in Afghanistan, seven in Iraq, and almost constant deployments throughout the equitorial hot spots of the world. The American public's focus isn't abroad--it's on our ailing economy. And unless that improves nothing else matters. Like everything else in this world, it comes down to money.

Just thought you might like to know.

I Want Your Money

There is supposed to be a new movie hitting theaters this fall. The timing places it in advance of the Congressional mid-term elections in November. It's called I Want Your Money and it's by film maker Ray Griggs. That is if Griggs can come up with the cash to finish production.

This movie depicts the national debt crisis through a combination of documentary interviews and animation. In it an animated Ronald Reagan tries to teach Barack Obama about economics and budgeting. The animation, as well as the logo, were done by an artist from Mad Magazine. Among those appearing in the movie are Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and John Stoessel.

One little problem: It is inconceivable that a conservative look at the last two years like I Want Your Money could ever be produced and then screened in any multiplex controlled by the left-leaning entertainment industry. Just remember the difficulty that conservative comic Ben Stein had getting Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed made. Conservatives who long for the days of Thirty Seconds over Tokyo and Medal of Honor: The Audie Murphy Story know the drill. No liberal bent, no investors. No investors, no screens. No screens, no movie.

Nevertheless, take a look at the trailer below. Share it with a friend. It's almost as good as a movie. And it's cheaper than ten bucks and a bucket of popcorn. If by some quirk this thing gets made and screened, so much the better.

Just thought you might like to know.

The Great I Am

   Near the end of Pres. Obama's first year in office, columnist Jeff Jacoby noted the president's decision not to attend the celebration in German marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The president, wrote Mr. Jacoby, was "too busy to attend the celebrations," opting instead to send a video of himself.

 

In the video, Mr. Jacoby writes, the president was careful not to offend any current or former enemy, blandly calling the wall   '' 'a painful barrier between family and friends' that symbolized 'a system that denied people the freedoms that should be the right of every human being.' He referred to 'tyranny,' but never identified the tyrants - he never uttered the words 'Soviet Union' or 'communism,' for example. He said nothing about the men and women who died trying to cross the wall. Nor did he mention Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan - or even Mikhail Gorbachev."

 

Pres. Obama, however, was not too busy to talk about...well...Pres. Obama.

 In "Obama's Swelling Ego" Mr. Jacoby notices that "[a]s presidential rhetoric goes, [the video] was hardly a match for “Ich bin ein Berliner,’’ still less another “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’’ But as a specimen of presidential narcissism, it is hard to beat."

Recently, the president spoke at a fundraiser for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA). According to The Weekly Standard, Mr. Obama gracelessly decried what he saw as the mess his predecessor had left him when he assumed office on Jan. 20, 2009. He then recited the litany of Democratic initiatives he was responsible for in his 14 months in office: the second stimulus bill, the healthcare bill, etc.

The president's self-congratulatory conclusion: "This has been the toughest year-and-a-half since the 1930s."

Oh, really?

Granted, the U.S. president has shown himself in that last year and a half to be shockingly ignorant of American history (for most leftists, American history started in the streets of Chicago in 1968). but has this president had a tougher go than:

• FDR in 1933-34 confronting not only an economic depression but the near collapse of a monetary system, as well as a natural disaster that left much of the nation's breadbasket a parched wasteland? 
• Harry Truman coming to grips with a devastated and vanquished Nazi Europe, a stubborn enemy in the Pacific that refused to yield, and the soul-wrenching decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan? 
• Jack Kennedy navigating by Braille through the Bay of Pigs in 1961, only to be taken to the nuclear woodshed the following year by the more experienced Soviet leaders? 
• Lyndon Johnson trying to bind the nation's wounds after JFK's assassination while trying to get his arms around that thing called Vietnam? 
• George W. Bush confronting a stateless, invisible enemy that  perpetrated the most significant attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor? 

Mr. Obama is much taken with his own accomplishments in the face of what he sees as adversity. But quite frankly, a lot of that adversity was of his own making. And while he views his legislative conquests as a lasting accomplishment, it may instead be a phyrric victory. Because if the president leaves any lasting accomplishments it appears that they will be the destruction of American initiative, the death of American exceptionalism, the end of America as a counterweight to the forces of tyranny in the world, and the permanent re-classification of the U.S. as a debtor nation.

You want to talk about a tough year and a half? That will be the first 18 months of whoever replaces him in the White House and has to untangle this mess.

Just thought you might like to know.

Chief Justice Roberts Fires Back at Pres. Obama

   The wires were abuzz this week with news of U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts' speech to the law school at the University of Alabama. Chief Justice Roberts broke his silence about Pres. Obama using his State of the Union address in February to lash out at the Supreme Court"s recent decision on campaign financing.


 
By a narrow margin the Court invalidated certain restrictions on campaign financing by corporations and labor unions. Pres. Obama lashed out at the decision in front of the justices who were forced to sit there, stone-faced, as the overwhelmingly Democrat chamber applauded loudly around them. It was a scene out of a North Korean re-education camp.

   Chief Justice Roberts today questioned whether the Court should continue attending the annual State of the Union affair, saying that the event had "degenerated into a political pep rally."

  Obama Minister of Propaganda, "Bagdad Bob" Gibbs, staunchly flaked for the president, saying in reply that the Court ruling opens the door for Big Corporations to buy elections. (In the liberal half of the world there's always a bogeyman, and the bogey is always Big.)

   But that's a red herring. Few if any corporations can or would do that because they have to answer to too many people. For example, they would risk loss of business by endorsing a conservative candidate and risk upsetting their more liberal customers. The same goes for financially supporting liberal candidates and causes. No company wants to risk a product boycott. And if sales do decline because of a company's political activism the company's management has to answer to shareholders who care about only one thing: their investment.

  Truth be told, the ruling, far from ushering in a new era of Robber Barons, as the president intimated, actually benefits Mr. Obama's biggest supporters: labor unions. Labor union spending on elections far exceeds that of corporate America, $80 million in the last presidential election. Labor bosses themselves strutted around after Pres. Obama's election and claimed that they were responsible for putting him in the White House, with millions of dollars in donations and thousands of get-out-the-vote foot soldiers. The Court's ruling only increases their ability to buy elections.

   In seeking to embarrass the Justices Pres. Obama said that they had "reversed a century-old law...that will open the flood gates for special interests." But the president, who bills himself as something of a constitutional scholar should have known that the turn-of-the-20th-century law he claimed the ruling invalidated wasn't the issue. It was a portion of the more recent McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act that the Court took to to the woodshed.

   Let's assume for a minute that the president confused the two laws, rather than engaged in deliberate demagoguery, railing against "special interests". The real issue is that he committed a transgression not seen since Franklin D. Roosevelt took the Court to task 73 years ago for invalidating much of his New Deal program (It's a prickly thing, that Constitution.) In addition to socialist-leaning politics, Barack Obama shares what was FDR's boundless self-confidence that somehow his intellect gave him the right to act badly in public.

   The Supreme Court is the most respected institution in the U.S. At a time like this, when the president's job approval ratings continue to sink like a two-seam fastball, and Congress' job approval rating hovers down there with used car salesmen and televangelists, the Supreme Court remains nearly universally respected. Does the Court always get it right. No.  Both liberals and conservatives rail against specific decisions, and not all individual justices are held in the same regard. But the institution of the Court is respected by nearly everyone.

   That's because no matter who we are, where we come from, whether we're rich or poor, black or white, we all feel that the Supreme Court is the last stop on Democracy Road. It's the institution that will set things right when everything else seems so wrong. It is the one place we can go where we think we'll get a fair shake, no matter if our name is Linda Brown or Ernesto Miranda. Yaser Hamdi or George Bush. The one place that's never forgotten the Forgotten Man, because it doesn't forget the Constitution.

   Mr. Constitutional Scholar, Mr. Defender of the Forgotten Man, forgot. He forgot when insulted the Court on national TV.

   Mr. Obama's supporters use a lot of adjectives to describe him. Brilliant. Articulate, Cool. I'll add another based on his State of the Union performance.

   Graceless.

   Just thought you'd like to know.

The Evil Empire vs. the Apologist-in-Chief

   Tomorrow, March 8, marks the anniversary of one of the defining speeches of our time: Pres. Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech. Like Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech 38 years before, and Pres. Reagan's own speech 15 days later, outlining a vision of a "strategic defense initiative," the Evil Empire speech set the tone for the Reagan foreign policy for the remainder of his presidency.

   Speaking to a group of evangelicals, Pres. Reagan pulled no punches in comparing the expansionist Soviet Union to an evil empire, complete with its gulag and its constellation of satellite nations.

   By speaking more openly and freely about the Soviet Union than any other American president had, Mr. Reagan for the first time challenged the very moral underpinnings of the USSR.

   Fifteen days later, Mr. Reagan followed up his Evil Empire speech with a speech that described his vision of a virtual nuclear shield that could be deployed over and shared with peace loving democracies across the globe.

   The mainstream media and the liberal intelligencia ridiculed both speeches. Mr. Reagan was accused of oversimplifying the Cold War, fear mongering, chest thumping, and pushing the world closer to nuclear war.

   But it was Ronald Reagan's clear vision that triumphed. His willingness to say what other world leaders knew but were afraid to say--that the Soviet Union was a morally bankrupt state bent on world domination--and his willingness to raise the military stakes with the Soviets that consigned the evil empire to the "ash heap of history," as the president had predicted.

    Within seven years the USSR collapsed, a victim of its own immorality and inability to match the American economy, ingenuity, values, strength, and a president who refused to compromise on the evil he saw.

   In his Evil Empire speech he challenged his audience to ignore the temptation of labeling both the United States and the Soviet Union equally "at fault" in the nuclear arms race. He reminded them that there is no moral equivalence between defending freedom and enslaving whole populations.

   Ronald Reagan stands in clear contrast to Barack Obama. Mr. Obama's foreign policy relies on wanting people to like America, rather than on the values of truth and liberty for which the world has come to rely on America. So instead of the moral clarity of "evil empires," and "ash heap of history," we get apologies to the Muslim world for defending freedom and welcoming its sons and daughters. Instead of the "shining city on a hill" we get repeated bows to foreign leaders.

   When Ronald Reagan spoke in 1983 his words were exhilarating to Americans sick of the Soviet quest for dominance, and to captive nations behind the Iron Curtain. When Barack Obama has spoken,  we have ambiguity and weakening of the traditional role that America has played in the world, and which, if truth be told, most people want us to continue playing.

Just thought you might like to know.
 

The State of the Union is Bleak

Wednesday evening, January 27, Pres. Obama will deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. He'll have to report to Congress, his cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the justices of the Supreme Court exactly what he's done as president over the last 12 months. And the answer to that is not much.

For the record, here is the president's score card, January 2009-January 2010:

• Nearly a trillion dollars in "stimulus" spending that has generated little to no growth and has only transfered wealth out of the economy to government institutions
• A $1.3 trillion budget deficit
• A continuing budget deficit projected to aggregate to $6 trillion over the next decade, based on current spending rates
• A national debt of about $7.5 trillion, which is more than half the amount of our Gross Domestic Production, or GDP
• A projection that our national debt will grow to $15 trillion by the end of the next decade and will balloon to 67% of our GDP, which starts to put us in the class of third world countries who owe two-thirds to three-quarters of everything they produce (Like the old Tennessee Ernie Ford song, we'll soon owe our soul to the company store. But for us the company store is in Beijing.)
• A 10% unemployment rate that won't budge significantly for several more years

Congressional Budget Office chief James Elmendorf says we won't see a 5% unemployment again until 2014. That means we're not even half way through this thing. Pres. Obama, who continually mislabels the current recession as the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression, is about to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Look for the president Wednesday night, in his typical graceless manner, to blame Pres. Bush in part for the country's troubles. But, as they say down in Pres. Bush's West Texas homeland, that dog won't hunt. Pres. Obama has had a year to turn around the recession he inherited,  and frankly we're going in the wrong direction. We have nothing to show for for the last year but higher unemployment, a bigger deficit, and a national debit, the payment for which will suck every spare dollar out of the consumer economy.

The president Wednesday night will resort to what boxing impresario Don King called "trickeration," saying that he's ordered an immediate three year spending freeze (Funny, how that brings us right to his reelection year.). But most of the programs lined up for "cuts" have already received healthy increases over the last year. These "cuts" won't even restore those programs to where they were before Jan. 20, 2009.

Maybe it's because so much was expected of Barack Obama that his failures look monumental. Maybe it's the election of Republican Scott Brown in heavily Democrat Massachusetts that's gotten the president a good old dose of foxhole religion-making him a deficit hawk, at least for one night. But I think the issue is that this presidency, by any calculus, is shaping up to be among the worst in history. Massive deficits. Monumental debt. Chronically high unemployment on the order of the European countries the president so admires. Lack of security. No cogent homeland security strategy.  And more concern for the alleged rights of self-admitted terrorists than the rights of the American people to travel safely.

Regardless of how the president spins it, that's the state of our union right now.

Just thought you might like to know.

Taliban Strikes Boldly at Heart of Afghanistan in Coordinated Tet-Like Offensive

Stratfor reported this morning at 0827 GMT that the Taliban had launched a major offensive on Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. As the country's new cabinet was being sworn in, the militant group claimed that 20 homicide bombers were attacking the presidential palace, the central bank and the ministry of finance, along with a number of other government ministries. Terrorists were seen attacking the capital's largest shopping mall, the Grand Afghan Shopping Center, gunmen armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers seen running back and forth on the second and third floors.



These bold attacks are designed to make a big impression in three ways: first, to show how vulnerable and weak  the democratically elected government is; second, to sow terror in the hearts and minds of the Afghan people; and third and most important, to weaken support among Western countries for continuing the mission to stabilize Afghanistan.

To anyone old enough, hearing the news of the Taliban's daylight attack this morning was like waking up 42 years ago to news of the Tet offensive in South Vietnam.

And just as with the Vietnam War, you're certain in the next week to hear liberal politicians and pundits moan that the war in Afghanistan is lost. In many cases, it will be the same people after Tet who led the exodus out of Vietnam. Remember Harry Reid's brilliant conclusion in 2006, "The war (in Iraq) is lost," just before the Surge turned the tide?

I don't want to minimize the level of effort that will be required if that hell hole known as Afghanistan is ever to be pacified. But thousands of U.S. troops promised this fall by Pres. Obama should be in country beginning this month. And if U.S. commanders could be unshackled and allowed to take it to the house, instead of fighting defensively, this might be the last coordinated daytime attack on a civilian population that we'll see out of this place.

But I can't help wondering something.  For six months Pres. Obama dithered on sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, troops requested by the U.S. commander Stanley McCrystal. Instead of acting quickly on the request, the president consulted his lawyers and held counsel with political advisors who had no experience in these matters, all the while checking the polls to see how granting Gen. McCrystal's request would play with his far left political base. In the meantime, the Taliban was re-arming, planning, and moving out. Ultimately, after 6 months of Hamlet-like deliberation, the President assented to part of McCrystal's request, playing to both left and right and pleasing neither. If the President has just agreed to the troop surge without the drama those troops would be in place now. So I wonder: Would the Taliban have been bold enough or strong enough to try and pull off this morning's terror attack? I doubt it.

Just thought you might like to know.

Democrat Plan to Steal the 2012 Election?

The Obambi.com blog has an interesting take on the 2010 presidential election. It's no secret that President Obama's popularity is sinking like a stone. The conservative Democrats, independents, and disgruntled Republicans who put him in the White House are now having a severe case of buyer's remorse. If the presidential election were held on Wednesday, he'd be a lame duck president by Thursday.

But George Soros, the far-left financier that has helped bankroll Democrat politics has another idea: If you can't control enough voters to re-elect the president, control the state secretaries-of-state who count the votes.

Soros believes that voters don't wield political power; the bureaucrats and politicians who decide whose votes count do. So he's concocted a scheme worthy of any Chicago pol: Send his accolytes out to the hinterlands and elect ultra-left secretary-of-state candidates in 2010 so that they can steal the election from the voters by deciding which votes to count and which to disqualify in 2012.

This would be a Machievellian move that would make Leon Trotsky blush. Click here to read. You won't believe it. I'm having a hard time figuring out if this is any different than what Hugo Chavez, Hamid Karzai or the Iranian mullahs have done. Maybe we should ask the UN to send international poll watchers in 2012. Where's Jimmy Carter when you need him?

The irony is that Democrats are proving to be decidedly undemocratic.

Just thought you might like to know.

The Dealmaker

Mainstream Media Fails to Connect the Dots; Polls Show Americans Have Lost Confidence in the President

President Obama continues his globetrotting adventures, trying to look--well, presidential. Meanwhile, back at home, opinion polls have started to show a disturbing trend, if you are an Obama supporter. The President continues to make healthcare the tall poll in his tent, which continues to shift precipitously to the left and away from most Americans. This has quickly eroded the base of good feelings and confidence with which voters swept him into office a year ago.  Check the numbers:

• A November CNN poll shows that 47% of Americans say the top issue facing the country is not healthcare; it's the economy. In fact, only 17% of those polled said that healthcare was their main concern.
• Following the Nov. 7 House of Representatives healthcare vote 54% of those polled said they opposed the plan. Only 45% of respondents said they favored it, according to a Rasmussen poll. 
• An NBC/Wall Street Journal p0ll taken from Oct. 22 through Oct. 29 showed that the President's personal magnetism is fading. When it comes to being honest and straight with the American people, he's dropped to 33%. Two out of every three people don't think he's being honest with us.
• In the same poll his rating for being firm and decisive--witness the waffling on Afghanistan, the constant empty warnings to Iran, and his boogie out of town last week to let Attorney General Holder take the heat for the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court--has slipped to 27%. Three-quarters of those polled don't see him as a decisive leader. 
• Most damning for the President is that a Washington Post/ABC News poll from Oct. 15-18 showed that for the first time a majority of Americans don't believe he can make the right decisions to lead the country.

So while Pres. Obama's acolytes in the media refuse to report such an aggregation of polling, the fact is that the President has lost the support of independents, the largest voting "bloc" in the country and the group most important in his historic election. So said pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.

The President continues to blame President Bush for the country's woes, especially the economy, but even that act is wearing thin with Americans. An October 26 Rasmussen poll showed that two-thirds of Americans aren't drinking the "Our-stimulus-saved-or-created-a-million-jobs" Kool-Aid. 

The percentage of people who think that Pres. Obama "inherited" the current economic crisis from Pres. Bush has dropped steadily over the year, according to Rasmussen. Over the last nine months that number has dropped from 84% to 63%. Today the number of people who blame Pres. Bush for the money mess we're in is about the same as those who now blame the current president. The more the President repeats his "It's Bush's Fault" mantra, the less that people believe it. 

Here's the kicker for the President, the one polling question that shows that his support is a mile wide and an inch deep, as they say in Texas: By a margin of 62% to 27%, majority respondents in an Oct. 26 Rasmussen poll said they trust themselves over the President to make the economic decisions necessary to get back on the road to economic recovery.

To a socialist-leaning Barack Obama, who believes that central planning will solve everything because the government is the answer to all questions, this is a death knell. For ten months this blog has attempted to show that his administration, because of its insular, elite, salon mentality, does not understand the American people and the American character. It sees itself as the savior of a nation that can save itself, thank you very much. Apparently two-thirds of the respondents see things our way.

Barack Obama will never understand that it was rugged individualism and a frontier spirit that settled this country, created great institutions of government, education and commerce to sustain it, and developed a font of goodness that other countries are quick to criticize and quicker still to drink from.  

When it comes to figuring out how to solve this nation's problems, the polls say Barack Obama's on the wrong side of history. We, the people, are on the other side. The right side.

Just thought you might like to know.

Appointment in Samarra

President Obama appeared this weekend on five television networks to try and save his controversial healthcare initiative. He appeared on all networks, with one exception-Fox News. The radical left wing of the Democrat party that President Obama heads believes that Fox is biased against the president and its policies.

But what's wet for the cat is dry for the fish, goes the old Russian proverb. And what the socialist wing of the Democrat party sees as bias may be just good, old fashioned good journalism.


The job of a reporter is "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." President Obama and the hardcore left continue to see themselves as the victims in this debate (See my post from last week on Jimmy Carter.), deserving of comfort. They'd rather be comforted by the media from what they see as the affliction of talk radio and Fox News. I think most Americans want to hear reporters ask tough questions so they can get to the bottom of an issue that continues to polarize the country.


Mr. Obama thought he was going to be comforted, instead of afflicted, when he scheduled interviews with the broadcast networks. But he had his thinking rearranged when he sat down with former Clintonista George Stephanopoulos at ABC News. Take a look:

Stephanopoulos did what good journalists do: He saw an opening when the president equivocated about whether mandating insurance is a tax, and he went in for the kill. President Obama's handlers will try and paint this as "gotcha" journalism, but it was good, clean reporting. It was the President who came across as defensive, surprised, glib, and condescending at the notion that Stephanopoulos would have the gall to back him into a corner on the issue of taxes.

We've reached a new low in this country when a president tries to control information by restricting who can have access to him. Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and the Bushes all confronted their accusers at one time or another. This is another example of how President Obama is ill advised and lacks the instincts and experience to make good choices in how he deals with the American people.

Like the fabled Appointment in Samarra, President Obama fled from one marketplace of ideas, Fox News, only to meet his fate-the devil, in the form of George Stephanopoulos-in another.

Just thought you might like to know.

There He Goes Again

 The hapless Jimmy Carter is at it again. He recently said in  an interview with state-run media that the opposition to President Barack Obama's healthcare fiasco is racially motivated. Take a look:

I have no doubt that some of the opposition to President Obama is racially motivated. I have no doubt that a lot of it is. But I know that the vast majority of it is not. It is motivated by the fact that millions of people oppose the president's policies, not because of the color of his skin, but because his policies are ill-advised, out of step with America, and doomed to failure.

Like most card-carrying Leftists, President Carter misses this point. Worse than that, the man who is generally regarded as among the worst of the 44 presidents has inflamed the racial patterns that Barack Obama was supposed to heal. This is another one of Jimmy Carter's ham-handed attempts to make himself relevant and rehabilitate his reputation. This from a man whose view of the world was recently endorsed by Osama bin Laden.

What the ex-president has tried to do is to turn the perp into the victim. President Obama's first eight months has included an $800 billion stimulus package which barely moved the needle on the economy, nationalization of the auto industry, continuing huge bailouts of big banks, a record deficit, a healthcare bill bogged down in partisan bickering, and a stalemate in Afghanistan with guys that don't even wear shoes. There's a long way to go in his term, but right now he's challenging Pres. Carter's record for ineptitude. 

So his answer to Mr. Obama's failures so far is to blame white people. The same white people, by the way, who savaged Mr. Carter when he bumbled through the White House. 

The real reason behind the Obama criticism isn't the color of his skin. It's the fact that he is academic, urban professional disconnected from the rest of America. Barack Obama has little contact with middle America. He has little understanding of middle America. And, frankly,  in his speeches on healthcare and his fly-by appearances at town hall meetings, he's shown he has little respect for middle America.

But a failed ex-president and one-term Southern governor from four decades ago has decided to play the race card in hope of rehabilitating his own reputation and making himself relevant. Sorry, Jimmy, it's going to work about as well as gas rationing and turning off the lights on the White House Christmas tree did.

The last Southern governor who so blatantly played the race card was George Wallace. The only difference between George Wallace and Jimmy Carter is that George Wallace had a better tan.

Just thought you might like to know.

School Daze

I think the point is missed in this whole dust-up over President Obama's Back-to-School speech this noon.

Few people would question President Obama's right to deliver an address on education to the people closest to the subject: students. Few people would question any president's right to address specific segments of the population. The president recently addressed veterans via the VFW convention. He addressed Organized Labor via an AFL-CIO convention. Presidents have a right and, frankly, an obligation, to address their citizens, whether they are middle-aged industrialists or teenagers in school.

Presidents including both H.W. Bush and his son, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan have all met with and addressed students. Few remember that George Bush was in Florida, reading to elementary school children as part of a literacy push, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center.

But this is yet another controversy of this president's own making. First, it is stunning how the team of advisers who delivered the White House to him with tight messaging, adept use of social media, and great public relations could suddenly turn out to be so tone deaf to the American people. It's not the stay-in-school theme that has people upset. It was the "Big-Brother-knows-everything-so-let-him-explain-it-to-you" lesson plan that was supposed to accompany it that angered the American people.

This American president, for someone who is supposed to be so bright, knows very little about Americans. If he did he would know that in matters of learning, parents consider themselves, not professional educators, and certainly not federal bureaucrats, to be their children's first and best teachers. Maybe in President Obama's Euro-world view education is the province of central planners. But in this country education takes place in the home and in the neighborhood schoolhouse.

Second, and maybe more troubling, is this president's tendency to always want to do the "great" thing. It's not enough to inject federalism into an ailing economy in the form of tax breaks. No, we have to have the high drama of midnight congressional sessions to pass a $787 billion "stimulus" plan. Tax breaks would have been more immediate (We've only seen 7% of the stimulus money; tax breaks would have been in people's pockets in two weeks.), but not as "great."

It's passing on the chance at bi-partisan, true healthcare reform for the chance to remake the healthcare system for all time.

Iin this case, if President Obama really wanted to shine the spotlight on education, spending a day at a DC-area high school would have gotten the job done. Hold an assembly. Maybe find an American history class, and help teach it that day. Eat lunch in the cafeteria with students. He would have gotten just as much press, but it would have been more positive.

But that wasn't big enough, or great enough. Instead, we have this need to wire up every school in America to show how technologically hip we are. Again, tonal deafness. Where the President and his Beltway Band saw the chance to deliver an education message grander and greater than any president before him, the American people saw it as a metaphor for a presidency that wants to control every aspect of American life from the Oval Office.

It's this need to be great without having earned the reputation that is so troubling to most Americans. Great things are accomplished by a lot of hard work on the little details, something this president does not seem be particularly adept at.

Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them, wrote Shakespeare.

"Some men are born great, some men achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers," quipped historian Daniel Boorstin. He must have been thinking of Barack Obama.

Just thought you might like to know.

Dog Day Afternoons

We've just finished the month of August--the dog days. Lots of heat and little relief. And that just about sums up President Obama's month as well. It was a tough summer for the 44th president. Take a look:

• Town hall meetings across the country, designed to let lawmakers show they were on top of the health care bill, erupted into acrimony as voters gave them an earful about the massive spending plan
• Voters used the healthcare issue as a springboard to air their grievances about a government that spends too much and does too little 
• The President's vaunted "cash for clunkers" program became a metaphor for an administration that can't seem to get anything right--much like Jimmy Carter's Rose Garden strategy in 1980 showed him to be just another hostage of Iran's mullahs
• Casualties in Afghanistan-the war Candidate Obama staked out as his-began to rise in the absence of any clear military strategy
• Attorney General Eric Holder stirred up a hornet nest by announcing a special investigation (yet another) into CIA interrogation techniques from 6 years ago-another Obama genuflection to his ideological base
• The FDIC, going broke after  a rash of bank failures this year, is looking for a GM-type bailout, a potential last straw for voters who are sick of hearing the word bailout.

You need to connect these dots to see what's happened to Barack Obama's presidency. In a couple of months he has managed to squander the enormous political capital built up in his amazing run to the White House. The Rassmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll this morning  has only 46% of Americans approving of his job performance.

The bad news is that it gets worse for the President in September. Congress reconvenes to pick up healthcare reform. After a summer of town hall meetings, Republicans are ready to move to the center on pre-existing conditions and other issues. Moderate Democrats are even looking at tort reform to get Republicans on board. That leaves the 20% or so of Americans who think of themselves as liberals and want Euro-health. So the President will have to decide whether he wants to be president of all the people of just cheerleader-in-chief for the radical left.

Similarly the President's own commander in Afghanistan ended August with a call for a new strategy. Will Barack Obama infuriate his political base and show the courage that George Bush did by calling  for an Iraq-like surge?

And to drive home the point about out-of-control federal spending, a coalition of conservative groups has ripped a page from the liberals' book and plans a massive march in Washington on September 12. 

In the absence of any White House leadership (Sorry, Mr. President, buzzing into a town hall meeting on the way to vacation is cheer leading, it's not nation leading) will Democrats use parliamentary tricks like reconciliation and simply ram a healthcare bill through the Capitol?

One gets the feeling that President Obama enjoyed the chase of running for president more than he enjoys actually being president. This autumn we may find out exactly how much more.

Just thought you might like to know.

The Gathering Storm

It was back in April that Attorney General Eric Holder memoed CIA employees, writing that "(i)t would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department." Apparently, his boss failed to read the memo.

Yesterday, Attorney General Holder backpeddled and reversed direction, announcing the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate so-called "CIA crimes" that took place in the aftermath of 9-11.

In doing so, he has opened up a firestorm that will consume many good employees at the CIA, the nation's early detection system against terrorist threats, and any shred of bipartisanship that may still exist in some dark corner of Washington. And, it may ultimately consume his boss along with it--much in the same way that Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter allowed their presidencies consumed by Vietnam, Watergate and Iran, respectively.

Let's review the timeline on how we got to this point in the first place:

1. The CIA's Inspector General commissioned the first investigation into allegations of prisoner torture early in George W. Bush's first term
   
2. The CIA supplied both houses of Congress with unedited copies of its investigative report in 2004
3. The Bush Administration turned over the IG's findings to the Justice Department for review to see if any further action was warranted
4. Justice Department career attorneys, not political appointees as the Obama administration would have us believe reviewed those findings
5. The Justice Department spent a great deal of time--in fact, years--investigating the allegations
6. After all that, DOJ brought only one case, that of a private contractor who had beaten a detainee who subsequently died
7. In December 2008 Carl Levin (D-Michigan), a relic of the 1970s, began calling on the incoming Obama administration to hold Stalinist-type show trials for Bush administration officials on the issue of CIA interrogation methods (see our post from December 29, 2009)
8. The ACLU sued for public release of the 2004 classified CIA report
9. Attorney General Holder in April, after looking into the matter, declines to investigate further
   
10. A court orders the Justice Department to release the CIA findings

But maybe we should take this chronology a little further...

1. The tall pole in the administration's tent--nationalized healthcare--begins to collapse in June in the face of the hard facts about healthcare
   
2. Polls in July show for the first time a majority of Americans oppose what has become known as "ObamaCare"
   
3. By August the President's once enormous popularity has been whittled down to about 50%
   
4. The President stumps for ObamaCare in the Rockies, but can't move the needle in the polls on healthcare
   
5. Mr. Obama high-tails it to Martha's Vineyard for vacation, removing himself from the national spotlight for a week till things die down a bit
   
6. Eric Holder announces appointment of the special prosecutor to investigate the allegations of CIA-inspired "torture"
   

Nothing in Washington politics happens by accident. The timing of all this could not have been orchestrated better. Mr. Obama disappears, leaving a news void. A story that is five years old reappears on the front page, replacing daily coverage of angry Americans opposed to the President's healthcare plan. Opposition to ObamaCare cools a bit. The President's leftist base, a small but vocal minority, is appeased and re-energized to fight the final battle for healthcare when Congress returns from its summer recess.

But this could be a fatal misstep. Mr. Obama's political instincts, lauded so greatly during the campaign, have deserted him, much as the instincts of Lyndon Johnson, one of the greatest political minds of our time, deserted him during Vietnam. Mr. Obama is as out of touch with the public as President Johnson was in the 1960s. Like Presidents Johnson, Nixon and Carter, Mr. Obama is ill-served by a cadre of career Beltway advisers for whom governance is a board game, not public service. 

Mr. Obama fashions himself as a modern day Lincoln. But perhaps his antecedents are a lot closer than he thinks--three men in succession in the 1960s and '70s. Three men who, frankly, outpaced him in intelligence, experience, and instinct. And while they were Mr. Obama's betters, they engineered their own downfalls by failing to escape storms that they themselves started. 

Just thought you might like to know.

Routine No. 1

If media powerhouses like talk radio and Fox News are any indication, the wheels are coming off Barack Obama's longtime ambition to nationalize the U.S. healthcare industry. A July 29 Gallup poll shows that only 44% of Americans believe that the President's plan will result in improvements to healthcare. August has proved a hot month for Democratic congressmen who are getting roasted about the President's plan at town hall meetings across the country.

So the President has gone back to the old-time Democratic pol playbook, and called Routine No. 1. Democrat Routine No. 1 says never argue with conservatives on facts; you can't win. Always argue through emotion. 

Be prepared: The White House says expect a new healthcare sales tactic after Labor Day, when Pres. Obama rolls out a new media attack on conservatives. Out are deficit projections, quality life- year studies, and nuances between a public option and insurance cooperatives. In will be gut wrenching stories about heartless insurance companies and heart-tugging tales by little pigtailed girls about how daddy doesn't have any insurance anymore because he got laid off. 

Expect every television news program break to be crammed with million dollar spots produced by Madison Avenue and paid for by the President's unlikely bedfellows on this backroom political deal: the pharmaceutical industry, the American Medical Association and AARP. 

But don't you believe it. The President is a master of creating bogeymen and rallying support by blaming the bogey. As in his lifting the presidential ban on stem cell research: "Rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced...a false choice between sound science and moral values." In this case Pres. Obama painted his predecessor as a medieval mandarin, unable to reconcile science and religion, when the truth was the opposite. (Pres. Bush's ban led to tremendous strides on other types of cellular research that hold great promise.)

When you're carpet bombed with 30-second spots featuring the new Harry and Louise, cute little kids and huggable grandpas, remember the facts: what the President is desperately reaching for has resulted in rationing, backbreaking costs, and a lack of innovation everywhere it's been tried. Those are the facts.

So don't be impressed at this last-ditch effort at socialism. In 1948, at an Illinois campaign stop, a supporter shouted to Harry Truman during his stump speech, "Give 'em hell, Harry." The President's classic reply: "I don't give them hell. I just tell the truth, and they think it's hell." 

So when they try to hide the facts behind slick commercials and speeches to handpicked audiences, give 'em hell.

Just thought you might like to know.

Free by Divine Right

In the face of the mounting unrest in Iran--the pent-up frustration of thirty years of medieval feudal rule--I was struck today by the President's unequivocal words about government and men:

"The struggle in the world today for the hearts and minds of mankind is based on one simple question: Is man born to be free, or slave? In country after country, people have long known the answer to that question. We are free by divine right."

Unfortunately, those were not the words of President Barack Obama, but of Ronald Reagan, quoted by Andrew Klavan. President Reagan spoke those words 30 years ago about the Soviet Union. Within ten years the USSR had been consigned to what the President called the "ash heap of history," in a final, ironic riposte to the original author of those words, Leon Trotsky.

President Reagan believed in the moral absolutism that freedom always trumped tyranny, and that the historical role of America was as a constantly evolving model and supporter of freedom--from Bunker Hill to Gettysburg to Flanders fields to Omaha Beach and beyond. 

President Obama, enamored of the Thinking Class, believes in the moral relativism of the I'm-okay-you're okay school of Realpolitik. He believes that the historic role of America is talk your way out of problems, racking up Nobel Peace Prizes along the way like 5th grade spelling bee ribbons,  a la Jimmy Carter. We contract out our foreign policy to the feckless United Nations, while the world goes to hell in a bucket. Pres. Obama's answer to Iran has been to show no comfort to the rebels, but to apologize for what he perceives as historic American slights to Islam.

As Iran's feudal lords slowly crush that country's mounting rebellion, and North Korea continues to cross line after line in the sand, we'll see who's approach is more effective in the long run: the moral absolutism of Ronald Reagan or the equivocation of Barack Obama.

My money's on The Gipper. 

Just thought you might like to know.

The Beauty Contest President

Democrats and their allies in the media like to tout the fact that Pres. Barack Obama enjoys unprecedented support after the first 100 days in office. But do the polls bear that out?

A Gallup poll taken April 26 - 28 gives the President an approval rating of 63%. Receiving support from two-thirds of the American people is an achievement, indeed.

However, a Quinnipiac poll taken the prior week shows that by the exact same margin of people who approve of the President (63%), Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Even a similar poll by the ultra-leftist Daily Kos shows that better than half the people think that we're headed towards the waterfall backwards in a rowboat.

So we have a situation where 63% of the people basically like Pres. Obama, and 63% also think that his whirlwind first 100 days of centralizing authority in Washington, nationalizing two important economic sectors (autos and banks), and reversing the Bush Doctrine on terrorism is leading the country in the wrong direction.

Maybe the deciding poll comes in the people's judgment on Congress. In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, only 30% of those polled approved of the job that Congress is doing.

So let's not kid ourselves that the President's personal magnetism is somehow an endorsement of his radical left policies currently being executed by Congress. While Pres. Obama may be personally popular, people still fear where he's leading us and have little to no faith that Congress can do the job that needs to be done.

In the meantime the President maintains his personal poll numbers with a constant stream of empty platitudes on subjects like banking, health care, intelligence, the military, and the auto industry--all subjects on which he has little experience and knows less.

Perhaps his high poll numbers are a result of not being tested by the media, unlike his predecessors. As Dennis Miller pointed out on Fox News the other night after another softball White House press conference, we live in a peculiar time in history when a Miss USA contestant can lose a beauty pageant saying the same thing that Barack Obama said in winning the Presidency.


Just thought you might like to know.

Are We Really on the Brink of a Depression?

More and more the talk out of Washington is that the nation is on the verge of a second Great Depression. President Obama consistently uses the word crisis when describing our economy.

The numbers are the numbers when it comes to current economic conditions, and they certainly aren't good. But Depression? I think that's a stretch if you compare 2009 to 1929.

Most economists take the historical perspective that a depression starts when unemployment rises above 10% and stays there for several years, wrote Justin Lahart in the March 30 Wall Street Journal. But there are a number of factors that would make a modern-day depression different from the great one of 80 years ago:

• In 1929 20% of Americans were employed in farming. They were decimated by the drop in agricultural commodity prices, not to mention the Dust Bowl climatology of the 1930s. Today fewer than 2% of Americans make their livelihood on the farm, lessening any potential blow to the ag sector. In addition price supports, enacted during the Depression woudl cushion and rapid deflation on commodity prices.
• In 1929 Americans thrown out of work, or evicted from their apartments, homes or farms were pretty much on their own. Today we have entitlement programs that cushion blows like these. Food stamps, TANF, WIC, LIHEAP, and unemployment compensation are just some of the programs enacted 80 years ago that help bridge people through the rough times.
• In 1929 a family expected to spend a quarter of its income on food. No income, no food. Today Americans spend less than 10% of their family income putting food on the table. In fact, consumer food prices in the U.S. are among the lowest in the developed world. The nutritional blow from an economic crisis is not as severe now as it was 75 or 80 years ago.

It's more likely that to weather the economic storm today, Americans are reducing their spending, not so much on food for the table, but on discretionary items like restaurant meals, video consoles or lavish vacations. This creates a rippling economic effect, but that's a story for another post.

Just thought you might like to know.