NO WAY OBAMA WINS IN 2012

"As the Rev. Jeremiah Wright said — outrageously and wrongly — about 9/11, “the chickens are coming home to roost.” The policies of this administration — the disastrous overspending, the irresponsible borrowing, the social experimentation — all are magnifying and amplifying the impact of the recession. Relief is not going to come anytime soon.

Instead, the true legacy of the Obama years is likely to be stagflation and an entire decade wiped out by his policies, budget and programs. Long after he is gone in 2013, we will still be repairing the damage of his terrible decisions."

More Jimmy Carter-esque comparisons keep rolling in. This one from Dick Morris flatly states that Obama has NO CHANCE of reelection in two years, and that "stagflation" (recession and inflation) will be Obama's legacy, as was it Jimmuh's in 1980...T

The combination of high oil and gasoline prices, rising food costs, higher health insurance premiums and the likelihood of future inflation has jarred consumer confidence, creating a major crisis for the Obama administration.

The collapse has been sudden and dramatic.

In December, the consumer confidence scale in the Rasmussen Poll stood at 81.7 percent. But in January, euphoria set in. Obama compromised on the George W. Bush tax cuts, the nation seemed to be coming together after the Giffords shooting and a Republican House sat poised to stop any new spending or social experimentation. On Jan. 11, the Rasmussen confidence index rose to 88.3.

Then reality dawned. Unemployment remained persistently high, economic growth was largely stagnant and partisan bickering resumed. The confidence level on Feb. 11 dropped to 84.5.

Then the bottom fell out. The daily Rasmussen polling reflected a drop day after day until, by March 11, the index had fallen to 73.1, its lowest level since it registered a 69 in July of 2009, in the depths of the recession.

The false dawn of January has faded and the hard, cold reality of a likely second recession is setting in. But this recession is accompanied by the likelihood of inflation, a stagflation syndrome that will probably grip America for years. And which will likely take a manmade recession, on the order of 1979-82, to counter it.

Will Obama get reelected? No way! In the teeth of the economic catastrophe that is shaping up, his chances are doomed.

The tsunami in Japan, perhaps the greatest tragedy since 9/11, will further impede any prospect for economic growth. There will be a demand for spending to repair the devastation of the quake. But Japan is tied with China as the world’s second largest economy, generating 12 percent of the global GDP. With Japan neither producing nor buying for the foreseeable future, the drag on the global economy will be profound.

Worse, the Fed and the administration are out of tools to help. Interest rates are already at zero. Fiscal stimulus — the deficit — already consumes 40 percent of our total government outlays. The Fed is printing money at a ferocious rate under its qualitative easing (QE-2) program. What is left to do?

Only dramatic cuts in the federal deficit, a rollback of regulations that cripple small and community banks, a cancellation of future tax increase plans, a big reduction in federal spending, repeal of ObamaCare, freeing manufacturing from the prospect of carbon taxation and unleashing our domestic energy potential can solve our problems. But Obama is not about to undo his legacy of disaster for the American people.

And then there is the longer-term oil and gasoline crisis. Instability in the Middle East is going to mount, not recede. The chances of disruption in Saudi oil supplies and the possibility of an overthrow of the regime (triggered by the best efforts of Iran) will continue to force prices upward. The drag on the economy and the rising consumer discontent in the United States spell further problems for the Obama presidency.

As the Rev. Jeremiah Wright said — outrageously and wrongly — about 9/11, “the chickens are coming home to roost.” The policies of this administration — the disastrous overspending, the irresponsible borrowing, the social experimentation — all are magnifying and amplifying the impact of the recession. Relief is not going to come anytime soon.

Instead, the true legacy of the Obama years is likely to be stagflation and an entire decade wiped out by his policies, budget and programs. Long after he is gone in 2013, we will still be repairing the damage of his terrible decisions.
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The Whiniest President Ever

Image via Wikipedia "President Obama gives off a sense of world-weariness and exhaustion with America’s leadership — and has earned a Nobel Peace Prize as a result. He reflects the deep vein of declinism running through the country’s elite, the same class of people who pronounced the presidency uninhabitable just as Ronald Reagan arrived to prove them wrong.

Today, as in the late 1970s, the job isn’t too big, nor is the country too powerful: The man is too small."

As has been posted numerous times on this site, as elsewhere, the comparisons to the feebly inept Jimmy Carter presidency are too glaring to ignore. The only question remaining becomes: Who shall step forward as our new Reagan, and restore our nation from the devastation of his predecessor, as did his namesake?...T

It was fashionable at the end of the 1970s, after a dreary parade of presidential failures punctuated by Jimmy Carter, to say the presidency had grown too unwieldy. The historian Barbara Tuchman spoke for all the academic and journalistic believers in the theory of the impossible presidency when she mused, “Maybe some form of plural executive is needed, such as they have in Switzerland.”

Ah, yes, the wonders of the plural executive. Why didn’t that occur to James Madison?

Pres. Barack Obama has belatedly joined the ranks of presidential fatalists. The job isn’t too complex necessarily; it’s too damn influential. According to the New York Times, Obama has been telling aides that it’d be easier to be president of China. No one hangs on Hu Jintao’s every word, or expects global leadership from a grasping, one-party state that has never been a beacon to the world.

In the history of presidential lamentations, this has to rank among the most pathetic. It brings to mind the affecting scene from The King’s Speech when Colin Firth, playing the stammering monarch-to-be, breaks down and weeps at the prospect of the crown being thrust upon him: “I’m not a king.” Except Barack Obama campaigned for two years straight to be president of the United States — and doesn’t stutter.

The proximate cause of Obama’s angst is the crisis in Libya. Obama announced that Moammar Qaddafi must go, and proceeded to do nothing that might give his words any bite. The administration is still agonizing over the no-fly zone, even as Qaddafi routs the rebels. The no-fly zone isn’t a panacea — realistically, it’d only be a way station to more robust military action. Perhaps the administration wants to rule it out. Fine. But decide already. If Obama wasn’t going to aid the rebels in any way — not even recognize their provisional government, not even arm them — he should have modulated his words accordingly.

Obama lacks executive flair. Talk to New Jersey governor Chris Christie and he will tell you at length how much he loves making decisions. It’s hard to imagine a Chris Christie enjoying life as a legislator. Obama came to the presidency after a political career spent marinating in senates, first in Illinois, then in Washington.

Osama bin Laden famously talked of the weak horse and the strong horse. Obama is the show horse. As a U.S. senator, he distinguished himself more by saying things than by passing legislation. In the White House, he has replicated his role as the non-legislating legislator on a grand scale. His successes have been as the leader of the Democrats in Congress, although even here, the word “leader” applies only loosely. He set the broad goals and gave the speeches; otherwise, he let Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid run riot.

The stakes of Obama’s self-imposed passivity aren’t as dire as those of Pres. James Buchanan, who pleaded powerlessness as the country fell apart around him on the cusp of the Civil War. William Seward commented acerbically: “[He] shows conclusively that it is the duty of the president to execute the laws — unless somebody opposes him; and that no state has a right to go out of the Union — unless it wants to.” Nor has President Obama reached the depths of a Jimmy Carter, who literally disappeared in the run-up to his infamous 1979 “malaise” speech.

At the dawn of America’s global power, a bumptious Theodore Roosevelt raced to make America’s influence felt around the world — and earned a Nobel Peace Prize as a result. President Obama gives off a sense of world-weariness and exhaustion with America’s leadership — and has earned a Nobel Peace Prize as a result. He reflects the deep vein of declinism running through the country’s elite, the same class of people who pronounced the presidency uninhabitable just as Ronald Reagan arrived to prove them wrong.

Today, as in the late 1970s, the job isn’t too big, nor is the country too powerful: The man is too small.
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Rubicon: A river in Wisconsin

Hell yeah! Could this be, finally, the end of the progressive movement's ascendancy in real terms, in America? Reagan, Newt, and Bush all had them on the ropes, but now the nation is in full throated revolt, and there may - MAY - be no caving in this time. Very courageous leaders in DC, Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana...T


The magnificent turmoil now gripping statehouses in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and soon others marks an epic political moment. The nation faces a fiscal crisis of historic proportions and, remarkably, our muddled, gridlocked, allegedly broken politics have yielded singular clarity.

At the federal level, President Obama's budget makes clear that Democrats are determined to do nothing about the debt crisis, while House Republicans have announced that beyond their proposed cuts in discretionary spending, their April budget will actually propose real entitlement reform. Simultaneously, in Wisconsin and other states, Republican governors are taking on unsustainable, fiscally ruinous pension and health-care obligations, while Democrats are full-throated in support of the public-employee unions crying, "Hell, no."

A choice, not an echo: Democrats desperately defending the status quo; Republicans charging the barricades.

Wisconsin is the epicenter. It began with economic issues. When Gov. Scott Walker proposed that state workers contribute more to their pension and health-care benefits, he started a revolution. Teachers called in sick. Schools closed. Demonstrators massed at the capitol. Democratic senators fled the state to paralyze the Legislature.

Unfortunately for them, that telegenic faux-Cairo scene drew national attention to the dispute - and to the sweetheart deals the public-sector unions had negotiated for themselves for years. They were contributing a fifth of a penny on a dollar of wages to their pensions and one-fourth what private-sector workers pay for health insurance.

The unions quickly understood that the more than 85 percent of Wisconsin not part of this privileged special-interest group would not take kindly to "public servants" resisting adjustments that still leave them paying less for benefits than private-sector workers. They immediately capitulated and claimed they were only protesting the other part of the bill, the part about collective-bargaining rights.

Indeed. Walker understands that a one-time giveback means little. The state's financial straits - a $3.6 billion budget shortfall over the next two years - did not come out of nowhere. They came largely from a half-century-long power imbalance between the unions and the politicians with whom they collectively bargain.

In the private sector, the capitalist knows that when he negotiates with the union, if he gives away the store, he loses his shirt. In the public sector, the politicians who approve any deal have none of their own money at stake. On the contrary, the more favorably they dispose of union demands, the more likely they are to be the beneficiary of union largess in the next election. It's the perfect cozy setup.

To redress these perverse incentives that benefit both negotiating parties at the expense of the taxpayer, Walker's bill would restrict future government-union negotiations to wages only. Excluded from negotiations would be benefits, the more easily hidden sweeteners that come due long after the politicians who negotiated them are gone. The bill would also require that unions be recertified every year and that dues be voluntary.

Recognizing this threat to union power, the Democratic Party is pouring money and fury into the fight. Fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers are unionized. The Democrats' strength lies in government workers, who now constitute a majority of union members and provide massive support to the party. For them, Wisconsin represents a dangerous contagion.

Hence the import of the current moment - its blinding clarity. Here stand the Democrats, avatars of reactionary liberalism, desperately trying to hang on to the gains of their glory years - from unsustainable federal entitlements for the elderly enacted when life expectancy was 62 to the massive promissory notes issued to government unions when state coffers were full and no one was looking.

Obama's Democrats have become the party of no. Real cuts to the federal budget? No. Entitlement reform? No. Tax reform? No. Breaking the corrupt and fiscally unsustainable symbiosis between public-sector unions and state governments? Hell, no.

We have heard everyone - from Obama's own debt commission to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - call the looming debt a mortal threat to the nation. We have watched Greece self-immolate. We can see the future. The only question has been: When will the country finally rouse itself?

Amazingly, the answer is: now. Led by famously progressive Wisconsin - Scott Walker at the state level and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan at the congressional level - a new generation of Republicans has looked at the debt and is crossing the Rubicon. Recklessly principled, they are putting the question to the nation: Are we a serious people?
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Government-Shutdown Blame Game

Image via Wikipedia Shut it down now. Obama can not win this one, as Boehner, Ryan and the house GOP leaders have him boxed in. The poll numbers (and the truth) support them, unlike in Newt's day...T

Sometimes you get an idea of the way opinion is headed by the phrases you don't hear. Case in point: In all the discussion and debate these past weeks about a possible government shutdown if Congress and President Obama fail to agree on funding bills, I don't recall having heard the phrase "train wreck."

I think that's significant, because back in the 1990s, when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich's Republicans and President Clinton failed to reach agreement and the government actually did shut down, "train wreck" was a common term.

And, of course, a derogatory one. The implication was that a government shutdown was a horrifying mess. In fact, the country weathered the 1990s shutdowns pretty well. And so did Gingrich's House Republicans, who lost only nine seats in the next election -- a lot fewer than the 63 seats Nancy Pelosi's Democrats lost last November.

Which is not to say that voters view a shutdown as an unalloyed positive. But you're not hearing it described as a train wreck, either.

House Republicans passed a stopgap funding bill Tuesday that Obama and Senate Democrats have signaled they will embrace, which will keep the government open after the March 4 deadline. But that would just postpone the prospects of a shutdown for two weeks. If the government is shuttered then, who would the public blame?

Both sides equally, say the pollsters in surveys over the past two weeks.

Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, says 41 percent would blame Republicans and 39 percent would blame Obama.

Gallup says that 42 percent say Republicans are doing a better job of reaching a budget agreement, while 39 percent say Democrats are.

The Hill says 29 percent would blame Democrats for a shutdown and 23 percent would blame Republicans.

The Washington Post says 36 percent would blame Republicans and 35 percent would blame the Obama administration.

It's a general rule that people have more favorable feelings toward individuals than they do to groups -- that's why the president, any president, almost always has better ratings than the Congress. You might want to keep that in mind in interpreting polls pitting the individual Obama against the group congressional Republicans.

Also keep in mind that opinion is not where it was during the Clinton-Gingrich struggle 16 years ago. The Washington Post helpfully notes that its polling then showed 46 percent blaming Gingrich and the Republicans for the shutdown and only 27 percent blaming Clinton.

We're in a different political environment now in two important respects. The first is the media. There was no Internet or blogosphere in 1995; Fox News Channel did not start until October 1996; talk radio was in its infancy, with Rush Limbaugh already an important national voice but with few other conservative hosts on the air.

In that environment, liberal-inclined media were able to tell the story and frame the issue the way they liked without much dissent. ABC's Peter Jennings could compare voters who supported Gingrich Republicans to infants having a tantrum. Such voices don't have a monopoly today.

The second significant difference is that in the mid-1990s the economy was growing and it was not clear why we needed to limit government spending. We could afford more for this, that and the other thing.

Now we're in straitened circumstances, just out of a severe recession (though many voters don't think it's over just yet) and in a very restrained and anemic recovery. We've seen that a substantial increase in government spending -- from 21 percent to 25 percent of gross domestic product -- hasn't done much to stimulate economic growth. And we've seen that government kept growing even as the private sector suffered.

In that setting, pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that 58 percent of likely voters would rather have a government shutdown until both parties can agree on spending cuts, while only 33 percent would prefer spending at the same levels as last year.

Liberal poll critics may say, correctly, that the question frames the issue the way Republican politicians would like. But that's the point. Republican politicians today have a much better chance to persuade voters to view issues the way they do than they did in the Clinton-Gingrich days.

All of which explains why Obama and congressional Democrats seem more willing to make concessions than Clinton was. And why we're not hearing the phrase "train wreck" much anymore
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