Mark Steyn has a few choice comments, as the chattering classes’ major case of buyer’s remorse becomes ever increasingly the topic of the day.
“Obamaism” was the Emperor’s new centrism: To a fool such as your average talk-radio host, His Majesty appears to be a man of minimal accomplishments other than self-promotion marinated in a radical faculty-lounge view of the world and the role of government. But, to a wise man such as your average presidential historian or New York Times columnist, he is the smartest guy ever to become president.
In part, this is a natural extension of an ever more conformist and unrepresentative establishment’s view of where “the center” is. On issues from abortion to climate change, a Times man or Hollywood activist or media professor’s notion of “centrism” is well to the left of where American opinion is.
That’s one reason why a supposedly “center-right” nation has wound up regulated into sclerosis, drowning in debt and embarking on its last decade as the world’s leading economy.
But in the case of Obama the chasm between soft, seductive, politico-media “centrism” and hard, grim reality is too big to bridge, and getting wider all the time.
You would think this might prompt some sober reflection from an American mainstream media dying in part because of its dreary ideological conformity. After all, a key reason why 53% voted for a man who was not, in Tina Brown’s word, “ready” is that Tina and all her pals assured us he was.
Occidental, Columbia, Harvard Law, a little light community organizing, a couple of years timeserving in a state legislature: That’s what America’s elites regard as an impressive resume rather than a bleak indictment of contemporary notions of “accomplishment.”
Obama would not have withstood scrutiny in any society with a healthy, skeptical press. Yet, like the high-rolling Wall Street moneybags, they failed to do due diligence.
He is being polite about it, saying that we are still “a great country” which has, in recent decades, “gotten a little soft.”
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The failed recovery is obviously our fault, not this administration’s. We all know that Barack Obama is a higher being, who could have delivered Hope and Change; who could have “ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth;” who could have made the rise of the oceans begin to slow and the earth begin to heal; if only we had been worthy of his magnificent leadership.
These considerations cause Frank Fleming to engage in some serious introspection.
Obama was elected on the promise of hope and change; he was going to make everything better by fixing the economy, ending all wars, and making every rainbow a double rainbow. As smart and capable as we all knew he was, he should have succeeded beyond our wildest imaginations. But instead, we’re even worse off than before — I don’t remember the last time I even saw a single rainbow. The only explanation is that somehow we’ve angered Obama and caused him to turn against us. It’s just that I’m not sure how.
Now, we could go to a town hall and ask Obama, “What have we done to make you want to destroy this country?” I think that is a horrible idea, though, as Obama will only glare at us and become even angrier. Obviously what we’ve done is extremely bad based on the way Obama is treating us, and it would only be worse if he knew we were ignorant of our exact slight against him.
We just need to accept the fact that we’re a bad country, and that’s why Obama is not following through on the hope and change he promised. So now what we need to do is try to figure out how to become a better country so Obama will like us and decide that he doesn’t need to destroy us. So I’ve done my best to study Obama and figure out some ideas to make us a country he considers worth saving.
Charles Krauthammer explains the president’s recent tax proposal. This is politics, but it’s not only politics, this is the real Barack Obama.
A most revealing window into our president’s political core: To impose a tax that actually impoverishes our communal bank account (the U.S. Treasury) is ridiculous. It is nothing but punitive. It benefits no one — not the rich, not the poor, not the government. For Obama, however, it brings fairness, which is priceless. ...
Obama has actually gone and done it. He’s just proposed a $1.5 trillion tsunami of tax hikes featuring a “Buffett rule” that, although as yet deliberately still fuzzy, clearly includes raising capital gains taxes.
He also insists again upon raising marginal rates on “millionaire” couples making $250,000 or more. But roughly half the income of small businesses (i.e., those filing individual returns) would be hit by this tax increase. Therefore, if we are to believe Obama’s own logic that his proposed business tax credits would increase hiring, then surely this tax hike will reduce small-business hiring.
But what are jobs when fairness is at stake? Fairness trumps growth. Fairness trumps revenue. Fairness trumps economic logic.
Obama himself has said that “you don’t raise taxes in a recession.” Why then would he risk economic damage when facing reelection? Because these proposals have no chance of being enacted, many of them having been rejected by the Democratic-controlled Congress of Obama’s first two years in office.
Moreover, this is not an economic, or jobs, or debt-reduction plan in the first place. This is a campaign manifesto. This is anti-millionaire populism as premise for his reelection. And as such, it is already working.
Obama’s Democratic base is electrified. On the left, the new message is playing to rave reviews. It has rekindled the enthusiasm of his core constituency — the MoveOn, Hollywood liberal, Upper West Side precincts best described years ago by John Updike: “Like most of the neighborhood, she was a fighting liberal, fighting to have her money taken from her.”
Added Updike: “For all her exertions, it never was.” But now with Obama — it will be! Turns out, Obama really was the one they had been waiting for.
That is: the new Obama, today’s soak-the-rich, veto-threatening, self-proclaimed class warrior. Except that the new Obama is really the old Obama — the one who, upon entering office in the middle of a deep economic crisis, and determined not to allow “a serious crisis to go to waste” (to quote his then-chief of staff), exploited the (presumed) malleability of a demoralized and therefore passive citizenry to enact the largest Keynesian stimulus in recorded history, followed by the quasi-nationalization of one-sixth of the economy that is health care.
Considering the political cost — a massive electoral rebuke by an infuriated 2010 electorate — these are the works of a conviction politician, one deeply committed to his own social-democratic vision.
That politician now returns. Obama’s new populism surely is a calculation that his halfhearted feints to the center after the midterm “shellacking” were not only unconvincing but would do him no good anyway with a stagnant economy, 9 percent unemployment and a staggering $4 trillion of new debt.
But this is more than a political calculation. It is more than just a pander to his base. It is a pander to himself: Obama is a member of his base. He believes this stuff. It is an easy and comfortable political shift for him, because it’s a shift from a phony centrism back to his social-democratic core, from positioning to authenticity.
The authentic Obama is a leveler, a committed social democrat, a staunch believer in the redistributionist state, a tribune, above all, of “fairness” — understood as government-imposed and government-enforced equality.
That’s why “soak the rich” is not just a campaign slogan to rally the base. It’s a mission, a vocation. It’s why, for all its gratuitous cynicism and demagoguery, Obama’s populist Rose Garden lecture on Monday was delivered with such obvious — and unusual — conviction.
He’s returned to the authenticity of his radical April 2009 “New Foundation” address (at Georgetown University) that openly proclaimed his intent to fundamentally transform America.
In a 2001 NPR, State Senator Barack Obama complains of constitutional constraints on redistributive change.
House Speaker John Boehner made it clear in a speech to small business owners at the University of Cincinnati Monday that he is not in sync with the president’s plan to raise the tax rates of the wealthiest Americans.
“Giving the federal government more money would be like giving a cocaine addict more cocaine,’’ the West Chester Republican told about 100 members of the Goering Center for Family and Private Business at UC’s Alumni Center.
Obama knew perfectly well that the Republican-controlled House would never go along with an any-prospects-of-recovery-killing plan to raise taxes on the only sector of society capable of new investment and new job creation.
What Obama was doing was affirming his commitment to left-wing orthodoxy by embracing class warfare as an attempt to appeal to voters’ worst impulses.
—————————————— Hugh Hewitt named the game:
The president unleashes his inner Alinksy this morning with the release of his proposal for massive tax hikes, mostly on high income earners, accounting tricks and childish rhetoric. It is clear he has decided to run hard left in 2012, with all the tiresome cliches that involves.
The plan is a sham of course, an election year set-up just like the absurd demand in the Joint Session of Congress for Stimulus 2.0. This new, new plan isn’t dead upon arrival; it was dead before sending. And everyone knows it. Politico’s Mike Allen details the massive spin put on the highly partisan plan last night by the president’s tap-dancing and desperate team, but no one is fooled. Everything the president ever said about “working across the aisle” is trashed. The Chicago way is in the saddle. It’s the only way he and his advisors know.
The very good news is that the country knows, even if the MSM doesn’t.
From CBS News: “(CBS/AP) WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders say they are rejecting President Barack Obama’s jobs proposals to rebuild schools and blighted neighborhoods, and help keep state and local employees on the job.”
Oh, come on, CBS, you can do better:
(CBS/AP) WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders say they are rejecting President Barack Obama’s jobs proposals to rebuild schools and blighted neighborhoods, and help keep state and local employees on the job, and cure cancer and help the lame walk again, and find good homes for puppy dogs and kitty cats, and take a sunrise and sprinkle it with dew and cover it with chocolate and a miracle or two, and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, and grow apple trees and honey bees and snow white turtledoves, and slow the rise of the oceans, and begin to heal our planet.
Maureen Dowd compares the prospective 2012 electoral contest between Rick Perry and normal American Republicans and Barack Obama and the coastal pseudo-intellectual elites to the rivalrous friendship of Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) and Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) in John Ford’s 1962 film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”
In the film, rugged rancher and man of violence John Wayne befriends the tenderfoot, man of peace, attorney James Stewart and defends him against the outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). When the code of manhood obliges Stewart to stand up to Marvin in a gunfight. Wayne, well of aware of Stewart’s incompetence, casually plugs Marvin with his rifle from ambush at the crucial moment in the gun duel.
John Wayne chivalrously lets Stewart receive the credit for ending Liberty Valance’s local reign of terror, which carries Stewart onward into a political career ending in the US Senate. He even stands aside and allows the lawyer (who owes him his life) to marry the girl he loves.
John Ford means his film to depict his own vision of tragic Historicism, in which manly bravery and larger-than-life frontier individualism is inevitably swept away by Progress and the advance of Civilization. John Wayne’s character is obviously the better man, but he is not the man of the future. He steps aside for Stewart because he recognizes it himself.
The John Wayne character isn’t only more competent than the Jimmy Stewart character, he is wiser and nobler.
The secondary tragedy of the movie is revealed when the Stewart character who has returned in old age, covered with success and honors and still married to the girl, to the frontier town which was the original scene of events for the Wayne character’s funeral.
Jimmy Stewart tries telling the whole story of the shooting of Liberty Valance to a young reporter, and revealing that his whole career has been built on another man’s deed, and the newspaper’s editor declines to print it. “When the legend becomes fact,” the editor says, “print the legend.”
There is no expiation in confession for Stewart. His life has been built upon a lie, and he supplanted a better man in his wife’s affections, and he knows it.
Dowd simplifies John Ford’s narrative into the conflict between the Eastern egghead and the anti-intellectual.
At the cusp of the 2012 race, we have a classic cultural collision between a skinny Eastern egghead lawyer who’s inept in Washington gunfights and a pistol-totin’, lethal-injectin’, square-shouldered cowboy who has no patience for book learnin’.
Dowd goes on to examine, and find unworthy, Rick Perry’s college grades.
Studying to be a veterinarian, he stumbled on chemistry and made a D one semester and an F in another. “Four semesters of organic chemistry made a pilot out of me,” said Perry, who went on to join the Air Force.
What a pity it is that the Egghead Barack Obama has never seen fit to release any of his college or law school grades for comparison.
The self-flattering interpretation of the political conflict between democrats and Republicans, between Maureen Dowd and the rest of the community of fashion and ordinary Americans, and potentially in 2012 between Barack Obama and Rick Perry as the conflict between the forces of book learning and the uninformed is doubtless gratifying to New York Times’ readers, but personally I think the claim of members in good standing of our establishment culture to represent learning and intellectuality has a lot of problems.
The kind of learning that most of these people boast isn’t book learning at all. It’s merely Cliff Notes summary familiarity with names and what they’re famous for.
Our establishment elite does not draw its understanding and conclusions from a reservoir of learning in the traditional Western canon. Our establishment is commonly hostile to that canon, deprecatory of its value and significance, and characteristically Philistine. Establishment judgments and conclusions come much more commonly from a consensus produced by newspaper editorials and articles in journals of opinion.
Our community of fashion is not intellectually inquisitive or critical. On the contrary, it is herd-like and conformist. And it is profoundly intellectually reactionary, being totally and entirely committed to defending late 19th century ideas revolving around Utopian ameliorism effectuated via the rule of scientific experts operating under a rubric of collectivist statism.
People who are gullible enough to believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming, people who have failed to notice Socialism’s failures, people who still think that Keynesian economics will get you out of a recession are not smart. They are dumb.
The democrat party and the American community of fashion are comprised not of Eggheads, but of pseudo-intellectuals and muttonheads.
Tyler Durden responds to President Obama’s “Millionaire Tax” proposal.
In his increasingly desperate attempts to pander to a population that has by now entirely given up on the hope, and barely has any change left, Obama is going for broke (or technically the reverse) by setting the class warfare bar just that little bit higher. This time around, his targets are millionaires, who according to the NYT are about to see their taxes soar. Or not: nobody really knows if the proposed “Buffett Rule”, affectionately known for crony communist #1, will impact just millionaires income tax, which incidentally is the same as what everyone else is paying, or, far more importantly, their Investment Income, which is where the bulk of America’s wealthy income comes from. Which incidentally makes all the sense in the world: two and a half years after Bernanke has been desperately doing everything in his power to raise the “wealth effect” if only for the richest 1% of the US population, it is, from the government’s perspective, time for the taxman to come knocking and demand his share of the capital gains. Yet what is lost in this ridiculous proposal are the unintended consequences…
There isn’t any hope that Obama can get these kinds of proposals through Congress. What this is all about is testifying aloud in public to his fidelity to the leftist redistributionist faith and energizing his base of parasites and looters.
Democrat party strategist James Carville is upset, and is offering some characteristically unvarnished Carvellian advice to the Obama political team. (CNN:)
People often ask me what advice I would give the White House about various things. Today I was mulling over election results from New York and Nevada while thinking about that very question. What should the White House do now? One word came to mind: Panic.
We are far past sending out talking points. Do not attempt to dumb it down. We cannot stand any more explanations. Have you talked to any Democratic senators lately? I have. It’s pretty damn clear they are not happy campers.
This is what I would say to President Barack Obama: The time has come to demand a plan of action that requires a complete change from the direction you are headed.
I don’t know how else to break this down. Simply put:
.. Fire somebody. No—fire a lot of people. This may be news to you but this is not going well. For precedent, see Russian Army 64th division at Stalingrad. There were enough deaths at Stalingrad to make the entire tea party collectively orgasm.
Mr. President, your hinge of fate must turn.
Mr. Carville must have actually been referring to Vasily Chuikov’s 64th Army (subsequently redesignated the 7th Guards Army) which played a key role in the Battle of Stalingrad and which developed the tactic of fighting the Germans from as physically close a position as possible, “hugging the enemy,” as a means of neutralizing German advantages in firepower and combined arms tactics.
It is unclear whether Carville is advocating some innovative democrat political strategy be developed to neutralize Republican advantages resulting from the failure of President Obama’s economic policies and public dislike of Obamacare, or whether Mr. Carville is really simply trying to compare Barack Obama’s unhappy political prospects to the German disaster at Stalingrad, mistakenly referring to one of the best-known Soviet military formations instead of Army Group B, the actual loser.
The substance of Carville’s advice to Obama is to go on a PR offensive, firing scapegoats from within the Administration, create additional scapegoats to sacrifice by indicting businessmen supposedly responsible for the real estate bubble, and fight harder by repeating the democrat left’s talking points louder and more insistently.
The correct comparison would really be that of James Carville and the progressive left (that is so passionately demanding that somebody else keep fighting) with Hitler, and of Barack Obama (who has found himself in a hopeless position after faithfully following their orders) with General Paulus.
From today’s emailed The Goldberg File by Jonah Goldberg:
Obama gave perhaps the best speech of his presidency last night and no one cares (for an excellent recap see this Taiwanese animation)..
Maybe I am alone in this, but have you ever noticed that when you watch a recording of a movie—on a DVR, DVD, Blueray whatever—and you rewind a scene or even a snippet of dialogue, it suddenly makes whatever the actor is saying seem fake? Watch Don Corleone deliver a great little 30-second speech in The Godfather and then rewind it and watch it again, and suddenly you can see that it’s an actor reciting words. The more you do it, the more fully you’re removed from the flow of the movie.
Something similar happens for political reporters who follow politicians around on the stump. Once you’ve seen a candidate give the same speech—with the same uhs and ahs, the same choked-up moments, the same comedic pauses—a dozen, two dozen times, it becomes impossible not to grow jaded and cynical about it. You may still like the politician, but the substance of what he’s saying fades into the background.
Heck, we all know that if you just say a word over and over and over and over again, it soon starts to sound funny or fake. Quick: say “sponge” twenty times fast.
That’s where we are with Obama, I think. He’s become an endlessly looped highlight reel. He says the same things, makes the same arguments, uses the same debater’s tricks, and can’t understand why he’s not getting the same reaction he got in 2007-2008.
He’s the political equivalent of an aging Vegas crooner who doesn’t understand why 25-year-old girls don’t still give him their hotel room keys when he sings “Fly Me to the Moon” the way they did when he was 50 pounds lighter and 30 years younger.
The old lines don’t work anymore either. C’mon baby, did I tell you that Warren Buffet wants his taxes raised? You’ve got to dig that.
This has always been an acute problem for Obama because his meteoric political rise had more to do with the dynamics of faddishness than they did with merit or experience. He belonged in the category of Beanie Babies and Justin Bieber more than that of Lincoln or FDR.
It must be very frustrating for Obama, because he seems to think he “delivers” when he gives a good speech. But politicians, even non-faddish ones, aren’t like baseball players, who deliver the goods when they get on base or hit a home run. If a good baseball player does the same thing he did last year or ten years ago, he’s an all-star. If a politician simply repeats what he did last year, he’s in danger of being a has-been.
Obama’s speeches get “better” in the same sense that when we talk to people who don’t speak a word of English, we think if we say things louder and slower they will suddenly understand English. Rhetorically, he talks louder and slower by simultaneously clarifying and becoming more strident in making arguments he’s made a million times before.
Meanwhile, his political operation is like the entourage who tells the crooner he’s still got it baby. Work that cowbell one more time.
I think the reason it comes across so glaringly as a performance is that Obama, for all his creased-pants Niebuhrian nuance, is stunningly unreflective about himself. His public persona is nearly always “I meant to do that.” So there was no acknowledgment that all of his “new ideas” last night weren’t new. No acknowledgement that he tried this stuff before in the stimulus. It’s just one more encore of “Fly Me to the Moon.”
I should say there have been times where he has admitted fault, but even then it comes across badly. His admissions that “shovel-ready” wasn’t shovel-ready (which should have been a scandal) either took the form of a condescending giggle or a report of fact that he assumed everyone else would be surprised by, too. He discovered that “shovel-ready” was b.s., and rather than report this as confirmation that Obama was outrageously learning on the job, the media acted like the man had confirmed the existence of an heretofore unknown atomic particle. Of course we can forgive you for not knowing shovel ready jobs don’t exist, the NY Times crowd seemed to say, because we thought they existed too!
All of the other times he’s admitted failure, it’s been a kind of humble brag. After Scott Brown’s election and again after the 2010 “shellacking,” he explained his biggest failure was that he, in effect, hadn’t sang “Fly Me To The Moon” louder and better with accompanying cowbell. In other words (heh), if only he gave people more Obama, everything would be better. It reminds me of the Campbell Scott character in Singles who thinks if he can just explain that his idea for commuter rail involves providing commuters a really, really good cup of coffee, everyone will understand the genius of his boondoggle.
Yes, I know Obama is trying to “trap” the GOP, and his advisers are moving little pewter toy-soldier versions of Boehner and Cantor on giant maps in the West Wing playroom. But at its core, last night’s speech was built around the assumption that all that separates Obama from a second term and greatness is one more really good speech, when the truth is that all that separates Obama from a second term and greatness is Obama.
James Lileks tells the liberals why their time on top is rapidly drawing to a conclusion.
Because that old world is over. . . .
A half-century experiment in draping steamship anchors around the necks of the productive class and expecting them to run a four-minute mile has ended in failure. The confiscation of rights and property, the moral impoverishment of generations caused by the state’s usurpation of parental obligations, the elevation of a credentialed elite that believes academia’s fashions are a worthy substitute for knowledge of history and human nature, and above all the faith in a weightless cipher whose oratorical panache now consists of looking from one teleprompter screen to the other with the enthusiasm of a man watching someone else’s kids play tennis–it’s over, whether you believe in it or not. It cannot be sustained without reducing everyone to penurious equality, crippling the power of the United States, and subsuming the economy to a no-growth future that rations energy.
To which some progressives respond: You say that like it’s a bad thing.
MSNBC records the passing of another landmark on the road to ruin for the current administration.
The U.S. has tumbled further down a global ranking of the world’s most competitive economies, landing at fifth place because of its huge deficits and declining public faith in government, a global economic group said Wednesday.
The announcement by the World Economic Forum was the latest bad news for the Obama administration, which has been struggling to boost the sinking U.S. economy and lower an unemployment rate of more than 9 percent.
Switzerland held onto the top spot for the third consecutive year in the annual ranking by the Geneva-based forum, which is best known for its exclusive meeting of luminaries in Davos, Switzerland, each January.
Singapore moved up to second place, bumping Sweden down to third. Finland moved up to fourth place, from seventh last year. The U.S. was in fourth place last year, after falling from No. 1 in 2008.
The rankings, which the forum has issued for more than three decades, are based on economic data and a survey of 15,000 business executives.
Car in front of me had a bumper sticker on it. It read: “Pray for Obama. Psalm 109:8.” When I got home I opened my bible to the scripture and read it and started laughing. Psalm 109:8 –“Let his days be few and brief; And let others step forward to replace him.” At last –I can voice a Biblical prayer for our president!
Let us bow our heads and pray.
The KJV reads: Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
Even liberals like Maureen Dowd have grown tired of Barack Obama’s self-important incompetence. Her final line is absolutely devastating.
The leader who was once a luminescent, inspirational force is now just a guy in a really bad spot. ...
Just as Obama miscalculated in 2009 when Democrats had total control of Congress, holding out hope that G.O.P. lawmakers would come around on health care after all but three senators had refused to vote for the stimulus bill; just as he misread John Boehner this summer, clinging like a scorned lover to a dream that the speaker would drop his demanding new inamorata, the Tea Party, to strike a “grand” budget bargain, so the president once more set a trap for himself and gave Boehner the opportunity to dis him on the timing of his jobs speech this week.
Obama’s re-election chances depend on painting the Republicans as disrespectful. So why would the White House act disrespectful by scheduling a speech to a joint session of Congress at the exact time when the Republicans already had a debate planned?
And why is the White House so cocky about Obama as a TV draw against quick-draw Rick Perry? As James Carville acerbically noted, given a choice between watching an Obama speech and a G.O.P. debate, “I’d watch the debate, and I’m not even a Republican.”
The White House caved, of course, and moved to Thursday, because there’s nothing the Republicans say that he won’t eagerly meet halfway.
No. 2 on David Letterman’s Top Ten List of the president’s plans for Labor Day: “Pretty much whatever the Republicans tell him he can do.”
On MSNBC, the anchors were wistfully listening to old F.D.R. speeches, wishing that this president had some of that fight. But Obama can’t turn into F.D.R. for the campaign because he aspires to the class that F.D.R. was a traitor to; and he can’t turn into Harry Truman because he lacks the common touch. He has an acquired elitism.
MSNBC’s Matt Miller offered “a public service” to journalists talking about Obama — a list of synonyms for cave: “Buckle, fold, concede, bend, defer, submit, give in, knuckle under, kowtow, surrender, yield, comply, capitulate.”
And it wasn’t exactly Morning in America when Obama sent out a mass e-mail to supporters Wednesday under the heading “Frustrated.”
It unfortunately echoed a November 2010 parody in The Onion with the headline, “Frustrated Obama Sends Nation Rambling 75,000-Word E-Mail.”
“Throughout,” The Onion teased, “the president expressed his aggravation on subjects as disparate as the war in Afghanistan, the sluggish economic recovery, his live-in mother-in-law, China’s undervalued currency, Boston’s Logan Airport, and tort reform.”
You know you’re in trouble when Harry Reid says you should be more aggressive.
If the languid Obama had not done his usual irritating fourth-quarter play, if he had presented a jobs plan a year ago and fought for it, he wouldn’t have needed to elevate the setting. How will he up the ante next time? A speech from the space station?
Republicans who are worried about being political props have a point. The president is using the power of the incumbency and a sacred occasion for a political speech.
Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed.
The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.
The White House team is flailing — reacting, regrouping, retrenching. It’s repugnant.
After pushing and shoving and caving to get on TV, the president’s advisers immediately began warning that the long-yearned-for jobs speech wasn’t going to be that awe-inspiring.
“The issue isn’t the size or the newness of the ideas,” one said. “It’s less the substance than how he says it, whether he seizes the moment.”
The arc of justice is stuck at the top of a mountain. [Emphasis added ] Maybe Obama was not even the person he was waiting for.
