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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (42091)	3/13/2010 7:38:24 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 71588

As Its Arms Makers Falter, Russia Buys Abroad By ANDREW E. KRAMER Published: March 12, 2010 nytimes.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (42091)	3/19/2010 9:34:34 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Dems Wrong War: Health Care Amid Jobs Crisis By David Paul Kuhn March 18, 2010 Barack Obama said 3,341 words before he advocated health care reform during his State of the Union address. It was indicative of the White House pledge to pivot to jobs in 2010. As early as last Thanksgiving, the president declared, "I will not rest until businesses are investing again and businesses are hiring again and people have work again." Nearly four months later, Obama continues to spend most of his waking hours attempting to pass a health care bill. No legislation has so engulfed Washington in decades. What's intriguing today is the thunderclap unheard. It's the greatest jobs crisis in three-quarters of a century. All political hands are on deck for health care. But to most Americans, the storm is elsewhere. Quiet amid Washington's storm, the Senate sent a jobs bill to the president Wednesday. The bill provides $18 billion in business tax breaks to spur hiring. It's a start. But it will only matter on the margins. "It is about 30 times too small," said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. "What they are going to do will create at most a couple hundred thousand jobs. We have a job hole of over 11 million." "The bill is so minuscule, even if every dime was spent over the next twelve months," said Brookings Gary Burtless, a former economist with the Department of Labor. The two economists believe far more should be done. What can and will be done is another matter, however. Differing House and Senate measures are pending. The former concentrates more on infrastructure and the latter on business tax cuts. But even those measures, perhaps totaling as much as $150 billion, pale beside the scope of the crisis. More than 6 million Americans have been unemployed for at least a half-year. That's double the previous record for long-term unemployment, in the early 80s, since tracking began in 1948. The Obama administration projects at least a 9 percent unemployment rate until 2011. The Pew Research Center reported Thursday morning that a majority, 54 percent, say that someone in their household has been without a job or has looked for work in the past year. Only 39 percent said the same last February. One in five adults say they have lost their job in the past year. And there is pervasive anxiety among those with jobs. One in four workers believe they will likely be asked to take a pay cut or be laid off in the coming year. This explains why a majority, 52 percent, views the most important issue today as the economy and jobs. The second most important issue is health care, at only 13 percent, according to a February CBS/New York Times Poll. Yet Washington's priorities appear to be the inverse. Pushing for universal health care is true to Democratic ideals. Should the bill pass, it would cap decades of effort – however imperfectly. It would be a large victory in pure legislative terms. But what agnostic observer, looking back, would still say the smarter move was not to focus exclusively on the economy in that first year, as FDR did? The economic focus would have addressed the crisis of these hard times. It was the popular move. And the popular move can sometimes be the right move. It could have built up the American people's confidence and Obama's political capital. Democrats could have mustered that success for the predictably harder push, health care. But that's now in the past. Instead, Democrats decided to go all-in on health care. We knew last summer that the stakes were high for Obama on health care. But the degree to which this president gambled on this issue was not foreseeable, at least not by this writer. It has cost Democrats an entire year and the bulk of Obama's remaining political capital. There is little tolerance left for big spending among moderate Democrats. And that hampers every jobs bill ahead. Washington is understandably obsessed with the political fallout of the health care bill. But there is the gap between what could have been done on the economy and what thus far has been done. And that economic expectations gap might haunt Democrats the most in the long run. It might cost Democrats their majority in the House. Look where we are instead of the economy. Monday was the Ides of March – when ancient Rome celebrated the god of war – and without a hint of irony Democrats began to float an obscure procedural maneuver termed the "Slaughter Solution." Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch has repeatedly said, should the Democratic vote proceed as expected, that partisan "war" will be upon us. Washington has already sunk into partisan war. But this much is clear – most Americans believe it's over the wrong cause. David Paul Kuhn is the Chief Political Correspondent for RealClearPolitics and the author of The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma. He can be reached at david@realclearpolitics.com and his writing followed via RSS. realclearpolitics.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (42091)	11/4/2012 9:01:10 AM
From: greatplains_guy	Respond to of 71588

Obama campaign struggles to explain ‘revenge’ remark Byron York November 3, 2012 \| 1:50 pm CINCINNATI — A seemingly offhand utterance from President Obama has turned into a major point of contention between the two campaigns, as Team Obama tries to explain what the president meant when he told a crowd of supporters that “Voting is the best revenge.” It happened in Springfield, Ohio Friday as Obama was discussing the economic policies of the 1990s. When Obama referred to “a Senate candidate by the name of Mitt Romney,” the crowd booed his opponent’s name — certainly not unusual reaction at political rallies of both parties. Then Obama said, “No, no, no — don’t boo, vote. Vote. Voting is the best revenge.” It was an ugly and small-minded moment, especially for the end of a campaign when candidates usually try to stress larger, optimistic themes. Romney incorporated the “revenge” line in his speech in Ohio Friday night, saying that while Obama advises revenge, he, Romney, wants people to vote “for love of country.” As Obama traveled to northern Ohio Saturday morning, campaign official Jen Psaki was asked about the “revenge” remark. According to a White House pool report, Psaki said Obama had been speaking in the context of Romney’s “scare tactics” in Ohio. The Republican is “frightening workers in Ohio into thinking, falsely, that they’re not going to have a job,” Psaki said, according to the pool report. “And the message [Obama] was sending is if you don’t like the policies, if you don’t like the plan that Gov. Romney is putting forward, if you think that’s a bad deal for the middle class, then you can go to the voting booth and cast your ballot. It’s nothing more complicated than that.” The problem is, the president was actually not speaking in the context of Romney’s highly-controversial ads about bailed-out Chrysler adding production of Jeeps in China. In fact, Obama had not said a word about the Jeep controversy when he said “revenge.” His speech had touched on Hurricane Sandy, on the progress the American economy has made in the last few years, on his national security accomplishments, on the choice Americans will make on November 6, on Bill Clinton’s record — on a lot of things, but not on Jeep. And even after the “revenge” remark, it took Obama six paragraphs to get to his discussion of Jeep. The bottom line is, while it is impossible to know what was in the president’s mind, he simply was not talking about Jeep when he told voters that “Voting is the best revenge.” washingtonexaminer.com