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

To: greatplains_guy who wrote (55163)	9/2/2012 11:15:48 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	1 Recommendation Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 71588

Barack Obama will be, as this editorial board predicted a month ago, a one-term president. And, we repeat, in the end it will not even be close. Why? http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/sep/01/selling-a-story-voters-wont-buy/ Because Obama and the Democrats, who open their national convention in Charlotte, N.C., on Tuesday, thereby launching the final stretch of the 2012 campaign, will be trying to sell a fanciful story of the Obama record that American voters will not buy. It’s the economy, stupid. That rallying cry, first given voice by campaign manager James Carville to campaign workers for Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 to keep them focused in the race against incumbent President George H.W. Bush, is today the rightful rallying cry for Republican nominee Mitt Romney against Obama. To be sure, Obama inherited a horrible economic mess in January 2009. The housing market had collapsed. Major financial institutions were failing, not to mention the auto industry. Unemployment and underemployment had skyrocketed. Consumer confidence had plummeted. The United States was in the most severe recession since the 1930s, with more than a few experts fearing further collapse into full-blown depression. So what did the new president do? He let congressional Democrats write a pork-laden $800 billion economic stimulus plan that did a lot to stimulate Big Government across the land but did almost nothing to stimulate the private sector where jobs and economic growth are created. And he focused his own attention on pushing through a massive overhaul of the health care system, signed into law in March 2010, that will not improve the delivery of health care for sick people, and will still not make health insurance accessible to all who need it, but will make the national health care system even costlier than it is today. And the federal budget deficit, already at record levels when Obama took office, is now projected to double and triple into a financial black hole as far as the eye can see. It was the economy, stupid. And Obama blew it. The Democrats in Charlotte this week will introduce fresh faces, most notably San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro as the convention keynoter on Tuesday night, California Attorney General Kamala Harris and actress Eva Longoria (Will she try to outdo Clint?), to tell the Obama story as best they can. More familiar Democrats of old will also pitch in, including former President Jimmy Carter (via video), Caroline Kennedy, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, a bunch of Democratic governors and mayors, first lady Michelle Obama and Clinton, who will formally place Obama’s name in nomination. Do not envy them their task. They will try to make something out of very little on the Obama record, but mostly they will attempt to portray the Republican ticket of Romney and Paul Ryan as extremists whose policies will protect the wealthy at the expense of the poor, the middle class and the elderly and who will wage war against women and the environment. But that will not hold water with anybody who watched any part of last week’s Republican convention. Americans want to be inspired to vote for a candidate for president, not frightened into voting against a candidate. In 2012, the inspiration for hope and change does not come from Barack Obama

To: greatplains_guy who wrote (55163)	9/5/2012 3:25:13 PM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

The Hubris of Central Planners By Jonah Goldberg - September 5, 2012 You have to feel a little sorry for Team Obama as they squirm to explain why the question “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” is so unfair. After all, there is only one way to answer it and retain any credibility. Which is why Maryland’s Democratic governor, Martin O’Malley, when asked, responded, No, we’re not. Within 24 hours, he reversed himself, by all accounts because the Obama campaign forced him to. I haven’t checked the video to see if he was blinking T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code as he did so. The idea that presidents “run” the economy is both ludicrous and fairly novel. Before the New Deal (which in my opinion prolonged the Great Depression), the notion that presidents should or could grow the economy was outlandish. But, as the historian H. W. Brands has argued, it was JFK who really cemented the idea that the president is the project manager for a team of technicians who create economic prosperity. “Most of the problems . . . that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems,” he explained, and should be kept as far away from partisan politics as possible. President Obama, a hybrid reincarnation of Kennedy and Roosevelt according to his fans, came into office with similar misconceptions. Controlling the White House, the House, and the Senate, his team of propeller-heads insisted that if we passed exactly the stimulus they wanted, the unemployment rate would top out at 8 percent and would be well below that by now. They waved around charts and graphs “proving” they were right, like self-declared messiahs insisting they are to be followed because the prophecies they wrote themselves say so.They got their stimulus. They were wrong. They say in their defense that’s because the downturn was so much worse than anyone realized. Okay, but that just demonstrates the folly of their confidence in the first place. If I jump off a building because I am sure I can fly (“I wrote a study that proves it!”), it’s of little solace, and even less of an excuse, if I sputter out my last words from the bloodied pavement, “The pull of gravity was so much worse than I realized.” Obama similarly defenestrated his own credibility, but he’s still insisting he knows exactly what to do. Now he argues that if we just do what Bill Clinton did — raise taxes on the top earners plus pass the so-called Buffett rule, which would raise taxes on investment income — we can have the economy Clinton had. The Buffett rule would pay for 11 hours of government spending in 2013, as Mitt Romney correctly observed — or 18 hours, according to Democratic reckoning. Anyone believe that would make the economy roar to life? Obviously, Bill Clinton — and the Republican Congress that forced him to balance the budget — deserves some credit for the 1990s boom. But last I checked he didn’t invent the personal computer, the Internet, or biotechnology. Nor did he end the Cold War. The notion that there would have been no “roaring Nineties” if George H. W. Bush had been reelected is simply preposterous. As much as it pains me to say it, Ronald Reagan deserves some of the blame for this notion that our individual successes and failures are wholly contingent upon the whim of the guy in the Oval Office. He was the one who popularized “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” to such devastating effect against Jimmy Carter. Since then, Democrats have made their own use of this crude reductionism. It has always struck me as a secular form of medieval thinking. My crops will not prosper unless the high priest wills it so. At least Reagan argued that the economy would prosper if he were allowed to liberate it from the scheming of self-styled experts. Clinton ran out in front of a parade of free-market successes and, like Ferris Bueller, acted as if he was leading the parade. In his manifest hubris, Obama believed it was just that easy. He, too, could simply will a vibrant economy into being through sheer intellectual force. But, unlike Bill Clinton, he wouldn’t sully himself by playing “small ball.” Obama would be “transformative.” For the ancient Greeks, hubris described the sort of arrogance that offends the gods and precedes the fall. In the current context, it certainly tests the limits of my sympathy. realclearpolitics.com