Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president's approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to "accomplish too much," and 57 percent think the country is on the "wrong track."
From a lousy cap-and-trade bill awaiting death in the Senate to a health-care reform agenda already weak in the knees to the failure of the stimulus to deliver promised jobs and economic activity, what once looked like a hope-tastic juggernaut is showing all the horsepower of a Chevy Cobalt. "Give it to me!" the president egged on a Michigan audience last week, pledging to "solve problems" and not "gripe" about the economic hand he was dealt.
Despite such bravura, Obama must be furtively reviewing the history of recent Democratic administrations for some kind of road map out of his post-100-days ditch.
So far, he seems to be skipping the chapter on Bill Clinton and his generally free-market economic policies and instead flipping back to the themes and comportment of Jimmy Carter. Like the 39th president, Obama has inherited an awful economy, dizzying budget deficits and a geopolitical situation as promising as Kim Jong Il's health. Like Carter, Obama is smart, moralistic and enamored of alternative energy schemes that were nonstarters back when America's best-known peanut farmer was installing solar panels at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Like Carter, Obama faces as much effective opposition from his own party's left wing as he does from an ardent but diminished GOP.
And perhaps most important, as with Carter, his specific policies are genuinely unpopular. The auto bailout -- which, incidentally, is illegal, springing as it has from a fund specifically earmarked for financial institutions -- has been reviled from the get-go, with opposition consistently polling north of 60 percent. Majorities have said no to bank bailouts and to cap and trade if it would make electricity significantly more expensive.
According to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, more than 80 percent are concerned that health-care reform will increase costs or diminish the quality of care. Even as two House committees passed a reform bill last week, the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warned that the proposal "significantly expands the federal responsibility for health-care costs" and dramatically raises the cost "curve." This sort of voter and expert feedback can't be comforting to the president.
There's a fairly famous WWII movie called "A Bridge Too Far" which is a proper analogy for the Obama Administration so far. In the movie the allies tried to jump ahead and secure a number of key bridges to make sure they got them before the Nazis destroyed them. The Allies suffered some disastrous losses when they pushed "a bridge too far".
Obama's whole presidency to date has been "a bridge too far". Entering office in the midst of a serious economic crisis he wasn't content to deal with that and try and staunch the financial bleeding. Instead, he insisted on pushing a whole laundry list of huge-spending liberal government expansion like cap-and-trade and nationalized health care, both of which would dramatically worsen the economic crisis and neither of which would do what they're advertised to do.
Members of Congress from his own party have begun to realize that going along with Obama on all these issues could jeopardize their seats in Congress, and that has given the GOP even more reason to stand firm against this massive expansion of government.
Right now Obama's on his way to being a one-termer.
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10 comments:
Since you don't live in the DC area and get to read the W Post on a daily basis, the Post was quite supportive of George Bush, especially on the matter of invading Iraq.
Michael Kelly, the opinion writer who was killed in Iraq, was based at the Post
LewArcher telling tales out of school again. The WaPo is totally in the sack for the Dems. Judith Miller of the New York Times (Cheney's favorite paper) was almost as "supportive" of Bush as the Post. So, I think that puts it into perspective. Anyway, how do we know how often or thoroughly our Rick reads the nation's papers.
It doesn't matter where you live Lew, baby. It's the internet age.
Oh, but got sidetracked.
I was just going to say that it's not only "a bridge too far" but a bridge "far out!" and "outta sight" and other quaint adages of a glowingly amber time past so adored by the Left as their Golden Age.
Obama is beginning to look like Carter re-runs, indeed. Carter Deux. And, let's face it, the original was boring enough.
However, after a Carter comes .... a Reagan! Who shall play the Gipper in the new version?
And PS apropos Michael Kelly's background, I was thinking wasn't he one of the Post's only conservative writers? And indeed, here's a bit of that background:
"Kelly was fired in 1997 by New Republic owner Martin Peretz -- who was pals with former Vice President Al Gore -- as the magazine's editor over his continuing attacks on the Clinton administration."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,83204,00.html
Maybe the United States military will take care of that "one term" part…
The mainstream media at work:
David Gregory of Meet The Press to Gov. Sanford and his press aide
Left you a message. Wanted you to hear directly from me that I want to have the Gov on Sunday on Meet The Press. I think it's exactly the right forum to answer the questions about his trip as well as giving him a platform to discuss the economy/stimulus and the future of the party. You know he will get a fair shake from me and coming on MTP puts all of this to rest.
... So coming on Meet The Press allows you to frame the conversation how you really want to...and then move on. You can see (sic) you have done your interview and then move on. Consider it.
LewArcher telling tales out of school again. The WaPo is totally in the sack for the Dem
I was thinking wasn't he one of the Post's only conservative writers?
ann, I've been reading the Washington Post as long as I can read, say since 1968.
Funny from a girl who jealous of ObamaGirl.
For ann, who reads like a box of rocks, George Will started contributing to the Post back in 1976.
Charles Krauthammer started writing for the Post in 1985 (in Dec 1989 he condoned the murders of the Jesuit priests and their housekeepers by the Salvadoran army)
And there is Ceci Connelly, who made up quotes about Al Gore while she covered him in 2000.
FINANCIAL TIMES (8/17/00): [T]he Gore media, for all its experience, sometimes appears to step over the line in its pursuit of critical coverage.
At the heart of the press corps are three reporters, known to their politically-incorrect colleagues as the "Spice Girls". The three are perhaps the most influential reporters on the Gore campaign, having covered the vice-president almost without break this year: Ceci Connolly of The Washington Post, Katharine Seelye of The New York Times and Sandra Sobieraj of the Associated Press. They can also be the most hostile to the campaign, doing little to hide their contempt for the candidate and his team.
Read more about Ceci and her shenanigans at www.dailyhowler.com
Oh crap, someone left the lid off the garbage can again, I can tell by the multiple posts by one mole.
Anonymous said...
Oh crap, someone left the lid off the garbage can again, I can tell by the multiple posts by one mole.
I will defend Annsnewfriend to post and be wrong.
Can't even use a fake name.
Try Oscar.
PS If you're going to crap, please not around here. Rick keeps it clean.
LewArcher,
I am impressed by the lightening fast speed with which you researched the bios of the handful of "conservative" voices that the Post has deigned to publish in modern times. Google must have been steaming! However, the problem is not about whether the Post lets Charles Krauthammer express an opinion. It's the reporters who are uniformly of one viewpoint, so much so that they cannot even imagine the questions that they are failing to ask because it never occurs to them to ask -- you know, those ideas that lie outside their thought box.
The Post did not support Iraq. The Post, which like the rest of the "mainstream" media is barely staying alive, the Post, I say, hesitated to oppose Bush at a time when newspaper writers recognized he had the American public's support. Once the Post saw cracks forming in that public support, they quickly returned to form.
Nice of you to entertain us with your reading history. Ann used to read the Star -- but it hardly counts -- I was just a child.
Nowadays, I prefer books to newspapers. It's more indepth. Less hip and transcient.
Thanks for your attempt at my defense, but I was not the writer's target as we both know. In any case, I am not a mole. I'm rather more a hawk than a mole.
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