Hillarysworld

Members Login
Username 
 
Password 
    Remember Me  
Hillarysworld -> We Told You So The Kool Aid Recovery Forum -> If President Obama carries on like this, he will turn into a lame duck (UK Telegraph 7/28/10)
Post Info
TOPIC: If President Obama carries on like this, he will turn into a lame duck (UK Telegraph 7/28/10)
Jen the Michigander


SuperModerator

Status: Offline
Posts: 1788
Date:
If President Obama carries on like this, he will turn into a lame duck (UK Telegraph 7/28/10)
Permalink  
 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/simonheffer/7913468/If-President-Obama-carries-on-like-this-he-will-turn-into-a-lame-duck.html

A perspective from the other side of the pond. Remember when the UK Telegraph used to call him President Pantywaist?

The shock about coming to America after an absence of four months is how, in that time, respect for and confidence in President Obama has slumped. It wasn't good in March; now the effect of what one blogger has called his apparent "impotence" has taken hold. It is not clear what Mr Obama actually does. He isn't engaged with the economy; he certainly isn't engaged with foreign policy; he has abandoned hope of a climate change bill this year (and probably for ever); he has seen his health care bill into law, but America awaits news of how it will be implemented; he is under attack for a casual approach to illegal immigration, notably from the Mexican narco-state. He has only just girded himself to go campaigning for his party in the mid-term elections. Last Sunday was the 100-days-to-go mark, and the talk in politics here is of little else. Joe Biden, the vice-president, has been nominated as "campaigner in chief". Why? What is the President doing?
He appears to be reading the newspapers and the blogs and watching television. Last week, a twisted opponent put out a selectively edited video of a black Department of Agriculture official, Shirley Sherrod, apparently admitting discriminating against a white farmer. Mrs Sherrod had done nothing of the sort – either the discrimination or, therefore, the admission of it – but was immediately sacked, for fear that Fox News was about to broadcast the video. This outrageous act was followed by an even more outrageous apology by the president the next day – outrageous in that Mrs Sherrod was not immediately given back her job. In the White House there were, we are told, great mutual congratulations (to start with) that swift action had stopped this becoming "a story". Well, it's a story now, not least because it exemplifies the incompetence and disconnection of the administration. Mrs Sherrod's husband was a leading civil rights activist and her father was murdered by white racists in 1965, so there is a resonance to this story that is causing discomfort.

Unemployment is 9.5 per cent and forecast to stay there for the time being. There are three million more jobless than when Mr Obama came to power, and unemployment among teenagers is around 25 per cent. The very constituencies to which he made his greatest appeal – the young and the disadvantaged – still suffer. This is despite the $787 billion stimulus programme last year, much of which was sucked into America's corrupt and inefficient local government system, or did favours for congressmen and senators, or provided wonderful pay days for trade unionists, or in some cases all three at once. The President sought the stimulus on the grounds that it would stop unemployment rising above 8 per cent; so that has been an expensive failure. All Mr Obama appears to have done is wave the money goodbye. Last week, trying not to sound provoked, Mr Bernanke announced that there was "unusual uncertainty" about economic recovery. The dollar fell against sterling and even the euro.

One advocate of renewing the cuts is Newt Gingrich, architect of the "Contract with America" in 1994, and now threatening to seek the Republican nomination in 2012. He is the sort of opponent Mr Obama should fear, because he is experienced, an intellectual, and has widespread name recognition. Yet some Democrats (including Howard Dean, the party chairman) are urging him to stand, if only to ensure that the Republicans make some policies that the Democrats can attack: for, at the moment, the GOP is simply attacking the incumbents rather than offering any solutions of its own. Wishing for Mr Gingrich (or someone like him) is a big gamble, though: all that seems to prevent Mr Obama's being confirmed as a one-term president is the absence of a credible Republican against him.

One senses that the Democrats are talking down the likelihood of success in the mid-terms in order to look better if things go less badly than expected. It is possible that they could lose control of Congress, though that looks a close-run thing. They certainly won't lose their Senate majority, though the Republicans should get sufficient seats to operate a filibuster against legislation they don't like. A lame-duck Congress like that would emphasise the reality of a lame-duck president. On Wall Street, some former donors to the Democrats, so angry at what they perceive to be Mr Obama's vindictive and ignorant attempts to re-regulate them, have stopped giving money to the party. Some are saying that if the mid-terms go badly then Hillary Clinton should resign as Secretary of State and declare her intention to seek the Democratic nomination in 2012. That is highly unlikely; but the fact that it is being talked about seriously in Mrs Clinton's New York heartland ought to horrify the president.

Last week an opinion poll reported that not only is Mr Obama less popular than Mrs Clinton (who by spending much time out of the country succeeds in seeming only vaguely associated with him), he is less popular than her husband, who is forbidden by the constitution from seeking the highest office again. President Clinton is much in demand for the mid-term campaign, but it will be interesting to see what sort of role his wife plays in it. There is no summer vacation for those seeking re-election in November, who will work hard throughout August to get their message over. They will return to Washington in September to see one of the Democrats' most senior congressmen, Charlie Rangel, a costermonger-like 80-year-old representative from New York, tried on an $831,000 ethics violation; which in its way sums up what the Democrats have done for America over the last couple of years. In that ecstatic dawn in November 2008, the Democrats would not have thought that things could turn out like this. But that is the trouble with the modern political mind these days: it never does think.



__________________

4145952823_2e0edce16f.jpg

Nobody puts THIS baby in the corner!
freespirit


Moderator

Status: Offline
Posts: 1695
Date:
Permalink  
 

I swear I responded to this article last night, but it seems to have disappeared - or maybe I'm losing it at an even more rapid pace than I realized. lol

This article makes some really good points.

This last line shows the irony of the whole Obamaphenomenon. He was "Hope, Change, Post-Racial," To hear him tell it, there was just nothing he could not do, and no problem too difficult for his superior intellect and education. What a crock. The Dems may not have been able to foresee how bad things would get under The One, but we PUMAs knew, and we tried to tell the party and the country.

" In that ecstatic dawn in November 2008, the Democrats would not have thought that things could turn out like this. But that is the trouble with the modern political mind these days: it never does think."



__________________
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.... Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.  ~Susan B. Anthony
Page 1 of 1  sorted by
 
Quick Reply

Please log in to post quick replies.
Hillarysworld -> We Told You So The Kool Aid Recovery Forum -> If President Obama carries on like this, he will turn into a lame duck (UK Telegraph 7/28/10)
Tweet this page Post to Digg Post to Del.icio.us


Create your own FREE Forum
Report Abuse 		Powered by ActiveBoard