The Obama Bus Tour
By Paul Greenberg

Another day, another jobs bill/economic stimulus. And another presidential tour to promote it.

This time our president and partisan-in-chief chose North Carolina for the setting, and who can blame him? Who wouldn’t want to drive through its mountains and vistas these beautiful fall days — instead of actually working out a compromise with those tiresome types in Congress? The kind who are always raising irritating questions, like whether the president’s programs will actually work. Unlike those that have succeeded mainly in raising the country’s unemployment rate to 9 percent or more.

No matter how many times his presidential prescriptions have failed to do much for the economy, Dr. Obama assures us that the same old approach (spend still more) will work this time — if we’ll just increase the dosage and suspend disbelief.

But in the ways that matter most, like jobs, the patient seems to have grown worse, not better, under his ministrations. Those higher and higher unemployment rates are starting to look like a fever chart, and not an assuring one.

Yet this president won’t change course. Unlike a real economic innovator like Franklin Roosevelt. FDR had his disastrous programs, too, but was quick to abandon them when they collided with reality, not to mention the U.S. Constitution. Anybody remember the NRA, its Blue Eagle and all the price-fixing that went with it? FDR threw it all overboard when it proved unworkable, legally and every other way. Barack Obama only doubles down on failure.

But the country is beginning to catch on. As this president’s falling approval rates indicate.

It strikes some of us as passing strange that Mr. Obama should now be campaigning in a part of the country and culture whose people he used to describe/deride as hopelessly bitter types. Their only response to hard times, he claimed at one point, is to “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

That kind of talk may have gone over big at a party for the president’s big givers out in San Francisco, but it struck a lot of us here in the middle of the country as about as dumb as anything else our bicoastal intelligentsia believes.

Barack Obama doesn’t get it. Not emotionally, anyway. He seems so busy analyzing us he may not understand us. There is a disconnecting distance, an emotional coolness, to his words when he puts us under his microscope. The man might score high on an IQ test, but emotional intelligence is something else.

These folks he was subjecting to his oh-so-astute sociological analysis weren’t clinging to their guns and Bibles because they were poor materially, but because their heritage, their faith, their history is so rich. You bet they’re going to cling to it. And with considerable justification.

They know where they come from, these people. It is part of their being. And, yes, they’re going to hold onto a heritage that is beyond price — in good times and bad. They may even cling to it even more when their faith is tested. That is the nature of faith. For what good is a faith that holds up only in the good times?

The people Barack Obama was so neatly pigeonholing in a few ill-chosen words stem from the pioneers who followed the Cumberland Gap across the Appalachians to conquer a wilderness. They made those hills and vales American even before the American flag flew over them. Their descendants still draw their faith, and strength, from the intrepid explorers and settlers who crossed those mountains with, yes, a Bible in one hand and flintlock in the other.

One of the president’s stops on his tour was at a general store in Boone, N.C. He seemed oblivious to the qualities that name still invokes, like self-reliance and freedom and adventure and in general the promise of this new world. They weren’t seeking a European-style security but a new birth of freedom. But this president’s slogan and message is no longer We Can, as in the last presidential election. Now it’s Big Government Can — even when the record of the past few years indicates it can’t.

To spread his message this week, the president of the United States chose to grace the hills and hollers of North Carolina with his presence and that of his sleek, super-sized $1.1-million bus. (Are the U.S. taxpayers footing the bill for all that?) Let’s just say his mode of transport wasn’t exactly a covered wagon. Yes, Americans have come a long way since Daniel Boone’s day but, on such occasions, the thought occurs that we’ve advanced only materially, not spiritually.

Listening to the president on his well-appointed Blue Ridge tour, some of us who have to take notice and even notes on presidential campaign speeches (for that’s what he was really delivering) could only shake our heads sadly. No, the man just doesn’t get it.

Barack Obama long ago lost the common touch — if he ever had it — but he still seems to believe he’s talking the language of The People even when he’s just spouting Washington nerdspeak. Or trying to do a poor, a very poor, imitation of Harry Truman giving ‘em hell. Maybe because Mr. Truman was authentic. As solid as any other show-me Missourian. But this president shows more condescension than connection to the American spirit.

And the people this president presumes to speak for are starting to notice. Which may explain why they’ve stopped paying him much attention. Remember when one of his presidential addresses, whether before a joint session of Congress or at a general store in the hills, was an occasion? Remember when people were actually interested in what he had to say? Now? Not so much.

“It’s as if he doesn’t like people,” to quote a loyal Democrat but independent thinker by the name of Mort Zuckerman, a real estate mogul and big time newspaper publisher in New York. He was one those earnest middle-of-the-road Democrats who back in 2008 thought Barack Obama was just what the country needed. He no longer does. And the number of Americans who share his disappointment seems to grow every day, presidential bus tours or no presidential bus tours. Because it’s not what a president says that matters so much in this always practical-minded country, but what he does. And this president is not doing well.

Even worse, this president seems to think that doing it all over again — another jobs bill, another economic stimulus — is just what the country needs.

It isn’t.

Is Obama Losing Party Support?
By Donald Lambro

President Obama was back on his bus this week, promoting yet another job bill in the diminishing hope that it might help him hang on to his own.

Just days after the Democratic-controlled Senate failed to muster enough support just to make his bill the pending business, he was venting in North Carolina, threatening Republicans and blaming Wall Street again for America’s unending recession for which he accepts no responsibility.

Conveniently ignoring that two Senate Democrats voted against his tax and spend bill last week, while others held their nose and voted aye, Obama said Republicans would pay a very heavy price for voting to kill his proposal.

“If they vote against these proposals again, if they vote against taking steps now to put Americans back to work right now, then they’re not going to have to answer to me, they’re going to have to answer to you,” the president said at a campaign rally Monday.

But Obama’s third or fourth jobs bill may be a hard, if not downright impossible sell in North Carolina, a state he barely carried by the skin of his teeth in 2008 by less than 1 percentage point and where unemployment has surged to a hope-crushing 10.4 percent under his presidency.

Obama wasn’t here, though, to win over new voters to his banner but to appeal anew to a wavering political base, especially dispirited black voters

In the Tar Heel state, where Democrats will converge next year to dutifully renominate him for a second term, “Obama’s most ardent supporters in Durham’s black community worry that waning enthusiasm among African-Americans may prevent him from repeating his razor-thin North Carolina victory of 20008,” writes Boston Globe reporter Tracy Jan.

Jan quotes an unemployed, 52-year-old black woman standing in line at the employment office, saying she “can’t muster the will to support Obama for a second term.”

“I don’t see what he’s done. I’m not even going to waste my time and vote,” this Democrat said.

In Durham County, where the president spoke, nearly 20 percent of its black voters are jobless and Obama’s job approval rating has dropped, even among this most loyal constituency who have suffered under his rule more than any other segment of the state’s electorate.

Nationally, black unemployment has surged to 16.7 percent, the highest since 1984, and a front page story in Tuesday’s Washington Post is ominously titled, “Can Obama hold on to black voters in 2012?”

Many hardpressed North Carolina Democrats must be asking if his first $800 billion-plus jobs bill failed to ignite the U.S. economy, why will this latest tax and spend bill, at roughly half the price, be any different? Or is this bill just another taped-together, repainted campaign prop for the 2012 election to give the president some cover?

Obama headed into the weekend before his three-day bus tour began, dogged by a lengthening list of Gallup polls that painfully illustrated why surveys show that 75 percent of Americans say the economy is “getting worse.”

Among Gallup’s findings:

– 19 percent of Americans say they are struggling just to afford food and, overall, “fewer Americans had access to basic life necessities in September.”

– Thirty percent of 18-29-year-olds are unemployed or underemployed, forced to to take temp or part-time jobs. Thousands of college graduates say they cannot find any jobs at all.

– If the plethora of “Where Are The Jobs?” signs among the Occupy Wall Street protesters accurately reflect their anger, these young people are also among the victims of Obama’s failed economic policies and his empty promises that unemployment would be below 8 percent by now.

– The Washington Post reported Monday that recently returning military veterans “have an unemployment rate of 11.7 percent,” well above the national 9.1 percent jobless rate.

These and other survey numbers are more than tragic human statistics, they are the sad story of a great nation in a decline, led by an incompetent administration whose ill-fated policies have worsened an economy that should be on a sharp upward trajectory by now.

The network news shows keep downplaying Obama’s troubles by reporting his job approval numbers are in “the low to mid-40s.” In fact, Gallup’s daily polls showed his approval numbers dropping to a low of 38 percent for the first time Friday and again on Saturday, with a high of 54 percent disapproving his presidency.

Throughout the first half of this year as the mediocre Obama economy grew weaker and unemployment rose, much of the news media took comfort in reporting that, while the president’s polls were falling, the Republicans’ were worse in generic surveys.

But at the end of last month, Gallup asked voters this simple and apropo economic question: “Looking ahead for the next few years, which political party do you think will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous?”

The response: 48 percent answered “the Republicans,” 39 percent said “the Democrats,” and 13 percent had “no opinion.”

Notably, Gallup asked the same question about which party would do a better job of “protecting the country from international terrorism and military threats?” The GOP led that one by an 11 point margin.

Obama’s taxpayer-paid bus trip took him into Virginia on Tuesday, a state he won in 2008 but now appears to be the underdog. In a further sign of his weakness, Obama’s former Democratic National Committee chairman Tim Kaine, who is running for the Senate, was expected to be noticeably absent on the tour, according to the Associated Press.

A further embarrassment for the president: prominent Democrats in the state urged the White House to readjust his scheduled campaign stops so that Obama would not be visiting battleground districts where local Democrats face tough elections.

Forget for the moment the coming political battle with Republicans, Obama is now struggling just to win back the support of his own party.

Ominous Parallels
By Walter E. Williams

People are beginning to compare Barack Obama’s administration to the failed administration of Jimmy Carter, but a better comparison is to the Roosevelt administration of the 1930s and ’40s. Let’s look at it with the help of a publication from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the Foundation for Economic Education titled “Great Myths of the Great Depression,” by Dr. Lawrence Reed.

During the first year of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, he called for increasing federal spending to $10 billion while revenues were only $3 billion. Between 1933 and 1936, government expenditures rose by more than 83 percent. Federal debt skyrocketed by 73 percent. Roosevelt signed off on legislation that raised the top income tax rate to 79 percent and then later to 90 percent. Hillsdale College economics historian and professor Burt Folsom, author of “New Deal or Raw Deal?”, notes that in 1941, Roosevelt even proposed a 99.5 percent marginal tax rate on all incomes more than $100,000. When a top adviser questioned the idea, Roosevelt replied, “Why not?”

Roosevelt had other ideas for the economy, including the National Recovery Act. Dr. Reed says: “The economic impact of the NRA was immediate and powerful. In the five months leading up to the act’s passage, signs of recovery were evident: factory employment and payrolls had increased by 23 and 35 percent, respectively. Then came the NRA, shortening hours of work, raising wages arbitrarily and imposing other new costs on enterprise. In the six months after the law took effect, industrial production dropped 25 percent.”

Blacks were especially hard hit by the NRA. Black spokesmen and the black press often referred to the NRA as the “Negro Run Around,” Negroes Rarely Allowed,” “Negroes Ruined Again,” “Negroes Robbed Again,” “No Roosevelt Again” and the “Negro Removal Act.” Fortunately, the courts ruled the NRA unconstitutional. As a result, unemployment fell to 14 percent in 1936 and lower by 1937.

Roosevelt had more plans for the economy, namely the National Labor Relations Act, better known as the “Wagner Act.” This was a payoff to labor unions, and with these new powers, labor unions went on a militant organizing frenzy that included threats, boycotts, strikes, seizures of plants, widespread violence and other acts that pushed productivity down sharply and unemployment up dramatically. In 1938, Roosevelt’s New Deal produced the nation’s first depression within a depression. The stock market crashed again, losing nearly 50 percent of its value between August 1937 and March 1938, and unemployment climbed back to 20 percent. Columnist Walter Lippmann wrote in March 1938 that “with almost no important exception every measure (Roosevelt) has been interested in for the past five months has been to reduce or discourage the production of wealth.”

Roosevelt’s agenda was not without its international admirers. The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies” and “the development toward an authoritarian state” based on the “demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest.” Roosevelt himself called Benito Mussolini “admirable” and professed that he was “deeply impressed by what he (had) accomplished.”

FDR’s very own treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, saw the folly of the New Deal, writing: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. … We have never made good on our promises. … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started … and an enormous debt to boot!” The bottom line is that Roosevelt’s New Deal policies turned what would have been a three- or four-year sharp downturn into a 16-year affair.

The 1930s depression was caused by and aggravated by acts of government, and so was the current financial mess that we’re in. Do we want to repeat history by listening to those who created the calamity? That’s like calling on an arsonist to help put out a fire.

Politics Versus Reality: Part II
By Thomas Sowell

No one is more of a master of political talking points than President Barack Obama. Remember “shovel-ready projects”? These were construction projects where the shovels were supposed to start digging the moment the government gave them the “stimulus” money.

Two years later, Obama can joke about the fact that the shovels were not as ready as he thought. In reality, the shovels were never ready. It can take forever to get all the environmental approvals to build anything in today’s political and legal climate.

If Obama didn’t know that, his advisers surely did. He can treat it as a joke today but it is no joke for those who are saddled with the debts produced by his runaway spending in the name of “shovel-ready projects.”

Nor is it a joke to the unemployed, who remain unemployed despite all the “stimulus” spending.

The talk about the many “green jobs” created by the government is likewise no joke. Since the government creates no wealth, it can only transfer the wealth required to hire people. Even if the government creates a million jobs, that is not a net increase in jobs, when the money that pays for those jobs is taken from the private sector, which loses that much ability to create private jobs.

Back in the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration hired more young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps than there were in the U.S. Army. But that never brought unemployment down into single digits at any point during that entire decade. As late as the spring of 1939, the unemployment rate was 20 percent.

Government-created jobs did not mean a net increase in jobs then — or now. But this is only mundane reality. What makes a great political talking point is government coming to the rescue of the unemployed by creating jobs. That talking point helps politicians get reelected, even if it does nothing for the economy in general or for the unemployment rate.

Among the biggest triumphs of talking points over reality are political discussions of rent control and gun control. Rent control supposedly rescues helpless tenants from the high rents charged by “greedy” landlords — at least in political rhetoric.

But the two cities which have the oldest and strongest rent control laws in the country also have the highest rents — New York and San Francisco. Yet that plain reality has not made a dent in the thinking, or lack of thinking, of those who support rent control.

Nor are they at all interested in other realities about rent control, whether in these two cities or in other cities around the world. These realities include housing shortages and a reduced supply of maintenance and other auxiliary services, such as heat and hot water.

Other forms of price control likewise lead to shortages, and have for literally thousands of years. But such plain realities do not affect the heady social vision conjured up by talking points.

Far from being discouraged by such realities, those who believe in price control for housing often think price control for medicines and medical care is a great idea too.

We need not speculate as to what effects price controls can have on medicines and medical care because there are already shortages of both in countries where a government-controlled medical system includes price controls.

The talking points about gun control are as far removed from reality as the talking points about rent control. But on this issue, at least, the advocates cite some highly selective statistics to go along with their rhetoric.

Gun control advocates often point out countries like Britain that have stronger gun control laws than ours and lower murder rates. But they totally ignore countries that have stronger gun control laws than ours and higher murder rates than ours.

One such country is right on our border — Mexico. But there are others farther away, such as Brazil and Russia. There are also countries with higher rates of gun ownership than in the United States — Switzerland and Israel, for example — that have much lower murder rates than ours. But none of this has the slightest effect on the talking points of gun control zealots.

Obama’s Dilemma — and Ours
By Pat Buchanan

Seventy-one years ago this spring, after the German army had broken through the French lines, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill flew to France to consult his embattled allies on how to stop the advance.

“Where is the strategic reserve?” Churchill urgently asked the French commander in chief, Gen. Maurice Gamelin, and then he repeated himself in French: “Ou est la masse de manoeuvre?”

“Aucune,” came Gamelin’s reply. “There is none.”

The French had no reserves to stop the Germans from overrunning their country. The Battle of France was lost.

The Obama administration, in its grand strategy to generate a rapid and strong recovery from the Great Recession, is at a similar pass. It has drawn and played all its cards: the $800 billion stimulus bill, three straight deficits averaging $1.4 trillion, the Federal Reserve’s mass purchases of bad paper from the world’s banks, and QE2, the monthly purchase of $100 billion in Treasury bills that ends June 30.

Yet, from the numbers that came in from May, Obama looks to be holding a losing hand. The anemic growth of the first quarter of 2011 seems to have stalled, and the prospect of a double-dip recession looms.

Though the administration anticipated perhaps a quarter-million new jobs in May, as April produced, May generated only 55,000. The unemployment rate ticked back up to 9.1 percent.

The rise in manufacturing employment went into reverse. Five thousand manufacturing jobs were lost. Consumer confidence sank.

Today 2 million homes remain vacant in the USA, putting immense downward pressure on housing prices. A fourth of U.S. homes are not worth the mortgages being paid upon them.

Says Federal Reserve Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen, “Looking forward, I unfortunately can envision no quick or easy solutions for the problems still afflicting the housing market.” Recovery is going to be a “long, drawn-out process.”

A further decline in housing prices of 10 to 25 percent over the next five years, says Robert Shiller, the economist who invented the S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values, “wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

The economic malaise has now begun to affect the mood of the nation and its attitude toward the president.

Almost 90 percent of Americans think the U.S. economy is terrible or poor. Sixty percent think the nation is headed in the wrong direction. Forty-eight percent expect a second Great Depression next year. Fewer than 40 percent approve of Obama’s handling of the U.S. economy.

In one new poll, Mitt Romney leads the president 49-46 in a matchup in 2012.

The question Obama faces and, indeed, Congress and the nation face is: What do we do now?

Chairman Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve has signaled that there will be no QE3, no more Fed purchases of $100 billion a month in U.S. government paper. Buyers for that $1.2 trillion a year of U.S. debt will have to be found elsewhere.

And with the economy stagnant or sinking, the Democrats on Capitol Hill are starting to back away from any deep budget cuts, even as Republicans are now even less likely to sign on to any tax increases to reduce the $1.5 billion deficit.

Indeed, if the economy is stalled or sinking into recession, what economic theory is it that argues for austerity and tax hikes?

And the perceived economic stagnation not only diminishes the chance of a bipartisan budget deal but also points to deadlock on the debt ceiling.

Republicans are already holding out for $1 in spending cuts for every dollar increase in the debt ceiling. And the country seems to be behind the GOP position: If the Senate and White House don’t agree to $2 trillion in spending cuts, we don’t raise the debt ceiling by $2 trillion.

The U.S. government does not run out of money to pay its bills until August. But markets probably will be making judgments upon the likelihood of a U.S. default well before then.

How did we get here? How did the richest and strongest country in history, triumphant in World War II and the Cold War, approach so soon the condition of the late Spanish and British empires as they began their precipitous declines?

Answer: We overextended ourselves. We bankrupted ourselves.

We undertook the defense of nations all over the world having little to do with our vital national interests. We fought unnecessary wars. We doled out trillions in foreign aid to ingrates, incompetents, opportunists and thieves.

We promised all our seniors Social Security and subsidized medical care for the rest of their lives and failed to put the money away to pay for it. We dropped half of U.S. wage earners off the tax rolls while creating a mammoth welfare state to dwarf anything Norman Thomas and his Socialists dreamed of in the 1930s.

Not only for the United States but also for the West, the days of wine and roses are over.

Obama’s Serial Indecision
by Michael Gerson

An administration that lacks a consistent foreign policy philosophy has nevertheless established a predictable foreign policy pattern. A popular revolt takes place in country X. President Obama is caught by surprise and says little. A few days later an administration spokesman weakly calls for “reform.” A few more days of mounting protests and violence follow. Then, after an internal debate that spills out into the media, the president decides he must do something. But hoping to keep expectations low, his actions are limited in scope. By this point, a strategic opportunity is missed and the protesters in country X feel betrayed.

This record of serial indecision has damaged American interests. The Obama administration initially stood aloof from the Iranian Green Revolution, even though democratic regime change may be the only realistic alternative to American confrontation with the Tehran regime over its nuclear ambitions. In Libya, Obama waited until Benghazi was in the shadow of genocide before an incremental response. Obama has deployed American credibility in Libya — eventually supporting regime change — while pursuing policies that seem designed to result in stalemate. In Syria, the administration calls for “meaningful reforms” while Damascus employs mass violence against mass protests. Apart from moral considerations, wouldn’t the coldest pragmatist see benefit in the overthrow of Iran’s main ally in the Middle East?

It is no longer credible to blame these failures on inexperience — an argument that years of experience tends to undermine. A novice can learn from his mistakes. Obama apparently doesn’t view these outcomes as mistaken. So what explains his positive preference for ambivalence?

First, there is the political context of Obama’s 2008 election campaign. Since George W. Bush embraced democracy promotion, Obama would devalue it. Since Bush called out enemies, Obama would cultivate them. But the return to nuance turned out to be remarkably superficial. Did Bush’s decisiveness really discredit the idea of decisiveness itself? Events in the Middle East have forced the Obama administration to gradually abandon its philosophy of Bush negation, but the vestiges of that view have slowed an effective response at every stage.

A second explanation concerns Obama’s leadership style. He still acts the part of a college professor who has unlimited time to sift and debate his options, as though extended deliberation were a virtue and indecision had no cost. But changes in the Middle East are demonstrating how difficult it is to conduct a seminar during a hurricane. Hesitance precludes options.

Third, the administration’s national security team does little to challenge Obama’s predisposition toward vacillation. Vice President Biden is, to put it kindly, a quirky foreign policy thinker with a history of getting large strategic issues wrong. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is focused on the war in Afghanistan, making him naturally resistant to American involvement elsewhere. Hillary Clinton has shown flashes of resolve, but the daily task of any secretary of state is to manage the status quo.

Finally, on foreign policy issues Obama seems to have drunk deeply at the well of academic liberalism. In the immediate aftermath of the Green Revolution in 2009, he said, “It’s not productive given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling, the U.S. president meddling in Iranian elections.” Obama was arguing that American support would somehow stain or delegitimize Iranian democratic aspirations — even as protesters were appealing for our help. This sounds more like the buzz of the faculty lounge than the leadership of an American president charged with defending and advancing history’s noblest ideals.

Some mix of these factors has combined to render the Obama administration blind to the promise of our times. Ending tyranny in the traditional centers of Arab cultural influence — Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus — would be a transformation akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It would demonstrate the exhaustion of authoritarianism in the Arab world and open the possibility of more successful, hopeful societies in the region. This transformation involves considerable risks. But those risks are magnified by an administration that refuses to take risks — willing to speak or act only when it becomes obvious that silence and inertia will bring disaster.

Now the Arab revolt has led to a predictable counterreaction — the attempt by regimes such as Libya and Syria to prove the efficacy of brutality. Their success would undermine American interests for decades. Presidential administrations don’t get to choose their historical challenges. But they can firmly take a side.

The Unhappy President
By Jonah Goldberg

“The Oval Office, I always thought I was going to have really cool phones and stuff. … I’m like, ‘C’mon guys, I’m the president of the United States. Where’s the fancy buttons and stuff and the big screen comes up?’ It doesn’t happen.”

–President Barack H. Obama

The list of people I feel sorry for is long. It includes not just all of the people I know personally who are suffering from one misfortune or another, but the billions around the world who’re having a rougher time than they ought: Japanese earthquake victims, targets of ethnic cleansing, etc. Then there’s the supplemental list, which includes everyone from fans of “Lost” who were ripped off by the series finale to the guy in the middle seat on a long flight.

But one guy who doesn’t make the list is Barack Obama.

And yet the president seems eager for people to know he feels aggrieved. All of sudden, he’s had a few “hot mic” incidents in which he “accidentally” vented his displeasure about various alleged insults. His staff let it be known that the president feels the head of China’s one-party authoritarian regime has it better than him, because no one second-guesses Hu Jintao.

“I just miss — I miss being anonymous,” he told some magazine executives recently. “I miss Saturday morning, rolling out of bed, not shaving, getting into my car with my girls … taking walks. I can’t take a walk.” He says the reason he plays so much golf is that it’s the only way he can get away from the “bubble” he’s in.

None of this is entirely new. The president has always had a gift for self-pity. And blame-shifting. “It’s Bush’s fault” could be the subtitle of his presidency.

And from the outset, the president has had little patience with critics. Serious critiques are always illegitimate “talking points.” In the summer of ‘09 he started insisting that he didn’t want to hear “a lot of talking” from Republicans. The time for debate always seems to over when it’s clear to everyone he’s losing the argument. When abroad, he loves to whine about the impertinence of the press.

I can’t prove it, but I’m also hardly alone (on the right or the left) in thinking the president really just doesn’t like the job anymore. He’s testier. His response to the Republican budget plan was not merely dishonest, hypocritical and partisan, it was bitterly personal.

One can understand his frustration. The guy who once said to a reporter during the 2008 campaign, “You know, I actually believe my own bulls—” about fundamentally transforming America is now forced to run as a reactionary, defending “Medicare as we know it” from “radicals” who — gasp! — want to change America. The overrated and inexperienced politician, accustomed to nothing but adulation, who was swept into office thanks to discontent with the incumbent, is now himself the incumbent desperately trying to explain how he’s done nothing wrong.

He demonized George W. Bush as an evil fool, but Obama has been forced to adopt many of the very policies he derided as evil and foolish. The “change” candidate is now the “more of the same” guy.

That’d put anybody in a funk.

But I don’t care. The presidency is not like his Nobel Prize — an award for just being you. If you hate the job, don’t run.

Moreover, I don’t think that’s the whole story. Many of his seemingly self-pitying jokes and asides just don’t seem that innocent to me, never mind endearing.

He may sincerely have wished his awesome job came with a cooler phone (or a Bat Signal perhaps?), and he may honestly feel trapped in a bubble. But he’s also determined to pretend that he is running “against Washington” in 2012. And that is outrageous nonsense, for a president who effectively owned the government for two years.

Already his campaign’s messaging is all about recapturing the feeling of insurgency from the first time around. Finish the mission. Complete the work. Remember the feeling. That’s why he’s running his re-election campaign out of Chicago, as if people won’t notice he’s the incumbent.

Obama has never run on a record. He’s always run almost literally on a hope and a prayer. Now he must defend what he has done — and what he has failed to do.

If that makes him cranky, that’s just too bad.

All the President’s Funny Money
by Michelle Malkin

Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. President Obama’s perpetual campaign cash-o-matic machine kicks into high gear again this week as the celebrity-in-chief heads to Hollywood for several high-priced fundraisers. But while the Democrats’ 2012 re-election team stuffs its hands into every liberal deep pocket in sight, questions about the Obama 2008 campaign finance operation still fester.

Last week, the laggard watchdogs at the Federal Election Commission announced an audit of the Obama 2008 campaign committee — which raised a record-setting $750 million. White House flacks are downplaying the probe as a “routine review.”

But there’s nothing routine about the nearly $3 million Obama has spent on legal expenses to address federal campaign finance irregularities and inquiries. Roll Call reports that Obama’s campaign legal fees have exceeded all other House and presidential campaign committees, including members of Congress under ethics investigations.

There’s nothing routine about the whopping $6 million that Team Obama has refunded to individual donors since Obama took office.

And there’s nothing routine about the 26 warning letters to Obama for America totaling “more than 1,500 pages of questions and data that outlined compliance concerns — including the longest one ever sent to a presidential candidate,” according to Roll Call.

Among the Obama 2008 campaign committee’s shadiest transactions that have gone unpunished:

– Foreign funny money. Federal election law bans foreign nationals from contributing to American candidates. But during 2008, the Obama campaign was forced to return an illegal foreign donation worth $31,100 made by two brothers in the Gaza Strip, and even mainstream news outlets reported that candidate Obama’s money-handlers had routinely failed to verify citizenship by checking donors’ passports. As the Associated Press reported at the time: “One donor, Tom Sanderson of Canada, made clear his $500 contribution came from a foreign source. He included a note that said, ‘I am not an American citizen!’ Obama’s campaign took the money anyway…”

Another illegal foreign donor, Australian Richard Watters, contributed $1,000, “entering a fake U.S. passport number — a random jumble of numbers and letters” onto the Obama donation website. “He said he also checked a box stating that he was an American living overseas, ‘because I could see it wasn’t going anywhere if I didn’t do that.’”

Obama raked in at least $2 million in overseas donations.

– Online donor credit-card fraud. Weeks before the 2008 presidential election, investigative journalist Ken Timmerman blew the whistle on rampant phony straw contributors slipping through the Obama donation site. Just one example: “Mr. Good Will” from Austin, Texas. Mr. Good Will listed his employer as “Loving” and his profession as “You.” Timmerman’s analysis of 1.4 million individual donations to the Obama campaign discovered “1,000 separate entries for Mr. Good Will, most of them for $25. In total, Mr. Good Will gave $17,375. Following this and subsequent FEC requests, campaign records show that 330 contributions from Mr. Good Will were credited back to a credit card. But the most recent report, filed on Sept. 20, showed a net cumulative balance of $8,950 — still well over the $4,600 limit.”

Subsequent digging by conservative bloggers found that the Obama campaign’s donor website appeared to intentionally disable security protocols and facilitate illegal donations with bogus names, shell addresses and untraceable credit cards. Among Obama’s online “donors”: Bart Simpson, Family Guy, Daffy Duck, King Kong, O.J. Simpson, Mr. Doodad Pro, John Galt, Della Ware, Crazy Eight and Adolfe Hitler.

– Social justice funny money. In 2008, the Obama campaign wrote checks totaling more than $800,000 to a nonprofit offshoot of ACORN called Citizens Services Inc. The campaign claimed the money went to nonpartisan get-out-the-vote services. But receipts showed the funds paid for polling, advance work and event staging supplied by a nonprofit that supposedly does simple canvassing work on behalf of low-income people. The FEC allowed Obama to wave his magic wand and amend the records to change political expenses into non-political ones. As a Republican National Committee staffer commented at the time: “For a candidate who claims to be practicing ‘new’ politics, his FEC reports look an awful lot like the ‘old-style’ Chicago politics of yesterday.”

On a related front, ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief filed an FEC complaint last year over illegal coordination between ACORN and the Obama campaign. MonCrief publicly released Obama donor lists supplied to ACORN affiliate Project Vote, which were allegedly used to target maxed-out presidential donors. The scheme involved converting the expenditures by Project Vote, ACORN and ACORN-affiliated entities to illegal, excessive corporate contributions to the Obama presidential campaign, in violation of federal law.

Nothing to see here, move along? The only “routine” business as usual being conducted here is Chicago-style self-exemption business as usual: Rules are for fools. Let the crooked cash flow in.

Ryan 1, Obama 0
by David Limbaugh

I am beginning to wonder whether President Obama is so cocky about his 2012 re-election prospects that he thinks he doesn’t even have to be serious in his budget plan offerings.

Unfortunately, the nation’s unfunded liabilities aren’t so casual as the president; they are growing by more than $10 trillion per year, which means that our looming debt crisis becomes far more problematic with each passing day.

I invite you to compare Obama’s recently submitted plans with either Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” or his own bipartisan deficit commission’s recommendations. Or, if you’re the risk-taking type, you may want to wait for the findings of yet another commission that Obama has talked about forming, obviously hoping this new commission would dutifully tailor its findings to his policy preferences.

Both Ryan’s plan and the deficit commission’s include specific proposals to achieve what the commission has termed “sustainability” in our budget and entitlements; Obama’s plan is strikingly bereft of specifics.

Ryan’s plan would reduce the deficit by $5.8 trillion in 10 years, mostly with spending cuts and revenue-neutral but growth-oriented tax reforms. Obama claims he would cut $4 trillion in 12 years, but his onerous tax hikes might completely negate his spending cuts, which he has yet to specify. Ryan’s plan would begin cuts immediately, but the president’s plan would postpone planned cuts and savings until 2013 — after his re-election campaign.

Ryan would freeze discretionary spending for five years to pre-2008 levels and index it to inflation thereafter. Obama’s plan has no such spending caps.

But the major drivers of our fiscal crisis are the big three entitlements — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — which together contain the lion’s share of the nation’s $88 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Ryan has offered specific proposals for reform. Obama has resorted to partisanship, name-calling and fear-mongering and has offered only generalities.

On Medicaid, Ryan proposes a block grant system tailored to meet the varying needs of each state. Obama rejects the block grants approach but has claimed he will achieve unspecified savings.

On Medicare, Ryan has proposed a premium support system for those 54 or younger that would provide payments to beneficiaries and a list of guaranteed coverage options from which they could choose to suit their particular needs. This competitive model is similar to the federal employee health plan and is designed to bring costs down through market forces. Obama proposes to save $500 billion from Medicaid and Medicare by 2023 and another $1 trillion in the following decade but again offers no specifics as to how we would achieve those meager goals.

Here, with Medicare, we see the greatest contrast in their respective approaches. Ryan recognizes that artificial cost containment measures imposed by the government cannot work and have not worked any more than wage and price controls and that in fact, they lead to increased costs and rationing.

Obama envisions the government attempting to control the costs bureaucratically by greatly expanding the power of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a 15-member panel appointed by the president that would have final, unreviewable authority to impose a one-size-fits-all rate scheme. Only Congress could override the authority of this board, by a two-thirds vote.

The reality is that Medicare costs could not be achieved by Obama’s plan without severe cost controls and/or rationing. It’s a Draconian idea, which completely defeats Obama’s stated purpose for Obamacare in the first place: to increase medical coverage and contain costs. You can’t achieve those goals by legislative fiat.

On top of all those things, Obama would continue Obamacare in force, which is an open-ended health care entitlement whose costs, the Congressional Budget Office confirms, he has radically understated. Among other sleights of hand, Obama counted dollars from the Medicare fund twice in order to create the illusion that he would be using those funds for Obamacare without raiding the Medicare system.

Perhaps worst of all, Obama plans on punitive taxes for the so-called wealthy, which would not only not raise revenues but also further smother our anemic economy. Both Ryan’s plan and the commission’s plan would simplify the tax code and reduce top individual and corporate rates.

Ryan’s plan would seriously steer us back toward economic and financial health. The commission’s plan is inferior but vastly superior to Obama’s.

Sadly, Obama is ideologically committed to essentially ignoring our entitlements crisis, Band-Aid approaches to domestic spending, reckless military cuts, and class warfare-driven, growth-stifling tax policies. Obama’s latest budget plan would be guaranteed to hurdle this nation toward European-style austerity at best and outright fiscal bankruptcy at worst.

The Education of Barack Obama
by Bill Murchison

When Ralph Nader wants to impeach a liberal African-American president for war crimes, you start to get the idea how odd these present times are. Odd and getting odder. Nor is it likely, in spite of the wall of comments concerning our Libyan intervention, that anyone can grasp the meaning.

There seems one likelihood to suggest. It is that this won’t be the last intervention. We live in that kind of world.

Which is what kind of world, exactly? The kind we know from the history books — in which, rather than sort out their varied grievances like gentlemen, the non-gentlemen usually in charge of public affairs will bloody each other’s and other’s noses. It has always been thus. The 192 disunited nations that belong to the United Nations don’t get along and never have.

None of this you might have supposed from drinking in Obama’s reset-button rhetoric on foreign policy.

Now that we’ve stuck out our necks for the Libyan rebels, we surely owe it to other war-torn peoples to consider their cases solemnly and possibly to act with whatever resources we may still have. We can expect calls that escalate into tearful demands. It is what happens when you make other people’s business your own business.

At a press conference in Chile on Monday, President Obama attempted an explanation for his decision to bomb Libya in collaboration with the British and French. “The core principle” he wishes to uphold is that in “a potential humanitarian crisis” — “about to take place,” he added redundantly — “we can’t simply stand by with empty words.” We have to “take some sort of action.” Some sort.

He couldn’t resist a sideways lunge at the Bush administration. On occasion, he said the United States has acted “unilaterally,” or without “full international support,” whatever “full” and “international” and “support” might mean. This time, we have the British, the French, and even the Belgians, to whom maybe (assuming something horrible doesn’t happen) we can turn over the whole mission (assuming they agree to take it on).

It sounds very much like a plan to come up with a plan — one that may or may not leave the Libyans better off than they were a month ago. But you try, while waiting for the next invitation to go forth and rescue others who, having watched this present mission, can think of no reason you shouldn’t help them, too.

Obama, winner of the Nobel Prize for Whatever — Peace, supposedly, but now we see where that got the world — has had a rude introduction to the ways of nations. You don’t “reset” human relations by pushing by a button; least of all, by giving a speech. Thanks to the general nuttiness of the human race, a president has to take what precautions he can against the malignancy of those who like neither Americans nor American ideals. The president keeps the armed forces armed and forceful and tries to remember that an enemy isn’t just someone you have failed to charm; he is apt to be someone hoping you go out of business. Permanently.

Another thing a wide-awake president does is shrug off the counsel of the obvious nut cases — Nader, for instance, and the congressional leftists who, to judge from their rhetoric, would wait for an armed intruder to kick in their front door before threatening to swat him with a rolled-up newspaper sports section.

Which isn’t to say Obama, with respect to Libya, has done well or poorly. We’ll find out as we go along. More to the point, he has made a hard, stark choice — the kind of choice presidents in a fallen, wacko world must make all the time, for better or worse, richer or poorer, no matter what nonsense you gurgle on the campaign trail about hope and change.

Only the Lord of Battles knows how this Libyan tiff will turn out, but the education of Barack Obama — the ongoing education, be it said — isn’t the worst kind of prologue.

President Hamlet
by Victor Davis Hanson

More than 400 years ago, William Shakespeare wrote a riveting tragedy about a young, charismatic Danish prince who vowed to do the right thing in avenging his murdered father. That soon proved easier said than done. As a result, Hamlet couldn’t quite ever act in time — given all the ambiguities that such a sensitive prince first had to sort out. In the meantime, a lot of bodies piled up through his indecision and hesitancy.

President Obama wanted to give us all universal health care. But then he discovered that the country was broke and that most people did not like his massive federal takeover. So we got both his health care and so far more than 1,000 exemptions from his landmark plan for unions, corporations and entire states.

The president wished to please his liberal supporters with more government redistributive programs and higher taxes on the wealthy. But such entitlements cost lots of money — more than $4 trillion in new borrowing in just three years — and scare to death the job-creating private sector. So the president not only borrows at record levels, but also sets up a commission to warn us that his borrowing will soon bankrupt the country. He damns the “fat cat bankers” and the rich who “at some point” have made enough money, even as he courts them for campaign donations and begs their companies to start hiring new employees.

Obama warned us that we could not drill our way out of the ongoing gas crisis and needed instead to develop new green energy. As proof, he borrowed billions to promote wind and solar power, and stopped most new leases for fossil fuel exploration in Alaska, the West and offshore. But it turned out that we still need lots of oil as gas nears $4 a gallon. So the president brags that America is now pumping more oil under his green administration than ever before — but neglects to mention that it true only because Presidents Clinton and Bush long ago approved the sort of oil leases that Obama had rejected.

President Obama wanted so much to discontinue George W. Bush’s war on terror that he banned the phrase “war on terror” altogether. He apologized to the Muslim world, promised to “reset” our foreign policy, and vowed to close Guantanamo Bay and stop the other nasty Bush antiterrorism protocols. But our “to be or not to be” Hamlet also wanted to continue to keep the country safe from another 9/11-style terrorist attack, so he kept Guantanamo open, quadrupled the number of Predator drone attacks, and either preserved or expanded all the Bush protocols that he had once derided.

Abroad, a new multilateral Obama wished to act only in concert with the United Nations and our allies. He vowed to respect the sovereignty of other countries and not “meddle” in their affairs by imposing American values. And yet the president also embraced eternal and universal human rights and wanted the United States to be on the right side of history. So he criticized our intervention to foster democracy in Iraq even as his vice president praised it. We surged in Afghanistan even as we posted deadlines to leave. We promised not to meddle to support Iranian protestors, and to meddle to support Egyptian protestors.

Hosni Mubarak was a dictator and was not a dictator, who had to leave yesterday, today or maybe tomorrow. The situation in Libya is deemed “unacceptable,” but how exactly it could be made acceptable is never spelled out. Intervening there to support rebels is said to be good; but apparently so is supporting Saudi troops intervening in Bahrain to put down rebels and protect the status quo.

Middle East strongmen, the president tells us, are cruel and must leave, but the why and how of it all are also never stated. Are they supposed to flee only when protests reach a critical mass? In Egypt and Tunisia, but not in Saudi Arabia, Syria or Iran?

President Obama has spent most of his life either in, or teaching, school — or making laws that he was not responsible for enforcing. His hope-and-change speeches were as moving in spirit as they were lacking in details.

But now Obama is chief executive, and learning, as did Prince Hamlet, that thinking out every possible side of a question can mean never acting on any of them — a sort of Shakespearean “prison” where “there is nothing either good or bad.” Worrying about pleasing everyone ensures pleasing no one. Once again such “conscious does make cowards of us all.”

Hamlets, past and present, are as admirable in theory as they are fickle — and often dangerous — in fact.

While Obama Seeks New Ideas, His Bureaucracy Stifles Them
by Byron York

Nearly a year ago, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and his healthcare policy team came up with a simple way to save the state’s Medicaid program a lot of money. Why not have Medicaid recipients and applicants handle their paperwork online? Using e-mail and a special website rather than paper, Herbert calculated, would save Utah about $6.3 million a year. “It seemed like a no-brainer to us,” says the governor.

The problem was, going paperless required a rules waiver from the Department of Health and Human Services. And that’s where the idea ran into a brick wall.

“We tried for eight months to get the waiver,” says Herbert. HHS delayed and delayed and delayed — and then finally said no. “The denial we got back from the secretary of HHS was by e-mail, of all things,” Herbert says, pausing a second for the listener to take it in. “The irony is rich.”

It might seem odd that a governor would need to become personally involved in the question of whether his state can use e-mail to deal with Medicaid recipients, but that’s what happened next. Still determined to go paperless — “I know in Washington it’s chump change, but for Utah, $6.3 million is real money” — Herbert traveled to the Nation’s Capital to meet Cindy Mann, director of HHS’ Center for Medicaid and State Operations. Mann and her staff were receptive, but then, a few weeks later, lower levels of HHS again held up the no-paper plan.

The bureaucratic runaround was on Herbert’s mind when he joined other governors in the White House State Dining Room in late February to hear President Obama pledge to help states burdened by skyrocketing healthcare costs.

Obama told the governors that he is always open to new ideas to improve the system. “I don’t believe that any single party has a monopoly on good ideas,” the president said. “And I will go to bat for whatever works, no matter who or where it comes from.”

After the event, Herbert approached Obama. “I said, ‘You know, we’ve been trying to get this waiver and go paperless,’” Herbert recounts. “He said, ‘That’s a great idea.’ And I said, ‘I think so, too, but we can’t seem to get HHS to give us the ability to do it.’”

At that moment, Obama spotted HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius nearby. “Kathleen, Kathleen — come over here,” he said, according to Herbert. When Sebelius came over, Obama explained what Herbert was trying to do.

A few hours later, Herbert received a handwritten note from the HHS secretary. “Just learned that we have worked with your staff, we have a draft agreement and we should have a formal agreement later today,” Sebelius wrote. Utah had finally won permission to go paperless.

Herbert is pleased, but a little baffled at why getting an ordinary waiver was so hard. “I appreciate the fact that they’ve come around after eight months, but does it take a governor having to talk to the president of the United States to make a simple cost-saving change?” he asks. “And the bigger question is why in heaven’s name do states have to ask for permission anyway?”

Herbert and other governors fear bigger problems ahead. New mandates in the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, will cost Utah $1.2 billion over the next decade, an increase Herbert calls unsustainable.

He’s still frustrated that Congress and the Obama administration didn’t pay much attention to governors during the Obamacare debate. “We were never even invited to the table,” he says. And he’s not impressed by the president’s promise to allow states to opt out of Obamacare, as long as they meet the administration’s requirements for coverage. “He’s saying, you can have flexibility, as long as you do it our way,” says Herbert.

But Herbert is happy the new Republican leadership of the House is paying more attention to the states. During his visit to Washington, Herbert, along with Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, urging that Congress allow the states more leeway in paying for health care. “Real healthcare reform will arise from the states, not be imposed by the federal government,” Herbert told the committee.

That seems unlikely, as long as it takes presidential intervention for the smallest improvements in the system. But Herbert is still hoping for the best.

After Obama, the Deluge
By Victor Davis Hanson

President Obama established a bipartisan debt-reduction commission — and then ignored its findings, which called for unpopular reductions in entitlements and across-the-board spending cuts. His first two budgets led to the largest deficits in U.S. history. The ensuing $3 trillion dollars in red ink prompted the Tea Party movement and led to the largest midterm defeat of the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives since 1938.

No matter. The president has proposed a new budget with an even larger, $1.6 trillion deficit. That record federal borrowing prompted columnist Charles Krauthammer to describe it as Louis XV indulgence, an allusion to the wild royal spending that brought about the French Revolution. Even Newsweek editor at large Evan Thomas, who once gushed that Obama stood “above the world” as some “sort of God,” called the president’s new budget a “profile in cowardice.” After Obama leaves office, a perfect storm of rising international interest rates, an anemic dollar and panic on the part of foreign lenders may force an end to this unhinged American rush to borrow and blow what it has not earned.

Gas prices in many parts of the country are nearing $4 a gallon; it could get even worse as unrest spreads throughout the oil-exporting Middle East. Yet the Obama administration once again seems to see no crisis. It has curtailed new leases for offshore oil exploration for seven years and exempted thousands of acres in the West from new drilling. It will not reconsider opening up small areas of Alaska with known large oil reserves.

Instead, the administration in 2009 pushed through cap-and-trade legislation in the House on the dubious proposition that, in times of unusually cold American winters, the planet is warming up. Accordingly, the administration would like to tax further the already high price of fossil fuels rather than go all out to look for more. Yet importing more oil from abroad and growing more subsidized biofuels at home will lead to a disastrous trifecta of borrowing even more money, ensuring greater global pollution and causing higher world food prices.

Obamacare — the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — was pushed through the Senate in 2009 through backroom deal-making and special perks for fence-sitting senators. The premise was that it would save both patients and the nation billions of dollars. But updated estimates now suggest that the takeover of health care will cost the country about $2 trillion over the next decade while disrupting and making more costly existing health plans.

That worry may explain why the administration has quietly granted waivers from its own “affordable” plan to some 700 organizations covering 2 million workers — 40 percent of them union members. Long after the president has left office, everyone else who is not so privileged to be exempted will have to live with the consequence of a cumbersome and costly new federal health bureau.

The president just weighed in on the Wisconsin budget deadlock, suggesting that Gov. Scott Walker was out to punish public-sector unions more than to figure out a way to close a $3 billion state deficit. But unlike the federal government, Walker cannot print money, and he cannot so easily raise taxes without losing residents who might flee to lower-tax states. That the president wants unions to know he is on their side is clear; that he cares how the people of Wisconsin are going to pay for sky-high public-employee wages, benefits and health care is not so evident.

In these lean times of nearly 10 percent unemployment and rapid hikes in gas and food prices, the president has chastised “fat cat” Wall Street bankers, the wealthy who jet to the Super Bowl, those who junket to Las Vegas, and in general suggested that strapped American families might wish to “sacrifice” and “put off a vacation.” But in “let them eat cake” style, the first family seems tone-deaf to the potential symbolism of postponing its own exclusive vacations. Michele Obama just returned from skiing at an elite Vail, Colo., resort. Last summer in Marie Antoinette fashion, she jetted to Costa del Sol in Spain for a costly Mediterranean vacation. The rich playground at Martha’s Vineyard, not Camp David, seems now to be the favorite presidential recession-era getaway spot.

Shortly after Barack Obama leaves office, we are all going to have to eat cake. Then a less eloquent president will have to balance budgets, pay off trillions in new debt, develop more energy, come up with a sane health-care policy, and in symbolic fashion have the first family share the sacrifice of a more mundane lifestyle.

Voices of Moderation
by Thomas Sowell

Moderation– at least verbal moderation– is suddenly in vogue.

President Obama’s rhetoric has moderated, even if his policies and practices have not. Among Republicans, voices of moderation are warning that the party cannot win elections without having a “big tent” and reaching out to Hispanics, for example. Recently, talk show host Michael Medved has suggested that Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin should moderate their attacks on Obama.

Moderation is fine– if it is not carried to extremes. But some moderates seem to think that it is always a good thing to tone down your words. Yet history shows that muffling your message can mean forfeiting many a battle to extremists.

No one has had more of a mixed and muffled message than Senator John McCain, which is why Barack Obama is President of the United States.

Republican moderates warn their fellow Republicans that they need to move away from the Ronald Reagan approach, in order to attract a wider range of voters. But Ronald Reagan won two consecutive landslide elections– and he couldn’t have done that if the only people who voted for him were dedicated conservatives.

What Reagan had was a clear, coherent and believable message. Even voters who did not agree with him 100 percent could respect that and prefer it to the alternative.

He didn’t have to offer earmarked goodies to each special group, in order to get their votes. Pandering can gain you some votes but lose you many others.

After the tragic murders and attempted murders in Tucson, some Democrats and the media have promoted the notion that sharp political criticism somehow provoked the shootings. There is not a speck of evidence to support that notion.

Such evidence as there is points in the opposite direction, because the individual charged with the crime did not follow talk radio or Sarah Palin.

This same political game was played after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which was blamed on the “hostile” conservative atmosphere in Dallas. But the atmosphere in Dallas did not kill JFK. A bullet from a far-left kook killed him.

The criticism-causes-violence notion plays right into the hands of those Democrats who have done outrageous things in Washington, and who now insulate themselves from the outrage they provoked by equating strong criticism with fomenting violence.

Apparently some moderate Republicans don’t realize that you can’t buy your opponents’ assumptions and then try to oppose the conclusions that follow.

Conservative talk-show host Michael Medved recently criticized Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Dinesh D’Souza for depicting Barack Obama as someone who does not love this country, and who is deliberately doing things to undermine it, at home and abroad. Medved declared, “it’s particularly unhelpful to focus on alleged bad intentions and rotten character when every survey shows more favorable views of his personality and policies.”

Are public opinion polls the way to determine the truth? If so, we can all outsource our thinking to Gallup and Zogby.

Michael Medved also cites other presidents of the past, whose errors or even sins did not mean that they were unpatriotic. But does anyone seriously believe that this tells us anything about Barack Obama, one way or the other?

Like some others, Michael Medved seems to think that Obama’s pragmatic desire to be re-elected means that he is not an ideological extremist. But Hitler and Stalin were pragmatic and that did not stop them from being extremists.

Finally, there is the argument that Republicans will have a harder time winning the next election if they are “perceived as running against the presidency.” But Rush Limbaugh and Dinesh D’Souza are not running for office, and it is not certain that Sarah Palin will be either.

And nobody is running against “the presidency.” They will be running against Barack Obama.

Are we not to consider a possibility with deep and painful implications for the future of this nation, for such feeble reasons as these? Or just because moderation is a Good Thing?

President Obama’s Pathetic Scalpel
by Mona Charen

Well, now we have the answer to the question posed Nov. 2: Will President Obama, faced with an electorate infuriated by big government overreach, pivot as Bill Clinton did in 1995 and become a centrist? By offering a budget that adds a gob-smacking $8 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, the president has answered that question in the negative.

At his press conference, the president displayed all the classic symptoms of what could be called Liberal Obduracy Syndrome (or LOS). For Obama, every single appropriation in the monster we call a federal budget is precious — so that he must approach it with “a scalpel, not a meat ax,” as he once put it.

How some of us long for a meat ax!

Casting around for examples of blatantly, incontrovertibly virtuous uses of taxpayer money, Obama cited two: college loans and infant formula for poor children. “Are we only serious about education in the abstract, but when it’s the concrete, we’re not willing to put the money into it? If we’re cutting infant formula to poor kids, is that who we are as a people?”

Oh, please. Since passage of the Higher Education Act in 1965 (those Great Society programs never went away; they just “growed” like Topsy), the federal government has spent billions on higher education. Though it is doubtful that the Founders ever conceived of a federal role in education at all, we’ve been lavishly funding students, colleges, and universities (over and above what the states spend) for decades. Between 2000 and 2008, federal aid to higher education jumped from $10 billion to $30 billion. And in 2009/2010, the federal government spent $41.3 billion on grant aid for undergraduate and graduate students.

You can make an argument that this spending represents an “investment” in the future of the country. But liberals never account for the distorting effects of government subsidies. Economist Richard Vedder, in “Going Broke by Degree,” outlined the pattern:

“… America has gotten itself into a vicious cycle with respect to higher education financing that goes like this: In year 1, tuition goes up fairly substantially. Political pressures build to ‘do something’ about the increases. Congress expands guaranteed student loan programs to make education more affordable, in turn increasing the demand for education and allowing universities in year 2 … to raise prices further. The result is a further expansion of student loan programs, state scholarship efforts, and other third-party funding.”

And then, in turn, the rest of us are faced with ever-increasing tuition bills. I have a high school senior and have been visiting a number of colleges this year. All of them, public and private, are luxurious. Why not skip the college and just buy a country club membership for our kids? Outside of the sciences, the cost of providing an education basically consists of paying professors and administrators. And they’ve done very well over the past few decades (salaries have doubled since 1980). How they must chuckle whenever a politician demands that we “invest” in education.

As for Obama’s invocation of baby formula for poor children — he’s a little behind the curve here. Most doctors and nutritionists have been insisting for years that mother’s milk is best for babies. Still, some mothers cannot nurse. OK, let’s imagine a federal program that subsidized formula only for poor women who cannot nurse. Would it look anything like the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program? Fully 51 percent of infants now get WIC funding, along with 25 percent of young children. Is a majority of infants in the United States poor? Since receiving benefits from one program does not disqualify you from another (quite the contrary), many of these recipients are also eligible for Food Stamps, free- or reduced-price school lunches, and so on.

This is not to be Scrooge, but merely to demonstrate that even the most heart-stirring of liberal programs — formula for babies! — has become bloated beyond reason and could easily be cut.

If it’s true for infant formula and college aid, it is doubly and triply true for other programs. The Bush administration had a quaint idea — evaluate the effectiveness of federal programs. They called it “Expect More.” After examining 1,015 federal programs, they found that 193 were “effective.” Of the remainder, 326 were “moderately effective,” 297 were adequate, 26 were “ineffective,” and 173 could not be judged at all because there were no metrics for evaluation.

So about 19 percent of programs were found to be working well. Most of them are probably superfluous anyway, but how about using that as a starting point for cutting? Count me among the 80 percenters.

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Obama: Egypt’s Hostage
by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

President Obama better hope that the crowds clamoring for an overthrow of the Hosni Mubarak regime really do achieve a functioning liberal democracy rather than an Iranian-style theocracy. His re-election hopes may be doomed if Iran takes over.

Just as Richard Nixon helped to discredit Harry Truman and defeat Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson in 1952 by trumpeting the question, “Who lost China?” Obama may well have to explain how and why he lost Egypt. If he permits Egypt to slip through our fingers and go over to the Iranian sphere of influence, he will pay for it politically in 2012. Imagine if this president, whose domestic policy initiatives are coming apart at the seams, loses office over a foreign policy blunder.

The Muslim Brotherhood is allied closely with Hamas. To the extent that it masquerades as a peaceful body, it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Any coalition with the Brotherhood is as likely to remain secular as Adolf Hitler’s early coalition with Paul von Hindenburg in Germany was likely to stay non-Nazi. The Muslim Brotherhood will take over if it gets its foot in the door.

By failing to back Mubarak, Obama is committing the same sin that Dwight Eisenhower did in Cuba and Jimmy Carter did in Iran. He needs to understand that the radical Islamists mean us ill and that any effort to appease them is bound to fail.

If Egypt falls, Obama will have permanently damaged America’s vital interests. Look at what Carter’s abandonment of the Shah has cost the world and is likely to cost it in the future. We now face the possibility that a radicalized Egypt could be Obama’s gift to the globe.

Until now, Americans have regarded Obama’s flirtation with the Arab street with a mild concern that he may be too naive in his understanding of that part of the world. But his policy of appeasement toward radical Islam has yet to have any bad consequence. We have had some terror attacks, to be sure, but none have risen to the level of a cataclysm. But losing Egypt to the grip of Islamic fundamentalism would be a huge blow to the United States, to Israel and to the entire Western world.

It would literally open the door to a theocratic Iranian-style empire stretching from Morocco to Iran. Inspired by an Islamic takeover in Egypt, he may find himself confronted with a Middle Eastern version of the old domino theory, where one nation after another falls to Islamism, with each new theocratic conquest destabilizing its neighbor.

Remember that Iran has a population of 79 million and Egypt has 75 million. Together, their 154 million almost equal the combined population of all the other nations in North Africa and the Middle East. If Egypt and Iran were to work in tandem, they could control the region.

By failing to back Mubarak and telling the Egyptian military to pull its punches and let the demonstrators take over the streets, the Obama administration has come to own responsibility for the outcome of the Egyptian revolution. If it goes south and leads to a disastrous outcome, it will be his foreign policy that will rightly shoulder the blame.

Obama should be backing Mubarak. Remember that Egypt was the first Arab nation to sign a peace deal with Israel and the only one to work with the Jewish state. It was in pursuit of peace that Anwar Sadat, Mubarak’s predecessor, gave his life.

With the U.S. supplying $1.3 billion in annual aid to the Egyptian military — in addition to $700 million in other assistance — we have great leverage, particularly over the military. Our demands that they behave gently toward the demonstrators may doom their efforts to preserve the regime.

How much damage can one misguided American president do? We are about to find out!

Obama Believes American Exceptionalism Begins With Government
by David Limbaugh

Obama’s latest watchword, “investments,” is not, as I originally assumed, simply a euphemism for government spending. It captures his entire economic philosophy — a philosophy that is permanently engrained in the core of his being and disastrous for America’s “future.”

President Bill Clinton shrewdly used the word as a more palatable substitute for income tax rate increases, saying taxpayers needed to “invest” more of their hard-earned dollars in America. But Obama’s use of the term was different in two important ways. First, for him, “investments” would apply to the spending side of the fiscal equation. He would ask our support in his plan to “invest” more government money in infrastructure and education.

Secondly, and more significantly, Obama used the term to candy-coat his fundamental lack of confidence in the private sector and free market, as well as his commitment to faith in government as the primary engine for economic growth.

For all the analysis of Obama’s speech, I don’t think nearly enough has been made of this theme, which was interwoven throughout it. For it is the key to understanding that regardless of any promises he might make to move to the center, he will not do so willingly. It is also critical to comprehending why, despite the marked failure of his economic policies, he is virtually incapable of voluntarily changing course.

Obama’s critics often say that it’s important to pay more attention to his actions than his words. Though there is much validity in that, it’s also true that we must not overlook his words, for he is not always careful to disguise his heartfelt views.

In his pre-speech teasers, Obama telegraphed that he would be emphasizing job creation. Indeed, he said that he saved the nation from economic collapse through his (atrociously wasteful and wholly ineffective trillion-dollar) “stimulus” bill. He insisted that he has succeeded in reigniting the economy but that the matter of job creation is an entirely separate process that will follow through his next round of magic.

He didn’t bother acknowledging that he’s played this same tune many times before (saying he wasn’t focused enough on jobs but now he is) or that he specifically promised from the outset that job growth would result from his stimulus. But he did tell us multiple times in this speech how he envisions job growth finally coming about.

Yes, he rolled out the blame-Bush card again, but he also underscored the limitations of the free market to produce economic growth and employment. His entire “Sputnik” meme was based on this wrongheaded notion.

When the Soviet Union lurched ahead of us in the space race, America’s leaders launched a national effort to surpass the Soviets. For Obama, by analogy, the federal government has to be the prime mover in leading and catalyzing America’s comeback in education and in economic growth. We cannot understand Obama without recognizing that he believes the private sector can’t create or innovate without paternalistic direction and googobs of money from the wiser beings in Washington.

“We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time,” he said. “The first step … is encouraging American innovation.” Note that he didn’t mean “encourage” in the sense of getting government off businesses’ and people’s backs. He means the federal government should proactively prod, direct and lead us into the promised land of economic growth.

He credited government for providing money for “basic research” and “cutting-edge scientists and inventors” throughout history, without which the hand of the free market would have been not only invisible but also impotent. As a result, he pledged from his command-control perch to “invest in biomedical research, information technology and especially clean energy technology” (that PC token can never be omitted) — “an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet and create countless new jobs for our people.” So far, they’ve been “countless” indeed. This is just one example. Read the transcript and you’ll see that throughout he betrays his blind faith in the indispensability of government action to job growth.

It would be bad enough if Obama’s ideas merely retarded their stated goal of restoring job growth. But they necessarily involve Keynesian prescriptions of throwing obscene and budget-busting amounts of federal money at this ephemeral solution. Even if Obama wanted to reduce the deficit and debt, his economic philosophy would compel him always to spend more and would prevent fiscal responsibility.

If you listened to the speech and came away believing Obama is receptive to moving to the center, then you didn’t hear or understand him. For the GOP to make headway on restoring fiscal sanity to this nation, it must first understand him. Then it must oppose and reverse him.

Chicago on the Potomac
by Michelle Malkin

No matter how you rearrange President Obama’s inner circle, it still looks, smells and tastes like a rotten Chicago deep-dish pizza.

Ready for the latest topping on this moldy old pie? It’s a possible chief of staff slot for Wall Street banker/lawyer/wheeler-dealer William Daley, brother of outgoing Chicago mayor/machine politics mastermind Richard M. Daley (also the former boss of White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and first lady Michelle Obama), whose retirement paved the way for former Obama chief of staff and Chicago mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel. Phew.

The White House is reportedly looking to manufacture a “pro-business” aura with Bill Daley, who holds a “corporate responsibility” executive office at J.P. Morgan and once headed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the latter, a left-wing hate object and Obama punching bag leading up to the midterms.

But the Beltway-based Chamber of Commerce is too often a fair-weather statist lobbying organization. It supported the TARP all-purpose bailout, the auto bailout and the bottomless, pork-filled stimulus package, all of which have forcibly redistributed money from taxpayers and small businesses to politically connected special interests (including Daley’s J.P. Morgan, which was most recently swept up in a massive pay-to-play bond scheme in Alabama).

Daley has about as much real experience creating jobs as Da Boss now sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave — which is to say, less than a thimble full. (It’s a New Year. I’m being generous.) In 2009, the head of Chicago’s sanitation department implicated Daley in a hiring corruption scheme tied to his brother’s mayoral administration. The official was convicted; Daley shrugged off the federal probe. “Even if it happened — and I’m not saying it did — things were different. There was nothing illegal about that stuff.”

Instead of distancing himself from the favor-trading Wall Street fat cats who have earned the ire of both anti-bailout tea party activists and anti-corporate liberals, Obama remains wedded, embedded and indebted to the worst kind.

Daley has served on the board of government-sponsored financial behemoth Fannie Mae since 1993. Like the Richard Daley machine in Chicago, Fannie Mae in Washington has served as an industrial-sized patronage factory — sharing profits with political allies, spreading taxpayer funds to ethnic groups, and doling out jobs to left-wing academics, Washington has-beens and back-scratching buddies. Like Daley. And close Obama adviser Jim Johnson, the Fannie Mae exec who got sweetheart loans from shady subprime lender Countrywide.

While they raked in six-figure salaries, Fannie Mae and government-sponsored sibling Freddie Mac engaged in Enron-style accounting, plunged into debt and helped usher in the subprime housing meltdown through reckless lending practices.

Bill Clinton, the man who appointed Daley to the Fannie Mae board, also appointed Emanuel to the Freddie Mac board of directors at a time when its oversight manager called the quasi-governmental agency “so pliant” that it enabled rampant book-cooking. Freddie Mac’s stock skyrocketed; its CEOs helped themselves to massive bonuses. Emanuel’s hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune, exposed how Emanuel’s “profitable stint” during this corruption-plagued period entailed almost no work:

The board met no more than six times a year. Unlike most fellow directors, Emanuel was not assigned to any of the board’s working committees, according to company proxy statements. Immediately upon joining the board, Emanuel and other new directors qualified for $380,000 in stock and options plus a $20,000 annual fee, records indicate.

On Emanuel’s watch, executives told the board of a plan to use accounting tricks to mislead shareholders about outsize profits the government-chartered firm was then reaping from risky investments. The goal was to push earnings onto the books in future years, ensuring that Freddie Mac would appear profitable on paper for years to come and helping maximize annual bonuses for company brass.

And now the torch may be passed in an endless Windy City circle, from Daley to Emanuel, from Emanuel to Daley, with Obama. ‘Round and ’round it goes in Chicago on the Potomac. Remember: When Crony State corruptocrats brag about “job creation,” the only jobs they’ve ever created are each other’s.

Why ‘True Consensus’ is Against Obama
by Kevin McCullough

Quiz question: “Who in Washington DC is obstructionist, angry, dishonest, and of course extremely partisan?”

If you guessed liberal Senate democrats, congrats…

How did Republicans at least temporarily halt a runaway train to insure that every American who pays taxes does not see an increase? Simple, they got lame ducks, democrats, and independents to join the cause. In doing so they halted a harmful tax increase against 75% of small business in America today.

Oh sure, to hear the Senate liberals explain it, they weren’t voting for tax increases against small business. No, they would argue, they were just desiring the steepest tax increase in history against people who OWN small businesses, or file their taxes as an s-corp business which makes their corporate earning vulnerable to the tax increases President Obama seems intent upon hammering them with.

Of course normal people look at this and say, “Hey wait… those people are one and the same.”

Of course they are!

But that didn’t stop Chuck Schumer, Claire McCaskill, and Frank Lautenberg from whining about the fact that they lost the vote in the Senate to support the President’s planned tax hike.

McCaskill cackled, “I feel like I am in the twilight zone. It’s depressing to me that we have gotten to this level of posturing, that they are saying if you do not give people a tax break on their second million, that nobody gets one.”

Of course that’s not what keeping the tax rates in place does, but why let Claire get all wrapped up in details, like facts.

The 482 year old Senator from New Jersey, Frank Lautenberg, proffered a commonly used argument, “I had a good business career and I would be entitled to a tax cut for those over the million dollar mark. But I don’t want it. I don’t need it. What I am looking at today, I think, is a great American travesty.”

That’s funny Senator Ancient because I’m pretty sure the majority of small business owners, who are already staring a Health Care Reform mandate in the face for 2011 breathed a slight breath of relief when they saw that you lost the vote on Saturday.

Don’t you think its ironic that Senator Lautenberg, for all his protestation hasn’t sent a check to the IRS lately–voluntarily, which we know they would take–to just contribute out of the goodness of his heart. I mean if the problem is so big, and he’s got money just laying around waiting to be shoveled into the great treasury pie-hole, why hasn’t he ponied up?

(Sorry, after further research it was discovered that we had wrongfully estimated Lautenberg’s age, falling short by a margin of at least 167 years.)

At least for today there would be no more stealing from those who produce to do something truly ridiculous like say give unemployment benefits for longer than two years to people who are able to work but decline jobs that pay less because “the government will pay me more” not to.

Nothing genuinely scares me more than Congress holding the President’s feet to the fire, correcting the economy and finally begin creating jobs, only to have the President take credit for it and cruise to reelection. But I know how the game works–whoever is on call when the economy sputters or grows generally gets the credit for it.

Nope at this point the situation is too bad to worry whether or not President Obama gets credit. The opposition to the maniacal crazy that’s been running loose in Congress for the past two years has to be put down. In a pasture with a blanket if necessary. We’re talking choked of all available oxygen. And spiking into their faces the pathetic volley they had served up Saturday is an encouraging sign.

It is so if for no other reason than it included Republicans, Democrats, Lame Ducks, and Independents–in other words, America.

We the people are not confused about how the recent elections went. We know Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid are to some extent, throwing victory parties and all. But the message sent was clear–do not raise taxes, create jobs, and get the economy going again.

And the clock continues ticking.

President Obama has lost valuable time and his party has lost complete face. America has voted them down, and is expecting action to be taken.

And now with Republicans, Democrats, Lame Ducks, and Independents all opposing President Obama’s desire to implement the highest single round of tax increases in American history, will he listen?

The United State of the Consensus of Americans is waiting Mr. President.