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November 9, 2009
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Monday, November 9
President Obama’s weekly address HERE
Duck This Quackery! Unemployment tops 10%. - Let's wreck health care! HERE.
Obama's best, and worst, moves - CLICK to read.
Obama's approval on the issues is CRATERING! - GO HERE.
Something Is Missing
Jennifer Rubin, Commentary Magazine.com
Let's be blunt, the affected “cool” of the president is getting rather creepy as a style of governance. (Mickey Kaus cops to discovering much the same phenomenon.) This was on display in an unfortunate and highly visible way this week. As Linda and others have pointed out, the president’s bizarrely inappropriate remarks after learning of the Foot Hood massacre left one puzzled, if not downright troubled. He not only didn’t seem to grasp the gravity of the situation; he didn’t seem emotionally connected to the appalling events.
In this regard he is quite different from George W. Bush, who, for all the criticism of his verbal abilities, delivered some of the most moving oratory (on the rubble heap in New York City, at the National Cathedral on November 14, etc.) in recent memory and never failed to impart a sense of his own emotional presence. Tears were often just beneath the surface, and sometimes not even concealed from view. It was not done for affect, nor as a ploy for sympathy. It was simply who he was, and the country could sense his innate decency and his tender affection for his fellow countrymen.
Now there is apt criticism of the Oprah-ization of politics. And thanks to Bill Clinton, much mockery is rightly made of politicians who put on great shows of emotion. Still, there is a place for empathy and genuine displays of kindness and sweetness by our leaders. When, as in the much remembered presidential debate, Michael Dukakis failed to register human emotion when given a hypothetical involving his wife’s rape and murder, the country flinched. What’s wrong with him? Yes, we expect our leaders, at a bare minimum, to reflect and exemplify values and traits that we would seek in friends — loyalty, kindness, and righteous indignation.
There is a price to be paid for those who don’t grasp this. A president who fails to bond with the American people, who holds himself above or beyond them, is not a president who will enjoy a reservoir of affection and support in return, especially when the political winds are no longer at his back. Read article.
The Rose Garden Path
Peggy Noonan, Online WSJ.com
There's a lot of firing going on in America, and now that includes politicians. Seems only fair and will likely continue. I don't think voters in New Jersey and Virginia were saying, "Oh the Democrats are awful, and we hate them," nor were they saying, "Republicans are wonderful, and we love them." The voters were being practical, and thinking policy: "Will he raise my taxes?" In Jersey, they fired the incumbent governor because they couldn't imagine the state getting off its current trajectory (high unemployment, high taxes, high spending) with him there. And they're certain they have to get off their current trajectory or they're sunk.
Both states hired new governors. The good news for the GOP is that they hired Republicans. The bad news is that if the Republicans don't make progress, they'll fire them too.
Second, it's too simple to say this was a vote against Obama. Yes, he went to Jersey three times and draped himself like a shawl around the Democratic incumbent. But the crowds showed and nobody booed and everyone had a good time. What happened actually is more interesting. They just didn't listen to him. Mr. Obama told Jersey to vote for Jon Corzine, and they didn't. They don't hate him, they're just not hearing him. That's new. They're warning him: Hey you with the health-care obsession, shape up or you'll get shipped out! Read article.
The sheep are quite capable of looking out for themselves. Someone tell the Democrats.
John Steele Gordon, WSJ.com
Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, recently explained the White House war on Fox News as an example of "speaking truth to power." Much of the American political world collapsed in laughter, pointing out that her boss was president of the United States, the most powerful man on earth. His every word is news around the world. Fox News is a cable channel rarely watched by more than a few million people at a time. How could she have so blithely said something completely out-of-sync with reality?
Simple: She's a liberal.
As a liberal she carries around in her head the liberal paradigm of how the world works and what needs to be done to make it work better. There's nothing wrong with that. We all use paradigms to make sense of what we see around us and couldn't get along without them. Unfortunately, the basic liberal paradigm hasn't shifted in a hundred years, while the world we live in has changed utterly since the late 19th century, when modern liberalism was born.
In a world where a majority of Americans work at white-collar jobs, have high-school and college degrees, own their own homes, and hold financial securities in their own right, the so-called wolves are now a majority. If liberals don't begin to take that fact into account in formulating policy, the Obama administration will not only be an unsuccessful liberal administration, it may well be the last liberal administration. Read article.
The Obama magic has faded
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, NY Post.com
All politics is local, they say, and Tues day's off-off-year elec tions certainly had their local angles. Jon Corzine has been a terrible governor even by the undemanding standards of terribly governed New Jersey. Creigh Deeds, though he looked good to Democratic Party recruiters not long ago, turned out to be an undistinguished campaigner, more driven by the concerns of Washington Post editorialists than of Virginia voters. And NY-23 Republican nomineee Dede Scozzafava was a bizarre choice, bizarre enough to inspire a seemingly quixotic third-party run by Doug Hoffman.
But these local angles weren't enough to keep the Obama administration out of the races. President Obama barnstormed Virginia and New Jersey -- and pumped money and Joe Biden into NY-23 in support of Democratic candidate Bill Owens. (One suspects Owens would have preferred more money and less Biden.)
And -- until it started looking as if they might lose -- the Obama people were suggesting that these races would seal their mandate and encourage congressional wafflers to toe the line on health-care reform. Not so much, as it turns out.
In fact, the elections underscored Obama's political weakness just one year after his triumphant victory over Republican moderate John McCain.
The Obama invincibility that was so much in evidence then seems to have lost its power. People can argue the reasons why these elections, all in places Obama carried handily, were so close. But if he were the political marvel he was thought to be, these races wouldn't have been contests, but walkovers. So one consequence of this Election Day is the end of his special political magic. Read article.
A Growing Sense of Unease
Paul Greenberg, JWR.com
In the friendly confines of the Oval Office, congratulations are about to be exchanged. On those dithering heights, victory is about to be proclaimed. A great change is about to take place in Americans' health care and how to pay for it, and the administration sounds triumphant.
It is only out here in the country, where the people are, that a growing disquiet can be sensed under the usual thrust and parry of American politics.
The country is about to pass "a critical milestone," the president assures us, though whether America is headed forward or backward remains unclear. Not to mention how American the country will remain as everything from the economy to foreign policy is Europeanized.
Despite growing doubts about where the country is headed, surely the direction is the right one. We know because Nancy Pelosi says so. But even to mention her name is to sow doubt; the speaker of the House may be the least trusted politician in the country, not counting household epithets like Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Harry Reid and, well, name your own unfavorite member of that all-too-familiar crew.
"We are about to deliver on the promise of making affordable, quality health care available for all Americans," says Speaker Pelosi, who always speaks in talking points, joining Tinkertoy phrases till they add up to a press release.
Do you believe her? Read article.
'All Campaign Hacks'
Dan Gerstein, Forbes.com
On the eve of the first election of the Obama era, the Washington Post ran a long profile Monday of the White House's "low-profile" political director, Patrick Gaspard. It was an unremarkable story filled with unremarkable tidbits about how the unassuming Gaspard has thrived in a West Wing filled with political heavies--save for one quote from Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina that caught my eye. Explaining what sets Gaspard apart from his White House peers, Messina said, "We are all campaign hacks. Patrick is a movement guy. He really came up through the movement and the grassroots."
This was meant to be an innocuous bit of inside baseball touting Gaspard's labor roots and progressive bona fides. But it wound up revealing the Obama White House's biggest weakness: The president's top advisers are not just overly political; they are almost totally political. Indeed, this West Wing is stacked with "hacks"--campaign professionals who are acculturated to think, act and win in the hothouse environments of elections, not to govern a bitterly divided country in extremely difficult times. Read article.
While the President Golfs - Afghanistan, once a necessary war, is downgraded to someone else's mess.
James Taranto, Best of the Web, Online WSJ.com
Who says President Obama hasn't accomplished anything since taking office? To his Nobel Peace Prize and two Grammys, we can add a sports record, Politico reports:
Obama has only been in office for just over nine months, but he's already hit the links as much as President Bush did in over two years.
CBS' Mark Knoller--an unofficial documentarian and statistician of all things White House-related--wrote on his Twitter feed [Saturday] that, "Today - Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24. Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months."
Yes, we can!
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports from Kabul that "eight American troops were killed in two separate bomb attacks Tuesday in southern Afghanistan, making October the deadliest month of the war for U.S. forces since the 2001 invasion to oust the Taliban."
We know what you're thinking, but this is not Obama's fault. Afghanistan is someone else's mess, so why don't you grab a mop? Read article.
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