Obama and the Big, Messy, Tough Democracy
As his term of office proceeded, his rhetoric turned increasingly testy. He told his political opponents they should shut up and pick up a mop. He advised people who wanted tax relief that he already provided it and they should be thanking him. In response to substantive objections, he asserted elections had consequences and he had won. He held few press conferences after the blowback from the one in which he told the Cambridge police they had acted stupidly in arresting his friend. He said those who refused to endorse his programs were simply standing around “sipping Slurpees.” He lectured Congress to eat its peas and turn in its work, just like his daughters did with their homework.
On the left, his supporters searched for an explanation for how Obama had become the sort-of-God that failed. On the front page of its “Sunday Review” section, the New York Times published a 3,300 word opinion essay by an Emory University professor of psychology (and “messaging consultant”) venturing five “hypotheses” about what happened to Obama: (1) he had “succumbed” to a belief that electoral success requires “centrist” politicians; (2) he was “simply not up to the task,” having had no experience and few accomplishments before running for president; (3) he doesn’t know what he believes, or will change his beliefs to whatever he thinks he needs for re-election; (4) he has been corrupted by the system; and (5) he ran for president on two platforms (reformer and unity candidate) that contradicted each other.
Put a little more concisely, the professor’s theories were that Obama was unqualified, corrupt, had no core beliefs, ran for president on contradictory promises, and succumbed to centrism. The New York Times effectively endorsed those views by putting them on the front page of its Sunday opinion section, which Paul Krugman and other liberal priests promptly seconded.
The right never believed in Obama; the left has been increasingly disabused of its belief; independents oppose him by lopsided margins. The percentage of likely voters who do not simply “disapprove” but “strongly disapprove” of him requires a chart to fully appreciate. The things he could do to improve his electoral chances next year are things he cannot do: (a) bring in a new team of economic advisers not invested in the failed philosophy of borrow, spend, and tax; (b) repeal ObamaCare, which hovers over every employer contemplating a new employee and includes a huge tax increase on investment income to take effect after the next election; and (c) adopt an “all-of-the-above” energy policy to replace the endless blather about “green” jobs.
After his 1994 shellacking, Bill Clinton abandoned HillaryCare, adopted Republican ideas on welfare reform, and reduced the capital gains tax, producing an economic surge and restoring his popularity in time for the 1996 election against a lackluster Republican opponent. This is not a strategy Obama can likely emulate, and next year no one will faint at his rallies; no tingle will go up the leg of a TV pundit; no New York Times columnist will project presidential greatness from the crease in his pants. He will have to run on a record, rather than rhetoric.
The big, messy, tough democracy will have its say, having repeatedly tried to send him a message in multiple elections and recurring opinion polls. Only a lackluster Republican nominee can save him now.
The job has proven to be too big for the president
No, the job is what it is, what it’s always been, an important and serious position.
Obama has proven himself too small for the job.
Red Diaper Childhood + Affirmative Action Youth + Soros Manchurian Candidate + Malignant Narcissist = Barry Obama = National Crisis. This equation was clear to many folks at PajamasMedia in 2008.
Amen! Obama has proven the “Peter Principle” extensively! He reached his level of incompetency back when he became an Illinios State Senator. The Powers that be, saw an “Intelligent (?), well dressed, well spoken Black man with no touch of dialect” who had solid corruptibility about him (He was Controllable!) and announced they had found their “Chosen One”
I feel sorry for all the hard working Black men and women who threw away all their political capital on this “Suit”
The Clintons USED to have the Title of “The Most Corrupt Presidency” ever, I think that the Obama’s have beaten them.
Good on ‘ya, mate. Wish I could put things so succinctly…I’m trying these days to see something-anything! positive to say about Mr. Soetero…dang…
*crickets chirping*
Wait!
Nice smile.
“In 2008, the big, messy, tough democracy actually went quite easy on him. It elected an inexperienced first-term senator, with no record of accomplishment, who announced for president two years into his term and then spent most of his time campaigning (he missed the debt ceiling votes in 2007 and 2008). In 2004, Democrats made an issue of the college grades and military service of a sitting president; in 2008 their untested nominee had no military record, refused to disclose his college transcript, and had less executive experience and fewer achievements than the Republican vice-presidential candidate.”
The main stream media, the jackals who carried all of Obama’s water during the 2008 election, will forever be shamed by what they did to Sarah Palin. That woman had way, way, more accomplishments than Obama ever did, yet they pounded her mercilessly during the campaign. They were total scum for doing it and they never, ever, highlighted Obama’s lack of experience. Shame on them for doing that. And now they can see what lack of experience is getting us. It has destroyed our economy, landed us in huge debt, and has made us a laughing stock around the world. And the press never, ever, made the point that Sarah Palin was NOT the one running for president, Obama was.
But, hopefully, the public in 2012 will be a lot wiser than in 2008. Now they can see what an empty suit liberal from Chicago actually did in office and make a change. The main stream media will still have to support Obama because, if they don’t, they’ll have to admit that they made a mistake in 2008. And they would never, ever, do that. The main stream media has destroyed what little credibility they had left with the Obama campaign and, fortunately, they will not be much of a factor in 2012. Why? Because people can actually see now what listening to them got them in 2008. And it ain’t pretty.
“Only a lackluster Republican nominee can save him now.”
We pray (I can’t bring myself to use the word “hope” anymore) that our democracy is too big, too messy and too tough to let that happen.
Without the liberal-infested MSM, this could never have happened to America.
If the truth had been reported, even half-heartedly, couched, diminished, the American people would never have fallen for this guy in numbers sufficient enough to elect him.
The common man of the Soviet Union understood how to read Izvestia, the daily news periodical whose name means “News” and Pravda, the journal of the Communist Party whose name means “Truth.” The average Muscovite said: “There is no Pravda in Izvestia, and there is no Izvestia in Pravda” (“There is no truth in News, and there is no news in Truth.”)
Perhaps what Our Esteemed President is saying “if this were a nice tidy dictatorship I wouldn’t be having these problems”.
Go back to the street corner you two bit hustler.
And the real problem is not Obama; the real problem is We the People, who have allowed and encouraged our legislators for decades to trample the Constitution underfoot. Like the Jews in the Old Testament, we didn’t want to be led by the prophet Samuel (or, in our case, led by a sensible set of foundational Laws known as the Constitution, written by men who had a Bible-saturated knowledge of Godly principles and human nature): we wanted a king. But we had revolted against the kings, so we didn’t call it a king. Instead we have progressively granted our gov’t king-like powers. What was intended to be a strictly limited Fed gov’t, powerful in the realms it was authorized to act in (mainly military), weak in all others, has metastasized into an economy-and-freedom-strangling monster. Obama is too small for the job, but frankly the job is too big for any man. Theoretically a benign dictator is the best form of gov’t. The problem is that man is not benign. That’s why the Founders designed a strictly limited gov’t, with a system of checks and balances. It will only work if the citizens will make it work, reading and understanding the Constitution, and insisting that legislators follow it, and executives appoint justices who will follow it. According to the Constitution, the presidency shouldn’t be the massively powerful position that it is; Congress shouldn’t have the power that it has. But when Congress can use the Commerce Clause as an excuse to regulate firearms, not because Massachusetts is putting a levy on pistols from Connecticut, but because our masters think we peons shouldn’t have unrestricted access to weaponry, one has no confidence in the willingness of Congress to follow the Constitution. And when the SCOTUS can, with a straight face, claim that the Constitution requires every state to allow any mother to have her unborn baby killed up until the point his head is poking out, without meaningful restriction, one has no confidence in their willingness to identify unConstitutional legislation. This does not end well.
You are absolutely on the mark. That is why these incumbents need to be retired at the next election and the next election. There is so much wrong with these long termers I wouldn’t know where to start. Congress has contributed a great deal to our current state of decline: Barney Frank, Murtha, Kerry, Pelosi, Reid and now Debbie Wasserman-Schultz who hails from the most gerrymandered district in the country. She will never be ousted unless the lobotomies are eliminated in her district. The list is long. I am hopeful that alot of people who did not show up last time because McCain was such a dud are awake now and will show up on election day. This needs to be a landslide election like no other. And by the way, Claire McCaskill you will not be re-elected in Missouri again. Thanks for playing.
It will take minimum 20 years to undo the damages Bush has caused. OK, lets remember some of his major accomplishments.
a)he underestimated the danger alqaida posed and thus misallocated intelligence resources.
b)when attacked by the alqaida terrorists, this time he overestimated the threat thereby playing into the enemy’s hand. Enemy was still alive in Afghanistan but he attacked Iraq a country who posed no threat to US.
c)Consequently, the pressure was off Taliban and al qaida so they regrouped and came back to fight both in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those two wars cost more than a trillion dollars (borrowed from Chinese)
d) Bush did not want tax the rich to finance the war, as the tax break he gave to the rich amounted to two trillion.
e)when Bush took over, the US had a budget surplus. Towards the end of his second term US was running a budget deficit close to 13 percent of her GDP.
f)years of unregulated greed in the financial market, the hedge funds, derivatives were hiding the true nature of the deficits not only US but also Europe were having. So, the credit baloon got bigger and bigger..
g) so Bush left with a bang: the credit baloon popped bringing down with it biggest finincial melt down since the great depression.. millions of jobs are lost forever..
h) Bush screwed up America so bad that an afro-american was elected into the
office.
i)America took eight years abuse at the hands of a total failure.
j)Just remember depth of the despair Bush created. Remember, it is the myth of free markets a lack of responsible government that brought this mess.
Bush, for all his faults, like every other President, does not collect his own intelligence. He relies on agencies like the CIA, and from our allies, to make his decisions. The enemy in Afghanistan was on the run and spread out. Then there was also Iran’s influence in Iraq, which caused more deaths to our soldiers, plus the fact that most Iraqis didn’t lift a finger and let our troops do all the dirty work that ensued after removing a ruthless dictator who killed more of his own than died during our liberation and rebuilding. You fail to mention that Clinton didn’t do anything is response to all the terrorist attacks against us throughout the world. When he did grow a pair and send some troops to Somalia, once he found it wasn’t a walk in the park, he cut and run.
And I won’t let you lie, the capitalist system of free markets work fine when unfettered with burdensome regulations and socialist inputs. The Community Redevelopment Act is the reason for the credit bubble, the housing bubble, and the recession. This is from many economists around the world who have no political affiliations. jimmy Carter started the CRA, Clinton greatly expanded it with help from Dodd, Frank, Andrew Cuomo (as head of HUD) and Obama as a community organizer. Plus during most of Bush’s term, after he “inherited” a recession from Clinton, the economy boomed and more wealth was created than ever before. The Federal reserve also had their hand in the economic collapse around the world by allowing the lending institutions to bundle the sub-prime loans into derivatives, thereby allowing unsuspecting investors to buy up the bad loans.
Bush did do things I don’t approve, like medicare part d, but he did get the facts correct when he stated about the axis of evil, presently Iran and N Korea ARE trying for nuclear weapons, and Saddam had used chemical (WMDs) weapons against his own people, still had the knowledge to produce these as well.
There was no surplus, we spent less than we took in and paid down some of our debt, but there wasn’t a pile of money just sitting around.
Oh pul-ease! Give it a rest. At some point, the driver must take responsibility for the direction of the vehicle, regardless who drove it last.
BOOOSSSHHHH!
Oh, please. What does that have to do with the article? Try to stay on topic. Oh, right… for you, Bush is always the topic.
h) Bush screwed up America so bad that an afro-american was elected into the
office.
Care to elaborate on what you mean by that?
I am sure those people who happen to be Americans of African descent would like to know what you mean, too.
Obama was correct when he said the job was beyond his pay grade.
Fantastic recap of the Disaster, Mr. Richman.
How did you cull it down from 10,000 pages?
The U.S. was designed to be messy. (Though it presupposed an electorate with a modicum of rationality.)
If it’s government efficiency you seek, study the Third Reich.
“After his 1994 shellacking, Bill Clinton abandoned HillaryCare, adopted Republican ideas on welfare reform, and reduced the capital gains tax”
No, he did not. The Republicans jammed these things down his lying throat.
Clinton vetoed welfare reform twice. When he signed it on the third time, he vowed to repeal it as soon as the Dems were in control of Congress again after the next election. Obama fulfilled that promise. Dem President + Dem Congress = repeal of welfare reform.
From the Saddleback Forum in ’08 http://www.thirty-thousand.org/pages/Saddleback_16AUG2008.htm:
[4] Warren: A lot of times candidates are accused of flip-flopping, but actually sometimes flip-flopping is smart because you actually have decided a better position based on knowledge that you didn’t have.
What’s the most significant position you held 10 years ago that you no longer hold today; that you’ve flipped on, you’ve changed on because you actually see it differently?
[4] Warren: What’s the most significant position that you’ve held 10 years ago that you no longer hold today?
Obama: Well, you know, I’m trying to think back ten years ago. I think that a good example would be the issue of welfare reform where I always believed that welfare had to be changed. I was much more concerned ten years ago, when President Clinton initially signed the bill, that this could have disastrous results.
He repealed it anyway. Like Clinton, he espoused it publicly and reviled it privately.
Clinton fought balanced budgets. He fought the cuts. He shut down the government. Twice. He lost. Then he took the credit for the balanced budgets, while blaming the Republicans for the shutdown.
They are following that example today. It is about who gets the blame. The difference is, the MSM no longer has a monopoly, and Obama is no Clinton. Unlike Clinton, he has no sense of how to connect to people. Few of the Dems do. It is why they are going to really lose badly in the next election. It will be a slaughter.
“Obama is no Clinton”
Obama isn’t even Butthead without his masters putting stuff on his ‘prompter. Clinton was wrong on a great many issues, but he was slick about it. That man could really shovel that stuff.
No Clinton, indeed. Obama isn’t qualified to shine Bubba’s shoes.
Indeed, I get really sick of the kind bent that “history” is trying to bestow upon Bill-Jeff the BJ man. He’s as much of a marxist as Captain Zero but is a little less arrogant about it, leaving that charge to Hitlery.
By less arrogant, I mean lazy. At the beginning, middle and end of the day, Bill-Jeff is at least as lazy as Burr-Rack. But, unlike the suspiciously gay president, he was more interested in getting his wick waxed than most anything else. Like any socialist, he really got his jollies at being the focus of attention, saying “smart things” on TV and radio that he had no problem with the media cropping/editing/tailoring his words to mean what they liked but perhaps most of all, Bill-Jeff was just ever-so-slightly more intelligent than the slimy Chicago-boy.
By that, Bill-Jeff knew how to manipulate people far better than Zero and wasn’t angry all the time. Just an affable, frat-party-boy who wanted to go get laid all the time. To be honest, who wouldn’t with the wife he has? There’s ugly, then there’s fugly, then there’s Hillary. And her preferences aren’t towards men anyhow.
But I digress.
Clinton was perhaps the country voting their “coolness” of the eighties because we couldn’t be “cool” with an old fuddy-duddy president anymore. It’s like, when a kid is given a ton of money from his grandad but when he buys a new car, he won’t even give him a ride because he’s embarrassed to be seen with him. So, voting for Clinton was the “cool” thing to do…I mean, he played the sax on Letterman. How cool is that? (sarc)
*sigh* The emotional vs. the practical. Usually, that’s where the argument starts and ends. Nothing more, nothing less. Sure, it brings in volumes of periphery. But in the end, it’s emotions vs. the necessary. Emotions won out with Clinton as they did with Obama. Have to prove I’m “cool wid it” and vote for the brutha. Yeah…that way I can tell my friends how hip I am…and be with the “in” crowd at parties.
So…cool people….how has that worked out for ya? Found work yet? Moving into that new house you got that loan for? How are your stocks doing? Is the company you’re working for expanding or downsizing? Oh, you’re in a union? Hm….so you think you’re not going to have a salary decrease or worse, have your “position” eliminated? Well, you just keep thinking that, ok? After all, it wouldn’t be “cool” to let it bother you.
At the risk of seeming naive, I never have though Bubba is a marxist. He’s more like a giant sex-organ that seeks only relief. I don’t even think he has an ideology other than getting laid. He became a democrat because JFK was good looking and when he learned that he got Marilyn Monroe, his lifetime of political preferences was launched. Since then, he has done or said whatever was necessary to get elected, knowing full well that the easiest path is the giveaway path.
And considering that Bubba was a self-trained liar, rather than one coached for 20 or 30 years by professional marxists, Bubba might just be the best politician, i.e. liar, of all time. Even better than the Narcissist in Chief.
How Obama got through screening has always been my thought, but being in the Illinois legislature some assumptions were made. He definitely in over his head. How much longer before he throws up his arms and storms out of meetings or press conferences muttering to himself.
With knowledgeable ‘handlers’ he could have performed his diplomatic moves more deftly; and getting the respect a president of the world’s most powerful nation would receive. He seems lacking in our nations’ history and heritage.
Very good summation; well done.
I think its interesting that a day or so after his this ‘will take time because of this messy democracy speech’, the communist party usa endorsed him. I know it sounds conspiratorial, but I can’t help but believe he is a front-man for something very ugly and is tearing down the country purposefully. The whole media hands-off approach to him is unprecedented, they’re all bought & paid for by someone.
“…next year no one will faint at his rallies.”
Someone will fake it. Wait and see.
The fact is Barako didn’t realize true American’s don’t go down without a fight !!!!
The Fantastical Wonderland of Barack Hussein Obama
. . . Adeptly executing the blame game approach to governing, two weeks after he signed onto the bi-partisan debt ceiling agreement, Obama now calls the pact “a debacle” and blames “partisan brinkmanship” and plain old bad luck from overseas for his abject failures. (http://bit.ly/oexCxK)
A reality check: America’s economy was in the pits long before Europe’s upheavals, long before Japan’s tsunami and earthquake, long before the Mideast exploded, and long before Republicans made a half-hearted effort to effect fiscal sanity.
Next thing you know, our leader will be saying he really did close Gitmo, that he hasn’t really raised taxes, that Obamacare is constitutional, and that his bride has always been proud of her country.
Far more critical than any of those developments is a valid concern as to whether Obama is in his right mind when he contends he “reversed the recession.” That distorted thinking is contrary to all perceived reality and could be emblematic of an unbalanced mind which is significantly more dangerous than economies in upheaval, tsunamis, crazed Arabs, or angry Republicans!
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5219)