Back in February, Jonah Golberg, (paralleling a notion I would later put forward) dated the onset of Obama’s troubles to the very “dawn of his administration“, indeed, to the first massive bit of legislation, he and Democrats pushed through Congress:
Politically, the stimulus offered the president a chance to break the back of the GOP, while at the same time fulfilling his promise to transcend the gridlock and partisanship of recent years. If he had offered something close to half-a-loaf to Republicans at the time, he wouldn’t have won total GOP support, but he would have gotten a sizable chunk of their votes — enough for the White House to claim a real bipartisan victory and force a Republican buy-in to Obama’s agenda. The climate going into the 2010 elections might look very different if the Republican Party had an ownership stake in Obama’s economic policies.
Now, Glenn Reynolds* alerts us to a piece in the Los Angeles Times where Aaron David Miller offers a similar view, claiming that while Obama may have “arrived at the right time; unlike them, he may have badly misread his moment, and America’s.” Note, I say similar. Miller doesn’t seem to offer as harsh an opinion of the president as some on the right do, but he does find that, in misreading the country, the president was guilty of “overreach”:
Obama was a man on a mission in 2008. But he has allowed his agenda to obscure his capacity to see where most Americans were and what they wanted.
First, he was convinced that the country was so badly served by his Republican predecessor that most Americans understood the need for sweeping change and were prepared to support it. Second, he misread his crisis: the recession. . . .
Obama may have had no choice but to introduce a large stimulus bill to stop the economic bleeding, but healthcare reform (and the way it was done) represented an overreach and stressed a political system that was already dysfunctional.
Read the whole thing. And I say that not because I agree entirely with Miller’s perspective, but he does offer a thoughtful non-conservative critique of the president, a lover’s lament if you will.
*Interesting how things change: I, a blogger based in Los Angeles, who once subscribed to the LA Times, learn about an Op-Ed in that paper from a blogger based in Knoxville, Tennessee.
I would submit that it started before the stimulus. If you recall the Dems were in charge of congress for the last two years of the Bush Administration. They purposely held over the final budget for fiscal year 2009 until AFTER Obama’s inauguration. The continuing resolution was signed by Bush but only reluctantly. They then cooked the books for many years to come by increasing the overall budget numbers for all of the pet constituencies in the government in the final Reconciliation bill Obama signed just after his taking the oath. Instead of an increase for inflation and population increases they added increases of 20% to 30% and more. They THEN added to those numbers in the budget when determining each successive year. You look at the increases in the deficit over the last few years and a large chunk of the problem can be traced directly to the dems deliberately and systematically baking the cake with hugely inflated numbers.
Given the rules that govern future budget calculations the numbers will be purposely enlarged unless another congress establishes a lower starting baseline. But given the screams of outrage that will occur for gutting the federal budget I don’t hold out much hope for removing these phony budget numbers.
I wonder what the rate of exchange will be in the coming years for current US dollars and those old confederate dollars up in the attic?
The left has always been composed of discordant groups of people involved in “causes” (women’s rights. minority rights, separation of church and state, etc.) . I have always believed that that their only source of unity came from an external enemy, and without that, they eat their own. Just as the Iranian mullahs created “The Great Satan” in the late 1970s and the Nazis demonized the Jews as the “source” of Germany’s problems in the 1930s, the left demonized George W. Bush; hatred of W was the only thing these disparate causes had in common. For that reason they still try to keep his spectre alive, but 18 month into the Obama administration it just doesn’t work .
*Obama care
*AZ immigration law
*Ground Zero Mosque
*Unemployment
*porkulus
*oil drilling ban
*raising taxes in January
*country on the wrong track
Obama is on the wrong side of all these issues and 60-70% of the American people are on the other side.
So whether Obama is out of touch really isn’t in question anymore.
Porkulus was the first overreach; however, ObamaCare w/control over student loans is the straw that broke the camel’s back though. Obama & the Obama Democrats gave America the middle finger to force the legislation through, despite the blatant, vocal opposition to the bill. President Obama believed his presidency would be destroyed if not for ObamaCare’s passage. Yet ObamaCare will destroy Obama anyway & any other Obama Democrat who voted for the monstrosity. In other words, the Democrats have essentially destroyed their own party for promises of more power. The Democrats will pay for years to come for this blatant betrayal as the Obama Democrats are just learning on the campaign trail.
I knew Obama was a con-man when I first starting watching him campaign. He would often rail against businesses, and being a business owner and knowing how much risk, investment and difficulty business owners endure, I knew he was dishonest in his portrail of members of my community.
His worst act, not based on a collective perception of the electorate, but in regards to how I view him, occured when he scrapped the DC school voucher program while sending his kids to private schools – totally unbelievable and a total lack of respect for so many kids futures who were benefit from the program. The private schools were better educating the students and doing so at half the price, yet he scrapped the voucher program and forced the kids to go to failing public schools. I am still shocked by such a decision to this day.
Howard Dean says:
When Howard Dean begins sounding like a voice of reason, you know things are bad for the Dramacrats.
Don’t worry: Obama will win re-election in 2012.
Four More Years, Baby! Happy Days!
Oh, Steve….sighing. You are out of touch as well with mainstream Americans. If the only people you talk to are as isolated as you are, there’s no reasoning with you. Americans are no longer confident about the future under Obama.
@Mary
I know it’s hard, but sometimes you just have to let the baby cry himself to sleep.
Ignore him.
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There are 4 political parties in this country:
The Religious Right (Palin, Beck, ILC, NDT)
Moderate Republicans (McCain, Snowe, Brown MA)
Moderate Democrats (Nelson NE, Webb, Bayh, HILLARY!!!)
The Loony Left (Kerry, Gore, Pelosi, OBAMA!!!)
I am a Democrat who hates the Loony Left takeover of my party. I am a conservative who takes his lead from Catholic Social Teaching which is pro-life, pro-worker, pro-outsider, etc. I liked it when most Catholics were Democrats and not interested in the liberal takeover of government, but instead saw government as a benevolent buffer between management and the worker, the rich and the poor.
That’s the point Obama missed. He’s not a Democrat, he’s a loony leftist who was elected by a lot of well-meaning Democrats who felt it was time for a black President. They were expecting Bill Cosby and got Malcolm X.
I resent Obama forcing me to vote for moderate Republicans when, in my heart, I’m an old-style Democrat. I want my party back.
Comment by Ashpenaz:
I resent Obama forcing me to vote for moderate Republicans when, in my heart, I’m an old-style Democrat. I want my party back.
Ashpenaz, I have been a registered Democrat for over 30 years and I will never vote for a Democrat again. I’ve never been so embarrassed about this party as I have been over the past eighteen months. Sad.
Ashpenaz,
How do you place either Beck or Palin on the “Religious Right?” (ILC and NDT are not either, but neither are they national models for left wing-nut dart boards.)
“Religious Right” could mean conservatives who are religious. But the general term is usually applied to social conservatives who draw their views from scripture and often do not vote because no candidate fits their idea of a moral leader. There is much debate as to how many people fit this category and, consequently, what their electoral clout amounts to.
Leftists often use “religious right” as a snarky label to infer that these people are morons who believe all manner of Genesis clap trap and want to repress all of society into a sort of Puritan theocracy.
You have thoroughly exposed the foundational values of the religion you have created for your needs and comfort, so I guess I would place you as a typical leftist brick thrower in your use of the term “religious right.”
Where am I wrong?
Ashpenaz longs for the days of yore when there was a battle between the worker and tyrannical bosses and gallant unions and parish priests did battle on behalf of the little guy.
Sorry, but that day is long past. What happened was that the captains of industry discovered they could find labor outside of the United States where people were glad to have any work at all. The multi-national corporation was born and now all production has fled to the third world. It is still far cheaper to load container ships and drive the goods in from half way around the world than it is to deal with unions and the United States government.
The unions and the priests “won” and theirs was a Pyrrhic victory: like most saprophytes, they did not stop until they killed the host. So, now we have fewer and fewer industries in the United States. Robots do a great job and do not call in sick or have to be treated for exposure to dangerous conditions.
So there are fewer jobs for skilled labor and a dearth of jobs for people who use their backs and don’t need much in the way of brains.
Ashpenaz would like to keep the incredible retirement benefits and all the goodies the unions squeezed out of the corporations while going back to the days when people could find jobs sweeping up at the typewriter factory.
My home town had 20,000 people in the 1950’s and six major manufacturing plants. Now there are no manufacturing plants, 18,000 people and high unemployment. The greasy spoon diners only need so many kitchen workers and wait staff.
Ashpenaz,
Gesundheit!
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What’ya say; we keep the Mexicans, and deport the Liberals!
At least the Mexicans like the place.
While it may be true that a small minority of Mexicans are criminals, a clear majority of American Liberals are idiots! It’s a hell-uv-a bargain, i say!
————
‘Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the oil, and sometimes the squeaky wheel gets replaced.’
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Someone should be able to answer this for me.
When it comes to the stimulus, what would have constituted “half-a-loaf”? I do actually mean this seriously, as I recall 100% Republican opposition to it and I fail to see anything Obama could have done short of killing all of the spending and making the whole thing yet another round of tax cuts. Which is not “half-a-loaf”, it’s the whole damn kitchen!
Also, Ashpenaz. LOL at McCain as a ‘moderate Republican’. Maybe a few years back, but now? John “The Original Maverick who Never Considered Himself a Maverick” McCain? Who opposed his own immigration reform plan? I’ve come to see him as a shameless opportunist, which makes him absolute scum in my eyes.
But also, Hillary as a moderate Democrat but Obama as loony left? The two were so similar in the 2008 election campaign that I didn’t really care which won. You think she’d be different on healthcare? Her 2007 proposal was for an individual mandate, similar to the Massachusetts plan, and damn near identical to ‘Obamacare’. The stimulus? She was proposing the idea as far back as January 2008. Abortion? In 2006, NARAL Pro-Choice America gave Hilary Clinton a 100% pro-choice voting record from 2002-2006.
Did you get a bit over-excited with that last post?
For information about Hillary as a moderate, I refer to our fellow blog, Hillbuzz:
http://hillbuzz.org/
Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, George Bush, and yes, Ann Coulter, all build their political foundation from their conservative religion. There might be a better term than Religious Right–Pseudo-Conservative Nutcases doesn’t have the alliterative ring of Loony Left.
We’ve had George Bush, a Pseudo-Conservative Nutcase, and now Obama, a Left-wing Loon. We need a moderate from either party. Someone we can all like at least a little bit. If not Hillary, maybe someone like Tim Pawlenty.
Beck, Palin, Bush and Coulter try to live their Judeo-Christian ethic and that is the foundation for how they conduct themselves in the political arena.
However, Aspenaz has something else entirely in his alleged mind. I guess he is stuck in the belief that there is a vast right-wing fundamentalist Christian army of Republican voters.
The simple fact is that those who value the Judeo-Christian ethic are not drawn to too many social justice, collective redemption, moral relativist professional politicians.
“from their conservative religion.
“Their” conservative religion, being Christianity, which is parcticed by about 3/4 of the country. Got it.
Serenity,
‘Half a loaf’ would have been to, instead of dumping money into untraceable, questionably effective ‘programs’ it would have been to extend tax cuts and more tax cuts, while focusing any government spending on border security and infrastructure repair. Those things enumerated in the constitution.
IIRC, some conservatives were floating the idea of a six-month payroll tax holiday in lieu of the Obamacrat Spendulus. Think of it, instead of pouring money down the rapacious maw of the public employee unions with a net negative economic impact (some economists estimate that theSpendulus produced $1 of economic activity for every $1.40 spent), the conservative plan would have boosted take-home pay across the economic spectrum; and would have cost less deficit spending than the Spendulus.