In his book, The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future, Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, contended, as his subtitle suggests, that the essential argument, perhaps the defining one, in American politics today, is between those who favor an ever-more intrusive government, regulating our economy and those who want an ever more vigorous private sector, trusting to individual initiative to build our country.

In the 2008 campaign — and still today — Barack Obama essentially punted on the question.  On the one hand, he promised a government solution to our health care woes.  On the other, he faulted the (then-)incumbent administration for its profligacy.   We’ve “been living beyond our means,” he said in the third debate, “and we’re going to have to make some adjustments.”  Yet, as president he has refused to make any, refused to offer that “net spending cut” he had been proposing “throughout this campaign”.

Simply put, he did not, in the campaign, clearly make the case for the ever bigger government he has offered since taking office in January 2009.  Indeed, in 2008, he made clear he wasn’t going to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000:

Back in August, Obama blamed the policies he “inherited from his predecessor’s administration for the soaring debt“, namely, “two wars . . .  tax cuts” and “a prescription drug program . . . we didn’t pay for”.  And despite all these things W didn’t pay for, Obama pushed through an $800 billion recovery plan and increased spending without relenting on his promise not to raise taxes on those, to borrow an expression currently in vogue because of a movement he supported, in the 99%.

In short, he gave us more spending without paying for it.

By holding firm to this tax pledge, Obama is effectively asking Americans to support a bigger government that the proverbial 1% will pay for.  No wonder the “Democrats’ tax-hike obsession killed the SuperCommittee.”  This obsession of taxing the rich is all they have.

Obama and his Democrats are unwilling to make the case to the American people for big government, unwilling to ask them to shoulder the burden of the higher cost of all the goodies they’re promising. (more…)

If I had access to Lexis/Nexis, I would love to do a search for how the media covered Barack Obama four years ago as he began his surge in polls (of candidates running for the Democratic presidential nomination”. As he emerged as the leading “non-Hillary” candidate, did scrutiny of his record increase?

When Michele Bachmann surged in Iowa polls, when Rick Perry entered the presidential contest, when Herman Cain won the Florida straw poll, they were all subject to greater media scrutiny. Now as Allysia Finley reports in this morning’s WSJ.com’s Political Diary (available by subscription), former Speaker Newt Gingrich is now getting the once (again)-over:

Now that Mr. Gingrich is rising in the polls, these issues [concerns about his record] are likely to come back to haunt him. We’re also likely to learn more about his marital problems, ethics violations and lucrative work as a consultant for Fannie Mae. Mr. Gingrich has hitherto gotten a pass on these issues because of his irrelevancy. Now that he’s getting more traction, he should prepare for heavier fire.

Why is it that when Democrats get more traction, they receive media adulation, yet Republicans need prepare for “heavier fire”?

Jim Treacher picks up a detail in the Politico report on Herman Cain, “The story has four credited reporters, but the lead is Jonathan Martin.”  (Via Instapundit.)

Four credited reporters?

Four credited reporters and they couldn’t provide specifics about the allegations?  It takes the conservative media to do that.

Lead article in New Republic’s daily e-mail: Yes, the GOP Just Might Nominate a Candidate Patently Unqualified to Be President.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  To a post I hacked out in a minute or so because a witty rejoinder popped into my head when I read the headline, darkeyedresolve offers a most thoughtful bit of commentary:

I just see the standards continuing to slip as time goes on, and Obama now gives both sides an excuse to continue the trend.

Because, before someone points out how bad he has been, supporters of whoever can still say you don’t need experience to win the national election. So we will get more people who sound good and less people who have a good resume.

Indeed.

Perhaps, someone else has noticed this, but given that I haven’t been following the news as closely as is my wont in recent days I missed that commentary.

We all know how anger and frustration are often the flip side of euphoria and enthusiasm.  We are excited about a person or a project, but when we find that said individual or said endeavor doesn’t meet our expectations, what was once excitement transforms itself into rage.

So, I’ve been wondering if this is happening with some of the young folk “occupying” various public spaces in large cities across the country.  Many are understandably frustrated in this difficult economy, unable to find gainful employment, anxious about their future.  I dare say some of these individuals had similar fears three or four short years ago, but used the presidential campaign that year to translate their anxiety into action, working hard for the man they thought would transform this nation, a man who would create opportunities merely by taking the oath of office.

When his administration didn’t bring the change they had hoped for, they found their excitement turning to anger, but aren’t directing it at one-time object of their admiration.  They turned it instead on one of his preferred targets.

With Bruce’s candidate (but not mine) for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination saying “Sunday that he should not have stayed silent after the audience at a GOP debate booed a gay soldier serving in Iraq“, the question remains should we fault the candidates for remaining silent when a boor in the audience booed just after a gay soldier asked the candidates a question on the repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell (DADT).

As Herman Cain himself noted, “it wasn’t immediately clear . . . what had drawn the audience’s scorn, adding, ‘I happen to think that maybe they were booing the whole “don’t ask, don’t tell“ repeal more so than booing that soldier.’”

From the candidate’s response, it seems that he had heard the booing, suggesting that his rival for the GOP nomination, Rick Santorum, was not speaking honestly when he said he had not heard the boos.

It is a very ugly thing to boo a member of our armed forces, whether he be gay or straight.  That said, audience members do not speak for the candidates.

“Had the candidates spoken out,” I wrote in an update to a previous post, “they would have shown themselves to be of a more noble sort.  But, absence of nobility does not necessarily mean smallness [as the president suggests it does].”

Would we even be having this discussion if leftist radicals booed a service member at a Democratic forum and none of the politicians there failed to chastise them?

So, let me throw this out to you, if Santorum had heard the boos, was he duty bound to criticize them?  Indeed, is any candidate duty-bound to denounce hateful rhetoric spoken (or rude actions undertaken) by an audience member at a rally where he speaks?

FROM THE COMMENTS:  ILoveCapitalism offers:  ”Since Santorum was asked a question by a soldier, Santorum should have begun by thanking him for his service. I think we can agree on that.”  Yes, we can agree on that.

On Friday, I, like many right-of-center bloggers, posted this video and expect to post it again (as I do today for a great variety of reasons:

Some see this as showing the president’s hypocrisy on debt, lambasting his predecessor for increasing government spending without paying for it, yet when increasing it at a far more rapid pace when he took office. And recall those times he promised a “net spending cut,” At 0:54 below, he says that when elected, he’ll cut more than he’ll spend:

If anything, the Democrat had a mandate to cut spending not build upon the Bush spending increases.

(And let’s not forget this one.)

NB:  Tweaked title to make my point clearer.

A number of conservative and libertarian bloggers have linked this video of then-candidate Barack Obama calling it “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic” for his predecessor to add $4 trillion to the national debt:

One of those bloggers, Ed Morrissey, quipped that the Democratic candidate “questioned Bush’s patriotism for the same policies that Obama accelerated as President himself“.  The 2010 CPAC blogger of the year reminds us that a phrase Obama used in the clip, “Credit card from the Bank of China”, was one of his favorites “during the campaign.  A quick search shows that he used it in an April 2008 debate, this June 2008 appearance, and others as well, usually tying it to tax cuts.”

This clip (which I daresay won’t be played that often on any of the major networks during the 2012 campaign) reminds us how the Democrat co-opted certain conservative constituencies in the 2008 campaign, casting himself as an opponent of the big-spending George W. Bush.  He helped pad his margin of victory with the votes of Republican-leaning independents who read such rhetoric as a commitment to cutting the budget.

He won’t be winning their votes back in the upcoming contest.

In the past few weeks, Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media have begun to question their assumption that Barack Obama, this most “remarkable man” would end the acrimonious politics which defined the last years of the previous century and the first years of the current one.  Excavating and building, in his words, “upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans“, he would craft a “new kind of politics.”

Maybe some are finally beginning to realize that the divine image they had of the Chicago Democrat (like the demonic one they had of his predecessor) was based not on his actual accomplishments, but their own eager imagination.  If this guy were such an agent of change, why hadn’t he done anything to reform the notorious political machine in his Illinois hometown?

In his second book, Barack Obama acknowledged that he served “as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”  And project they did.  So, bewitched were they by his rhetoric, that they gave short shrift to his record as Drew Westen acknowledged in Sunday’s New York Times:

Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography . . . .

Via Powerline.

If he does indeed have those qualities about which lefties once waxed eloquent, he has the chance now to show them.  Instead of engaging in pointed partisan attacks on his opponents and fixing his sights on next year’s presidential contest, he should focus on the task at hand, working to effect real reform and craft a budget compromise that can pass a Republican House and Democratic Senate. (more…)

Barely had Barack Obama settled into his job as a United States Senator in 2005 than he began setting his sights on the White House.  He spent the second half of his Senate tenure running for the presidency.

He didn’t seem all that engaged in his legislative duties.  And now he doesn’t seem all that engaged in his executive ones.  He yielded to his fellow partisans in Congress to draft the key legislation of his term and preferred giving speeches to offering solutions.  Where his predecessor titled his memoir Decision Points, he could call his Decision Punts.

Responding to Drew Westen New York Times essay where that psychology professor acknowledged Obama’s absence of accomplishment prior to his election to the White House, John Hinderaker contends that

. . . there is only one context in which Obama has ever displayed passion–that is, when he was running for political office. When Democrats say, Where is the Obama we voted for and thought we knew? they are referring to Obama the candidate. It is not hard to see why Obama is passionate about his political campaigns, when he is seemingly so indifferent to almost everything else: they are about him.

Note that when he traveled to Europe in the midst of his bid for the White House in the summer of 2008, he did what no previous major party had done, headlined a “campaign rally” on foreign soil.

Seems Barack Obama would rather run for president than be president.

Yesterday, Jim Geraghty reprinted account that Mike Allen had included in his newsletter from Politico about a meeting of hedge-fund billionaires in New York where “venture capitalist Ken Langone . . . implored New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to reconsider and seek the GOP presidential nomination.”  Several in the audience indicated that they were Republican show voted for Obama because they “couldn’t live with Sarah Palin”:

Many said they were severely disappointed in the president. The biggest complaint was what several called “class warfare.” They said they didn’t understand what they had done to deserve that: If you want to have a conversation about taxation, have a conversation. But a president shouldn’t attack his constituents — he’s not the president of some people, he’s president of all the people. Someone mentioned Huey Long populism.

Well, does seem the media did their job, destroying the reputation of Mrs. Palin while ignoring the background of Mr. Obama, leading Geraghty to comment:

But not all of us are shocked and stunned about Obama’s class warfare and his demonization of you and the sense that he doesn’t think of himself as your president too. Some of us spent two years telling anyone who would listen that he was a lot more liberal than his bland, blank-slate rhetoric suggested. And was all of this worth it because you “couldn’t live” with Sarah Palin? Really?

Emphasis added.  We had news media rifling through Mrs. Palin’s garbage, yet uninterested in checking out Mr. Obama’s story, so much did they swoon over his narrative.  And now, bit by bit, we’re learning not just how far left he’s always been, but also how he’s misrepresented his own background.

Many in our mainstream media have taken Barack Obama’s word as gospel.  And when it comes to subjecting him to the same sort of scrutiny to which they subject Republicans, particularly Republican women, well, they’ve just taken a pass.

Yesterday, while doing cardio at my gym, I received yet another lesson in the bias of CNN.  When I looked up from my book, I found Wolf Blitzer breathlessly reporting on the latest controversy swirling around Michelle Bachmann’s campaign.

Now, let me make clear (yet again) that I have some serious concerns about Mrs. Bachmann and do not back her bid for the Republican presidential nomination. I do, to be sure, appreciate her commitment to small government ideals and her ability to articulate her convictions.

Yet, as I watched Blitzer detail the allegations against her husband’s “Christian counseling business”, that, as per my previous post, allegedly  ”uses a controversial therapy that encourages homosexual patients to change their sexual orientation“, I wondered at the media obsession with this charismatic politician.  At this point in the 2008 election cycle, indeed at any point in that cycle, did Mr. Blitzer — or anyone at CNN for that matter — engage in such critical scrutiny of then-Senator Barack Obama, then a candidate for the Democratic nomination?

The CNN report was not about Mrs. Bachmann’s activities, but her husband’s.

Now, as I recall, Mr. Obama did succeed in securing an earmark (i.e., money from the federal government) for the hospital where his wife worked and subsequently received a substantial raise.  There appeared to be a pretty clear connection between his wife’s professional advancement and his official duties.

This is not to say that this information about Mr. Bachmann is irrelevant.  It is indeed relevant.  And it relates to one (of the many) concerns I have about his wife’s bid for the White House.  But, this is simply to point out the bias of CNN, more interested in allegations against the husband of a Republican presidential candidate than in evidence of a Democratic presidential candidate using federal money to help his wife. (more…)

Saturday, at a Democratic fundraiser in Boston, the president said:

People out there are still hurting very badly, and they are still scared. And so part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. . . .  And the country is scared, and they have good reason to be.

Um, Mr. President, don’t you remember the polls in 2008 just prior to the market meltdown?  Your opponent John McCain enjoyed a small, but  steady lead in the presidential contest.  And then AIG and Lehman Brothers went belly-up.  We heard warnings of domino effect, of more financial institutions collapsing with repercussions across the economy, leading to another Great Depression.

People panicked.  They were worried about their own financial future and, um, what’s the word, oh, yes, they were scared.  And you, the Democratic standard bearer, took it all in stride, appearing calm, a man who could keep a steady hand on the tiller of state.  The polls shifted in your favor.  Seems a little fear helped rally support for the ostensible outsider, the candidate of the party out of power.

People are a lot less scared now than they were then.  Indeed, Roger Simon says voter “aren’t scared.  They are angry“:

Mad as Hell, in fact.   They are angry at his policies and the way those policies have been rammed down their throats –and they have a right to be.  That’s why citizens — who have never done anything like that before — have organized all over the country and are on the brink of destroying his party at the ballot box.

Roger’s right.  This isn’t about fear, but about anger.  As one candidate put it, “They heard us, and yet they ignored us“.  The governing class just isn’t listening to the governed.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if White House senior advisor David Axelrod (much like his fellow Democrat James Carville) is just a one-trick pony, having like filmmaker Michael Cimino (or the Wachowski brothers) having one great idea and being able to present it in the right package at the right time.  But, never able to repeat that success.

Michael Cimino, as you may know, directed the 1978 film The Deer Hunter, one of the great movies of the 1970s, a flick which took home five Oscars.  Two years later, he would be responsible for Heaven’s Gate, one of Hollywood’s most celebrated flops.

Will David Axelrod have a similar record?

He scripted (and helped direct) a brilliant campaign two years ago, presenting his candidate as healer who would rise about partisan differences and end the polarized politics that had defined the nation for the preceding twenty years.  People wanted change and Axelrod’s man promised it.

Yet, now when that man hasn’t lived up to the hype, Axelrod, the Washington Examiner‘s editors write, has been “charged with finding a strategy to change the focus of the 2010 election to something, anything, other than the chief executive’s failed record on taxes, spending and the economy.”  And he hasn’t been succeeding.

This time ’round, he can’t seem to articulate a coherent campaign message that resonates this year as “Hope” and “Change” did two years ago.  His story lacks a theme and he’s looking for a demon to vilify.

Hopeandchange, folks…. Hopeandchange.

This is the whole that Obama Democrats’ One Trillion Stimulus has dug for our nation and our future generations. Not even a short-term gain for the pain. Just pain all around. Pathetic.

How’s is this NOT a Depression, again? Remind me, please.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Just caught this bumpersticker, thought it might be a new slogan for the Democrats, but if you look in the right side, you can see that it was from ’0[something].  Obviously not for the ’12 campaign.  Must have been an Obama campaign slogan from another part of the country.

Or maybe the car owner was trying to peel off the ’08 as he’s gearing up for ’12?

With the appointment of Carte Goodwin to the seat of the late Robert Byrd, Senate Democrats are set to break the Republican filibuster against Democratic attempts to extend unemployment benefits without adhering to President Obama’s campaign pledge to “pay for his new spending plans with even bigger spending cuts.“

That imminent appointment didn’t stop the president yesterday from attacking Republicans:

Obama launched a fresh salvo Monday, demanding the Senate act on the legislation — after a vote already had been scheduled — and criticizing Republicans for the holdup.

“The same people who didn’t have any problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans are now saying we shouldn’t offer relief to middle-class Americans,” Obama said.

Republicans say they do favor the benefits but insist they be paid for with spending cuts elsewhere in the government’s $3.7 trillion budget. After initially feeling heat this winter when a lone GOP senator, Jim Bunning of Kentucky, briefly blocked a benefits extension in February, the GOP has grown increasingly comfortable opposing the legislation.

So ready is this post-partisan politician to attack Republicans that he misrepresents their record.  They’re not saying the government shouldn’t provide relief, only that that relief should be paid for with spending cuts — almost exactly what he said in his campaign infomercial at the close of the 2008 presidential contest.

In short, the Republican filibuster is an attempt to hold the Democrat to his campaign promises.

Amazing that he has resorted to misrepresenting the Republican position in order to attack.  Wonder why that is.

“In his half-hour infomercial” the Wednesday before the 2008 election, the Washington Post reported, candidate Barack Obama “repeated earlier assurances that he had ‘offered spending cuts’ to pay for every cent of the post-election bonanza that he plans to shower on his fellow Americans.”  (Emphasis added.)  Indeed, in the third debate that fall, pointing out ”that we’ve been living beyond our means and we’re going to have to make some adjustments” he told what he’d been doing ”throughout this campaign”: he had proposed “a net spending cut.”

So, if he favored a net spending cut throughout the campaign, why would he be so upset if Republicans opposed en masse a post-election spending bonanza that didn’t offer any compensatory spending cuts as Obama promised in his infomercial:

Three days after he decried the lack of civility in American politics, President Obama is quoted in a new book about his presidency referring to the Tea Party movement using a derogatory term with sexual connotations.

In Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” President Obama is quoted in an November 30, 2009, interview saying that the unanimous vote of House Republicans vote against the stimulus bills “set the tenor for the whole year … That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

So, we see two things here about Obama.  He’s incredulous that his political adversaries would act in the spirit of his campaign rhetoric.  And that he responds to a grassroots political movement based on principles identical to that rhetoric.

Guess he just assumed those ideas would stop resonating once he won election.

A lot of liberals, including at least one of our critics, are making much of the clip embedded below where President Obama supposedly slaps down the man he defeated in the 2008 presidential election for reminding him of a promise he made on his road to victory:

So, is the president then saying that since the campaign is over, his promises then were only intended to win votes–and not to define how he would govern once elected?

(Clip via Legal Insurrection.)

RING, RING.

ME: Hello?

INTRUDER BY PHONE: “Hi, first I want to thank you for your previous contributions to Senator John McCain and for being such a strong supporter.”

ME:  HAHAHAHA.  Um, what?  I am NOT a supporter.

IBP: Oh, I sense frustrations, may I ask why you…

ME: IMMIGRATION!  DUH!

IBP:  Well, you will be happy to know that Senator McCain is working to…

ME:  DON’T CALL ME AGAIN.

CLICK.