On Saturday, Michael Barone linked a Weekly Standard piece by Yuval Levin which he described as a “must read”, adding that “the Romney campaign should definitely read the whole thing, and act on it.” Having read the lengthy essay, I agree.

Yuval offers a sound means for Romney to approach the issues facing the country in the current campaign and to advocate for real reform (some might call it to put forward his hopes for change).

And Levin offers a sharp critique of the incumbent’s sustained support for Washington’s sclerotic status quo:

His express objectives are to protect our existing entitlement system from structural reforms, to increase the tax burden on investment and employment, to further empower and liberate regulators, and to bring more of our economy into the public sector. His economic policy is unimaginative in the extreme—combining early-20th-century social democratic theory with mid-20th-century pork barrel politics. His answer to the government’s fiscal woes is to squeeze the military and the taxpayer to buy a few more years of denial. In every respect, he stands for stagnation and stasis, for defensive consolidation rather than aggressive growth. He thinks the best we can do is to manage decline.

Simply put, President Obama has no interest in a new way of thinking about America’s prospects, and therefore essentially nothing to offer to assuage the public’s growing anxiety. All he can do is try to direct that anxiety away from himself. He is at best irrelevant, at worst a great impediment, to the effort to keep America growing in the new economic order we are entering.

Like Barone, I urge you to read the whole thing.

Interesting how today, both gay conservatives and leftists see through President Obama’s pander yesterday on gay marriage, coming as it did following a week when the Democrats was facing questions for his stand on gay marriage.

The president may claim that Vice President Biden’s recent comments on gay marriage forced the timing of the announcement, but the real question is why he didn’t announce his change of heart when it could have made a difference, especially given, as Ed Morrissey reports that, in his interview yesterday, Obama claimed “he’d made up his mind to change his position some time ago“:

And for all of those who cheered this flip-flop, here’s a question: wouldn’t it have been more effective in North Carolina had Obama made this announcement before Amendment One went to the polls?  According to Obama himself, he’d already changed position on same-sex marriage.  An announcement last week or the week before that, with a personal plea to African-American voters, might have made a difference.  Instead, Obama hid, the White House fibbed, and Amendment One won easily in a state that Obama carried in 2008.  Regardless of whatever else this might be called, leadership isn’t among the terms that come to mind.

Ad the Yahoo! online survey indicates, it does seem most people see through the president’s pandering move, with more than two-thirds of respondents saying they see his policy shift as based on campaign politics.

This may help rally the base and generate some more campaign cash, but could well end up being a net negative for the president, not on the merits of the issue, but on his approach.  Expect more people to realize Obama is just another politician for whom political calculation matters more than principle.

UPDATE:   Seems Obama consulted his political advisors to reach the decision he announced yesterday: (more…)

Yesterday, Ann Althouse, reminding us that his predecessor gave up golf when he was chief executive, wondered as the president’s latest effort to appear cool:

Does a slow jam with Jimmy Fallon send the wrong message? Or do we not think about the mom whose son may have recently died anymore? (Obama has no Cindy Sheehan dogging hounding him bothering him… at least not that we see in the news.)

Why is Obama immune from the criticism that normally befalls a President? Back in 2008, running for President, Obama pushed back the press one time with “Why is it that I can’t just enjoy my waffle?”

It’s like that was a really hard question — why is it that he can’t just enjoy his waffle… and his multiple vacations and his golf and his rock concerts in the White House and his slow jam with Jimmy Fallon?

The answer is: Because you have a job. You applied for it. We hired you. Make us believe you’re doing it.

Via Instapundit.  Seems he’s more interested in the perks of office than its responsibilities.

It’s not just that we’re still at war, it’s also that the nation has big problems, many exacerbated by the president’s policies in his first three years in office.  Our debt is skyrocketing, entitlements face insolvency and the president has neither pushed his fellow partisans in the Senate to vote on his budget nor put forward solutions to reform Social Security or Medicare.

Perhaps, his attempt to be “cool” is part of his campaign strategy.  In Commentary, Peter Wehner observed that:

Given his inability and unwillingness to run on his record, the Obama strategy appears to rest on achieving three things: (1) energizing the turnout of his base (minorities, young voters and liberals); (more…)

Earlier today, Jim Hoft linked this telling excerpt from the president’s recent Rolling Stone interview:

Frankly, I know that there are good, decent Republicans on Capitol Hill who, in a different environment, would welcome the capacity to work with me. But right now, in an atmosphere in which folks like Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist are defining what it means to be a true conservative, they are lying low. My hope is that after this next election, they’ll feel a little more liberated to go out and say, “Let’s redirect the Republican Party back to those traditions in which a Dwight Eisenhower can build an interstate highway system.”

Can you recall Mr. Obama’s immediate predecessor ever attacking his liberal critics by name, particularly, say, the folks at Moveon.org when they actively worked to frustrate and eventually succeeded at blocking the then-president’s efforts to reform Social Security?

(To name but one effort when liberal group’s worked to block that Republican’s agenda, even before the election of  a Democratic Congress in 2006.)

* (more…)

As the president focuses on his campaign for reelection, he seems less focused on doing his job than he is on attacking his partisan adversaries.  He hasn’t put forward plans to address the nation’s pressing fiscal problems, the burgeoning federal debt and the coming insolvency of entitlements.

And he hasn’t really specified what he plans to do in his second term.  In a post on this topic four months ago, I included a “tidbit Ed Morrissey pulled out of the [then-]recent CBSNews poll“:

Even while Obama keeps fanning the flames of class warfare, no one is sure what Obama intends to do with a second term anyway.  Two-thirds don’t have a clear idea on his second-term goals (32/66) — and that includes a majority of Democrats (46/52) along with more than two-thirds of independents (29/69).

Now, even a liberal pundit is taking notice.  Jeffrey Toobin who, more often than note, repeats the conventional wisdom of Beltway insiders wonders what Obama has planned for his second term:

The President and his campaign have been strikingly quiet about plans for a second term. As a rule, all incumbents, of whatever office, run for reëlection on their records rather than on their future promises, but Obama appears to have taken the strategy to an extreme.

The showpiece (to date) of the Obama campaign is “The Road We’ve Traveled,” a seventeen-minute video directed by Davis Guggenheim. It’s an entirely backward-looking production, featuring the President’s efforts to extricate the country from the financial crash, the bailout of automobile manufacturers, and the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Although Toobin once questioned Michael Barone’s sanity, his commentary on the campaign film seems almost a summary of the “review” Barone offered last month, its visuals “oddly antique for a president who promised hope and change.”

Toobin does note that the president has offered one “promise for the future [,] his embrace of the “Buffett rule” for tax rates—to ensure that millionaires pay a greater percentage of their income than their secretaries.”

It would be nice if the president could offer more than just a plan to increase taxes.  It would also be nice if more pundits than just Mr. Toobin called the president out for his paucity of ideas.  And perhaps as well for attacking his rivals instead of offering solutions.

On Monday at the Washington Examiner, Charlie Spiering provided a clip from then-Senator Barack Obama’s speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination not quite four years ago:

In 2008, he derided the very strategy he would adopt four years later. proclaiming that

. . . if you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone that people should run from. You make a big election about small things. And you know what it’s worked before — because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn’t work, all its promises seem empty.

Democrats declaring a Republican “war on women” because they disagree with the GOP’s opposition to federal health care mandates sounds like an attempt to paint the opposition as individuals people should run from. That kind of distortion feeds into the cynicism we all have about government.

Now the president is busy scaring voters about the Ryan budget without presenting a one capable of securing a single Democratic vote in the House (indeed without insisting the Democratic Senate pass a budget).  He may be scaring voters about Republican reforms, but still has not put forward a plan to address our growing federal debt or the coming insolvency of Medicare and Social Security.

“As president,” Peter Wehner writes, “Obama has not only discarded” the commitment he made in 2008 to “rediscover our bonds to each other and get out of this constant, petty bickering that’s come to characterize our politics”,

. . . he has turned it on its head. Republicans aren’t simply people with whom he has philosophical disagreements; they are members of the “Flat Earth Society” and have embraced a budget that demonstrates their “Social Darwinism.” (more…)

Earlier today, Jim Geraghty linked a video in which the Republican National Committee (RNC) contrasted the Obama as candidate in 2008 against his rhetoric in office today:

Don’t think someone who compares those who oppose his policies to Social Darwinists or members of the Flat Earth Society can run as a post-partisan healer. Linking the same video, Ed Morrissey offers this sbout the incumbent’s reelection strategy:

This is not a campaign that relishes running on the so-called accomplishments of the incumbent; almost 70% of voters wanted the Supreme Court to partially or completely overturn his signature legislation, and the economic stagnation of the last three years means he can’t run on pocketbook issues. The only way he can win is if the election becomes another referendum on George W. Bush, which is exactly the message that Obama’s ads try to send.

No wonder he and his supporters have been spending so much time bashing the man who has long since retired to Texas–and who has largely absented himself from public life.

NB:  Tweaked the title to make it a question.

Whatever happened to hope and change?

Writing about the president’s speech on Tuesday, Walter Russell Mead found that the president, in attacking the Ryan budget, is defending the status quo:

The Republican budget may or may not be the way forward, and there is doubtless much to criticize within it. Yet Obama’s response hardly advances the debate, reading as it does like a laundry-list of blue dream ideas that have dominated Democratic thinking for decades. Rather than proposing an alternative model for the future to compete with the GOP’s, the President appears content to run on what is essentially a stand pat program: the only thing wrong with the blue social model is that it is underfunded.

. . . .

And he remains a distinctly darker shade of blue than the “New Democrats” of the 1990s for whom reform was more important than shoring up the old ways of life. Yet it remains interesting to see that even President Obama has (particularly on educational issues) been forced by reality in the direction of reform. Beyond the public sector union movement, where all anybody can think about is how to get more funds to shovel into the machine, even the staunchest defenders of the blue social model must these days pay some attention to the need for results.

Via Instapundit.  No wonder Obama in 2012 is “a brand in search of a slogan” (also via Instapundit).  Guess that means that Republicans are now the party of change?  Running on reform alone, Mead writes further, won’t be enough for Republicans to win in November:

His opponents will have to make the contrary cases: that the need for reform is urgent, and that the reforms they have in mind are well thought out, no harsher or rasher than they need to be, and likely to achieve key goals of blue programs (like helping the poor, educating the young, caring for the old and the sick) but in a more sustainable way. (more…)

Mr. President, I observed the presidency of Bill Clinton. I marveled at his ability to co-opt partisan adversaries’ ideas and spin them as his own. Bill Clinton was a political genius. Mr. President, you are no Bill Clinton.

Perhaps the most brilliant aspect of Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign, was the series of TV ads the Democratic National Committee ran in media markets outside the nation’s three big markets tying then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (who would emerge as his Republican opponent) to then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich who already then had high negatives.  The then-president left it to his ad-makers to attack Republicans while he himself offered a much more upbeat message.

It didn’t hurt that the economy was much stronger during his fourth year in the White House than it is at the same point in the term of the next Democrat to have his old job, the current incumbent.

One wonders why Mr. Obama hasn’t followed the tack of his Democratic predecessor, why the incumbent feels it incumbent upon himself to attack.  Peggy Noonan, a conservative pundit once impressed by the Democrat’s charm and optimistic about his ability to unite us, has, on listening to his speeches, shed any illusions she may once have had.  She found his Tuesday speech to be

. . . an unusual and unleavened assault on the Republican Party. (more…)

This past week, I penned two posts on the president’s telling “open mic” comment to Russia’s President on how “he would have ‘more flexibility’ to deal with controversial issues such as missile defense” after the election. As I write this, both posts generated a total of 9 comments.

I wrote one piece on the Travyon Martin/George Zimmerman matter. That post has, so far, generated 80 comments.

Now, to be sure, that story offers a fascinating window into media sensationalism — and has more wrinkles than does the president’s telling comment, but has far less bearing on the state of the union, particularly given the upcoming election and the incumbent’s bid for a second term.

Calling the president’s remarks “a moment of political contempt—for the issues at hand as well as for the demos itself“, Martin Peretz, long-time editor in chief of the left-of-center New Republic, finds the important message to be . . .

. . . that the American people can’t be trusted if the president is honest with them about what he proposes. More bluntly, that the American people are not trusted by their own president. Otherwise the president would tell us the truth about his intentions. And here he is, admitting his distrust of his own people to a leader of a nasty foreign government that seeks to thwart our purposes in the Middle East and elsewhere. President Obama is in cahoots with the Russian regime against America’s very body politic.

Mr. Obama’s revealing comment, and the question of missile defense, and the question of Mr. Obama’s bizarre desire for coziness with Vladimir Putin, is a matter about which our European allies have great concerns.

Hence, we should be constantly reminding our fellow citizens of what the president said when he thought no one was listening. To that end, the folks at American Crossroads have crafted a clever ad:

(more…)

Obama apologists were so quick to trash outgoing Senator Olympia Snowe for reporting that the president didn’t talk to the liberal Republican on a regular basis, worried as they were that if this story got legs, it would further undermine the Democrat’s 2008 campaign rhetoric about his post-partisan potential.

But, these folks are going to have to do a lot of spinning to prevent people from seeing the reality of this most partisan president.  Commenting today on a Republican National Committee video highlighting Obama’s latest bipartisan achievement, getting “every single member of the House of Representatives” to vote “against the president’s $3.6 trillion budget”, Tina Korbe asks:

What meaningful bipartisan achievements does Obama have to his name? Adoring documentarian Davis Guggenheim might fault Republicans for Obama’s inability to arrive at bipartisan solutions to the pressing problems that face the country, but, in the end, it’s the president’s job to lead.

Indeed.  And as to that blame game, maybe the president should have taken advice from the politician who was “trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.“

Citing an article from from New York magazine, November 29, 2009, Jim Geraghty reminds us how after signing the “stimulus,” President Obama turned his attention to overhauling the nation’s health care system rather than focus on the economy, the top issue on America’s minds:

“Barack did the stimulus, and he thought he checked the box and moved on.” Of course, unemployment remained high, and the economy continued to struggle through this year. Obama moved on, of course, to Obamacare, phenomenallyunpopular legislation that may very well be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Read the whole thing.  Seems he was more interested in provided the fundamental changes he sought than in providing the changes for which Americans hoped.

More on this anon.

In a blog post this morning, Jim Geraghty repeated an observation he has made before that the president’s “furious schedule of fundraisers is driven less by a need for campaign cash than by his ego’s need for constant praise and adoration.”

Sometimes, it seems that even the president’s official speeches serve a similar function.  He speaks not so much to defend his policies, but to demonize his political adversaries and, in so doing, elevate himself in the eyes of audiences who really, really hate Republican leaders and conservative ideas.  In a speech today “at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Md., a smug President Barack Obama,” reports Tina Korbe, Obama did just that, smearing “opponents of his energy policies as backward and unscientific in their approach”:

“Now, here’s the sad thing. Lately, we have heard a lot of professional politicians, a lot of the folks who were running for a certain office, who shall go unnamed, they’ve been talking down new sources of energy. They dismiss wind power. They dismiss solar power. They make jokes about biofuels. They were against raising fuel standards. I guess they like gas guzzlers. They think that’s good for our future. We’re trying to move towards the future. They want to be stuck in the past!” Obama exclaimed to cheers from the crowd. “If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they probably must have been founding members of the flat earth society. They would not believe that the world was round!”

Can you imagine George W. Bush leveling those accusations against Democrats?

Korbe points out how the president misrepresents the Republican stance on energy: (more…)

“All told,” writes Devin Dwyer of ABC News, “41 of the 364 expected attendees” at last night’s White House state dinner in honor of British Prime Minister David Cameron “are Obama campaign bundlers, or volunteer fundraisers who give the legal maximum and then gather checks from friends and colleagues who do the same.”

Nor is this, Dwyer adds, “the first time Obama’s campaign donors have been spotted at a White House state dinner.  In October, at least half a dozen attended the evening in honor of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.”

Would be interesting to compare this to the number of Bush campaign bundlers who snagged invitations to state dinners in his administration.  AP reporter Jack Gillum claims that that good man did indeed invite

dozens of his “pioneer” supporters to state dinners, and President Bill Clinton did the same. But Obama previously has criticized Washington’s pay-for-access privileges, and even donors themselves complained early in his presidency that they were kept at arm’s length.

He doesn’t provide an actual number there, but did find that his organization’s review some of the donors at the dinner had “written big checks to Priorities USA Action, a ‘super’ political action committee run by former White House aides.”

(Politico reports that there were “at least 50” bundlers at the dinner:  ”There are 43 invitees, plus seven spouses or partners who are also listed as bundlers, on the dinner list.”.)

Today, reports the Washington Examiner’s Joel Gehrke

Obama held his first meeting with Republican leadership since the debt-ceiling fight last year – but Cantor was not invited. “The group was limited to only the top congressional leaders: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi,” Politico reported today. “That left out House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.”

Emphasis added.  First meeting with Republican congressional leaders in nearly six months?  And here, we hear about how regularly Republicans refuse to work with the president.  How can you work with a guy who won’t sit down and listen to your concerns?

ADDENDUM:  Bear in mind, this is the guy who didn’t bother to call Paul Ryan when that thoughtful Republican put forward some reform proposals.  As Michael Barone reports:

At one point [The New Yorker's Ryan] Lizza does quote Obama writing on a memo, “Have we looked at any of the other GOP recommendations (e.g., Paul Ryan’s) to see if they make any sense?” Another president might have looked at Ryan’s proposals himself, or might even have called him on the phone.

So, when your Democratic friends rush to accuse the Republicans of refusing to work with Obama, ask them, why the Democrat has met so infrequently with Republican leadership.

UPDATE:  In December, Andrew Malcolm reported that “Obama, who cares so much about working constructively with opponents that he didn’t chat with the Senate GOP leader for nearly two years because he didn’t need to and that would take leadership.“

President Obama may repeat his mantra about making “tough choices” in his budgeting decisions, but House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan exposed just how specious that claim is when he questioned the Treasury Secretary about the president’s latest budget.

He just doesn’t his “rhetoric matching the results” (at 0:54 below).

Just watch the whole video; it provides an insight in the utter failure of the administration to make the tough choices necessary to keep the president’s campaign pledge and not “go back to our profligate ways.”

There are three key points to bear in mind about this budget, two that Geithner himself acknowledged, a third related to a question the Treasury Secretary failed to answer:

1. The budget fails to address the long-term solvency of Medicare and Medicaid.  As Geithner himself said, “Even if Congress were to enact this budget we would still be left with–in the outer decades as millions of Americans retire–what are still unsustainable commitments in Medicare and Medicaid.”
2. The administration doesn’t like the Ryan plan, but has no plan of its own to deal with the nation’s long-term debt problem.  Geithner again, “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem. What we do know is we don’t like yours.”
3. “President Obama’s FY 2013 budget does increase federal spending, not only above current levels (from $3.796 trillion in FY 2012 to $5.537 trillion in FY 2021, a 46% increase) but also above the levels approved by current law” (i.e., the August 2011 debt deal).  Geithner could not answer with “Yes” or “No” when asked whether  the budget increased federal spending above those levels set by that deal.

(more…)

Take a gander at the folks Barack Obama consulted before reaching his decision on the contraception mandate:

We know that the President did not act on impulse, that he took his time in making this decision, and that he sought advice from a range of individuals within the Democratic Party. Vice-President Joe Biden and William Daley, who was then Obama’s Chief of Staff, both profess to be Catholic, and they strongly advised against doing anything that would antagonize the Catholic bishops and the laity. Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House and current Democratic minority leader, were also consulted.

Emphasis added.  (Via Powerline Picks.)  He’s President of the United States.  Republicans hold a strong majority in the lower chamber of the legislative branch and he only sought advice from individuals within the Democratic Party?!?!?!

Telling.  Most telling.

Contrast this governing style with something he said early on in the 2008 presidential campaign.  As Jonah Goldberg reports:

. . .during a Nevada Democratic debate, then-senator Obama told the late Tim Russert that, “My greatest strength, I think, is the ability to bring people together from different perspectives to get them to recognize what they have in common and to move people in a different direction.

Seems like the only people who sought to bring together had a Democratic perspective. Now, to be sure, the Democrats consulted offered differing perspectives.  But, one wonders if the Democrat ever consults with Republicans before making a major administrative decision like this one.

RELATED:  The specious notion of Obama’s bipartisanship

By a margin of greater than 2-to-1 in 2008, voters under 30 backed Barack Obama over John McCain. Investors Business Daily offer up the grim statistics:

The unemployment rate among 18-to-24 year olds was 16.3% at the end of last year, compared with 8.8% for the rest of the working-age population. That gap in unemployment rates, the Pew study notes, is “the widest in recorded history.”

Meanwhile, the share of this population that’s managed to find work has fallen to 54.3% — the lowest level since 1948, the first year the government started collecting such data.

And they’re just getting started. Default rates on student loans have climbed. Many twentysomethings have taken unpaid work. Others have returned home to live with their parents.

(H/t Instapundit.)

At least since the 2004 the then-state Senator delivered his paean to national unity at the Democratic National Convention, there have been two Barack Obamas, the inspiring orator aspiring to transcend partisan politics and the bare-knuckled Chicago politician seeking to advance his own partisan interests.

On the one hand, the Democrat claims he’s “trying to break [that] pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.”  On the other, he’s always looking for someone to blame for his failures.  It’s as if George W. Bush were still pulling the political strings and Democrats had not had overwhelming majorities in the 111st Congress–Barack Obama’s first two years in the White House.

Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney blamed Republicans for the increase in demand for food stamps since Obama’s inauguration:

Carney turned Newt Gingrich’s description of President Obama as the “food stamp president” around on Republicans, whom Carney blamed for the increased need for food stamps. ”The economic policies that helped create [the recession],” Carney said about Gingrich, “are the kinds of policies that he advocates to this day.”

Now, he’s blaming the GOP for his decision to reject the Keystone Pipeline:

Obama said he was not acting on the merits of TransCanada Corp.’s plan, but instead was forced to make the decision based on the “arbitrary” deadline mandated by GOP provisions in December’s payroll tax cut extension deal.

Oh, and, one more thing: James Taranto offers some interesting statistics:

In the three-year period CBS ascribes to Obama, the food-stamp rolls have increased by 18 million people, or 6 million a year. In the seven years attributed to Bush, the increase was 10.9 million, or 1.6 million a year. Almost four times as many Americans have gone on food stamps every year during the Obama years than during the Bush years, and the percentages are not increasing as quickly precisely because the numbers are.

I’m pretty sure that’s Bush’s fault.

Can you imagine how the media would have reacted if the immediate past President of the United States told a group of Republican donors that Democrats threatened the “very core of what this country stands for.” Well, at a campaign event two days ago at the Capital Hilton in Washington, D.C., his successor did just that and we don’t hear much squawking:

The very core of what this country stands for is on the line — the basic promise that no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from, this is a place where you could make it if you try. The notion that we’re all in this together, that we look out for one another — that’s at stake in this election. Don’t take my word for it. Watch some of these debates that have been going on up in New Hampshire.

Must be that new kind of politics.  Wonder if his poll numbers would be any better if he spent more time attempting his uplift Americans and less time seeking to malign Republicans.