Last October, I asked What could Obama accomplish in a second term? Two months later, I wonder if he had anything planned should he win reelection.  Even, as I blogged last month, a liberal pundit is wondering what’s on the Democrat’s agent after November 6.

Asking what Obama’s second term would look like, Commentary’s Alana Goodman quipped, “At this point, the American people have no idea, and Obama doesn’t seem to either.”  To back up her point, she cites Zeke Miller’s BuzzFeed post with this observation from Democratic pollster Doug Schoen:

[The Obama Democrats] have no clear message or overarching theme other than class warfare and attack politics. . . . They don’t have a vision for the second term. No clear sense as to what the Administration is offering for a second term. There is widespread dissatisfaction with both parties and both candidates in primary results [Tuesday] — and no clear idea how Obama is going to unite the county and lead us forward.”

Schoen’s words conclude Miller’s piece on the Obama campaign’s loss of confidence.  Perhaps, the disappearance of their arrogance will cause the Democrats to fight harder.

That, however, wasn’t what happened when the Obama team suffered similar anxiety in the 2008 presidential campaign.  They may have a tougher time fighting back this time around.  Market meltdowns tend to work against the party in power.

Oh dear.  When incompetence rears its ugly head in one area…. it generally is a cancer that spreads to the rest.  So lies the Obama Campaign mired in what seems to be an endless wave of incompetence lately.  And now this….

President Barack Obama was scheduled, albeit briefly, to visit North Carolina on Election Day to make an speech in Asheville about the economy.

The White House sent the notice Wednesday last week but reversed course about five hours later, saying the trip wasn’t taking place, according to a North Carolina congressional office notified about the trip. The false alarm isn’t unprecedented — but the fact the White House even considered visiting the state on primary election day is interesting.

A controversial vote on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and civil unions is on today’s ballot. Obama issued a statement against the amendment earlier this year — but polls show it is likely to win by a solid margin.

The White House did not respond to questions about the scheduling snafu. The alert about the Obama visit came Wednesday last week and was changed by the end of the day. The White House’s official week-ahead schedule released at the end of last week put the president in New York today, not Asheville.

Given the gay marriage conversation that consumed the White House on Monday, a visit to North Carolina on the day of a gay marriage vote would only increase the questions about where the president stands on the issue — questions Gov. Bev Perdue took the brunt of earlier today on an appearance on MSNBC.

Weird this is.  After all, if the Obama Regime TRULY believed that North Carolina was in play… I would think he would be in my neighboring state every chance he gets.

I’m afraid that Obama/Biden are going to find out that having it both ways on the gay marriage issue may cost them the election in November.  Think 2004 in reverse.  I will explain my theory later if no one gets it.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

As Glenn Reynolds has said….and I reiterate on Twitter…. UNEXPECTEDLY!!!!!!

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — There are far more jobless people in the United States than you might think.

While it’s true that the unemployment rate is falling, that doesn’t include the millions of nonworking adults who aren’t even looking for a job anymore. And hiring isn’t strong enough to keep up with population growth.

As a result, the labor force is now at its smallest size since the 1980s when compared to the broader working age population.

“We’ve been getting some job growth and it’s been significant, but it hasn’t yet been strong enough that you start to get people re-engaging in the labor market,” said Keith Hall, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A person is counted as part of the labor force if they have a job or have looked for one in the last four weeks. Only about 64% of Americans over the age of 16 currently fall into that category, according to the Labor Department. That’s the lowest labor force participation rate since 1984.

It’s a worrisome sign for the economy and partly explains why the unemployment rate has been falling recently. Only people looking for work are considered officially unemployed.

Yesterday I noted, also on Twitter (so you may want to follow me!), that I’ve come to conclude Obama & his economic team must have studied “Applied Theories in Martian Economics” rather than understand what truly drives human economic activity.  It isn’t rocket science, but The Most Brilliant President Evah somehow has missed the boat.  Class warfare does not employment make.

Kudos to CNN Money for addressing the Elephant In The Room that most of the rest of the MSM has ignored to this point.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Finding “a growing air of incompetence around Mr. Obama’s White House“, Athene took it to the incumbent again in his column on Friday.  Teasing out the essence of her column, Allahpundit offers:

As for her point that “a lot of what he says could have been said by a president 12 or 20 years ago,” that’s because he doesn’t want to engage with the major challenge of his day. He knows the numbers on spending and entitlements. He could lead the reform effort if he wanted to, but that would mean great electoral peril and ferocious pushback from the left.

Emphasis added.  He does seem a bit beholden to the left, far more so than the immediate past Democratic president with whom he has recently teamed up.  Perhaps, it’s because like the academic intellectual, he’s so beholden to this theories that he knows they must be true and experience at fault.

Mr. Clinton, however, deftly responded to the changing political landscape after his party suffered setbacks in the 1994 election and learned to work with the then-Republican Congress to address popular concerns about our bloated welfare system and increasing federal spending by supporting welfare reform and working to balance the federal budget.

Instead of addressing the problems of the day, Mr. Obama is standing fast to the big-government programs he has long supported even though they are losing favor with the public.

Oddly though, despite his commitment to his policies, he doesn’t seem very confident about their popularity nor about their success in the real world.  Instead of campaigning on those, he’s campaigning against his ideological adversaries, often creating issues of out of whole cloth–the better to demonize them.

NB: Tweaked the post since its initial publication.

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…)

On Sunday, I reported that a Democrat who currently serves in Congress — and seeks to represent my district in the next Congress — spoke to a town hall at my synagogue, yet acknowledged he had no plan to address the coming crisis of entitlements. Even though he failed to stand behind any plan to fix the problem, he did find the time to attack the Republican solution.

And this even as the “nation’s Social Security and Medicare programs are sliding closer to insolvency, the federal government warned in a new report underscoring the fiscal challenges facing the two mammoth retirement programs as baby boomers begin to retire.”  These reports, writes Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner, “underscore the dire need to reform the programs if the nation wants to avert a fiscal crisis.”

Democrats like Mr. Schiff and President Obama, however, seem either oblivious to the challenge sor lack the political will to face up to them.  Where Obama has failed, Mitt Romney has at least recognized the imperative to act, having already, as Jennifer Rubin notes,

. . . set out Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security reform. There is no guarantee that he will have the nerve or skill to push those through, but he’s already done more than Obama has in over three years in the White House.

A bit harsher on Republicans than Jennifer Rubin has been, the editors of the Washington Examiner also stress the importance of action:

Conservatives are well within bounds to apply appropriate blame to Obama for his cowardice in confronting the great challenge of the day — an unsustainable entitlement state created by previous generations’ overpromising. But they must not go easy on Republican politicians; if anything, they should push back even harder against Republican attempts to avoid the tough business of reform or to expand unsustainable entitlements for their own political benefit. If Mitt Romney becomes president and has a Republican Senate and House, conservatives will be the last line of defense against a repeat of the Bush disaster.

We need real reform. And the candidate of hope and change has chosen instead to attack Republicans rather than address the nation’s fiscal problems — which have only become worse under his watch.

RELATED: Path to the White House: Ready for entitlement reform?

The more I think about how Congressman Adam Schiff responded to my question earlier today, the more aware I become not just of this Democrat’s incompetence (a competent Congressman would offer a government’s pressing fiscal problem), but also his demagoguery. In the course of his talk, he attacked Republicans for holding the nation “hostage” on the debt negotiations (without acknowledging his party’s responsibility for accumulating so much debt*
).  And, as I reported previously, he criticized the Republicans’ proposed Medicare reforms without offering any alternative of his own.

His comments reminded me of something Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in response to a question Paul Ryan asked him about the president’s budget:

Here’s a link to a video putting that comment in context. This may prove to be the defining exchange of the Democrats’ 2012 strategy — governing as well as political. Fault the Republican plan without offering a solution of their own.

*Under his party’s leadership, we saw a vast increase in federal spending which, to borrow an expression, “we didn’t pay for“.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  V the K asks: “why aren’t the Republicans demanding of Democrats, in every interview and every press conference ‘What’s your plan?’” Good question. Why aren’t they?

Pundits and politicos on both sides of the aisle have long lauded the Democratic campaigns in the three most recent presidential elections (1992, 1996 and 2008) where that party’s candidate won the general election.  Yet, one wonders how those campaigns would have held up had their Republican opponents mounted a more effective challenge.

In the most recent contest, we had a brief window into how the Obama team performed on defense when John McCain surged out of of St. Paul and the Democrat stumbled badly.  Obama didn’t do well on defense.  Had it not been for McCain’s ham-handed handling of the financial crisis — and had the Republican had a better political operation — who knows how Obama would have fared come November.

This year, we’re beginning to witness just how unprepared the Obama team is for an effective opposition.  As Tevi Troy observes today in commenting on the doggie wars, “there is a larger point here as well, one that speaks to competence“:

Attacking Romney for cruelty to dogs without recognizing Obama’s own self-admitted and enormous vulnerabilty on the issue is a shocking instance of a research and self-assessment failure on the part of the Obama campaign. The Seamus attacks were not a one-time hit, but appear to have been part of a concerted effort by the Obama team to make Seamus an issue. To do so without considering that the pro-Romney forces had an easy comeback fails Campaign Hit 101.

“The dog wars show”, Troy concludes, “that the vaunted Obama campaign competence appears to be a thing of the past as well.”  Is it a thing of the past or is it that it hasn’t faced such challenges before?  Or perhaps, it never occurred to them that if Republicans got hit, they just might, to borrow an expression, “punch back twice as hard“.

And possibly they were also counting on the legacy media to back them up (and oblivious to the effectiveness  of conservatives using new media.) (more…)

At least since his 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama has frequently spoken in lofty terms, appealing, it would seem, to the better angels of our nature. Yet, in his unscripted moments, he has often clung to bitter phrases of resentment. And since taking on the chief executive’s governing responsibilities, some of that unscripted resentment has become the scripted remarks of the President of the United States.

Yesterday, I quoted this passage from his speech in 2008 accepting the Democratic nomination for president:

. . 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.

Increasingly, we see that he is making his reelection campaign about small things.  Note that Obama’s chief campaign strategist, not just the Romney-obsessed legacy media, has attempted to make an issue of Mitt Romney’s dog.  ”In late January, for example,” reports the Washington Examiner‘s Byron York

. . . top Obama campaign aide David Axelrod sent out a tweet that included a photo of Obama with his Portuguese water dog Bo in the back seat of the presidential limousine. “How loving owners transport their dogs,” Axelrod wrote.

It wasn’t a random comment. “They’re obsessed with the dog thing,” liberal journalist Chris Hayes said on his MSNBC program Sunday morning, referring to the Obama campaign. “And the reason is that, I have heard, in focus groups, the dog story totally tanks Mitt Romney’s approval rating.”

This appears to be a pattern for the Obama White House as well as the Obama campaign.  Yesterday, dubbing Obama’s the Mini-Issue Presidency, Jim Geraghty provided examples of how the incumbent embraces the smallest of small-ball, citing some of the little issues on which the president has spent a great deal of time.

Guess, to borrow an expression, this “shiny-object strategy of campaigning” distracts a legacy media favorably disposed to the incumbent from the administration’s various scandals and failed policies.  Not to mention the failure of the incumbent to propose a budget capable of securing a single Democratic vote in the House or of passing the Democratic Senate.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

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…)

When George W. Bush got a fact wrong, our friends in the legacy media highlighted it as a sign of his stupidity.  If Barack Obama makes a mistake, well, if they get around to covering it, they’ll just see it as a sign of human imperfection.

Last night, before bed, I read that, in his speech yesterday offering up anecdotes from American history for “examples of ignorant incredulousness“, the Democrat, well, got his facts wrong about one of his Republican predecessors, claiming that “Rutherford B. Hayes couldn’t understand why anyone would want a telephone”. But, Nan Card Nan Card, curator of manuscripts at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio, corrected Mr. Hayes’s successor:

“He really was the opposite,” she said. “He had the first telephone in the White House. He also had the first typewriter in the White House. Thomas Edison came to the White House as well and displayed the phonograph. Photographing people who came to the White House and visited at dinners and receptions was also very important to him.”

While often cited, Card said Obama’s cited quote had never been confirmed by contemporary sources and is likely apocryphal. A contemporary newspaper account of his first experience with telephone in 1877 from the Providence Journal records a smiling Hayes repeatedly responding to the voice on the other line with the phrase, “That is wonderful.” You can read the full story here.

By the time I woke up this morning, conservative bloggers were all over the story. Steven Hayward offered an image of the former president and linked the page where I found the above images.

Glenn linked a Washington Post fact-checker scolding the president, “It’s bad enough for one president to knock another one for not being on Mt. Rushmore, but it’s particularly egregious to do so based on incorrect information.”

Mr. President, in the age of all this new technology, when it’s easy for your critics to check your facts and publicize your errors, don’t you think your speechwriters could do a little fact-checking?

Well before Memorial Day, the Obama administration will achieve a dubious distinction, having accumulated more debt in those 40 months than George W. Bush accumulated in 96.  With the Treasury Secretary acknowledging yesterday that his team (i.e., the administration) doesn’t have a “definitive solution” to the nation’s growing debt problem, we now know that they’re punting on a crisis that Barack Obama, as candidate, promised to address.

Although the Democrat put himself forward as the adult in the room during last summer’s negotiations on the debt ceiling, this week’s budget shows that he and his advisors have been anything but grownup in dealing with the debt crisis.  Last fall, just after the House Budget Committee Chairman “spoke on ‘The American Idea’ at the Heritage Foundation in Washington”, Peggy Noonan explained why Paul Ryan merited the honorific the president accorded to himself:

Mr. Ryan receives much praise, but I don’t think his role in the current moment has been fully recognized. He is doing something unique in national politics. He thinks. He studies. He reads. Then he comes forward to speak, calmly and at some length, about what he believes to be true. He defines a problem and offers solutions, often providing the intellectual and philosophical rationale behind them. Conservatives naturally like him—they agree with him—but liberals and journalists inclined to disagree with him take him seriously and treat him with respect.

Ryan scored the president for his pettiness and slammed “corporate welfare and crony capitalism”: (more…)

Just caught this on Yahoo!

No, Obama doesn’t want to wreck the economy; he’s just clueless about how to fix it.  He — and many of his supporters — really do believe Keynesian theory.

And, no, Republicans don’t want to “wreck the economy” in order to hurt Obama’s reelection prospects.  We just don’t think big government schemes will work to effect a sustained and robust recovery.  And have evidence to back up our contention.  Large public sectors really do reduce economic growth.

In linking a post on the president’s soon-to-be released budget which offers little in the way of meaningful reform, Jennifer Rubin asks the right question:

Smart politics or do the voters penalize political cowardice? “President Barack Obama’s budget proposal Monday will offer several measures to trim the federal deficit in the next 10 years. But it would leave largely unchanged the biggest drivers of future government spending: the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security programs that are expanding rapidly as the baby boom turns into a senior boom. Calling for major changes in the popular programs would be politically treacherous in an election year because of fierce opposition from seniors, who vote in large numbers. But budget experts of both parties agree the programs’ growth must be curbed at some point or they will swamp the budget.”

Emphasis added.  At a time of trillion-dollar deficits  – and a national debt that has increased by well over $4 trillion since the incumbent was sworn in.  (By contrast, the “national debt increased $4.9 trillion during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush . . . [and] is rising at a pace to surpass that amount during Mr. Obama’s four-year term.“*)

Given the challenges we face, a smart Republican would instead of following the president’s example of offering half-measures, take heed to Paul Ryan and offer a real plan for reform:

In other words, a bold reform agenda is our moral obligation. We have an obligation to provide the American people with a clear path that gets our country back on track. (more…)

The president, as I noted last month in my brief review of his State of the Union address, indicated that he was “prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long term costs of Medicare and Medicaid”. Only problem was that he failed to put forward any of his own.

At another point in the speech, he praised innovation and indicated a willingness to reduce regulation.  Only problem was that he asked others to do the work for him:

After all, innovation is what America has always been about. Most new jobs are created in start-ups and small businesses. So let’s pass an agenda that helps them succeed. Tear down regulations that prevent aspiring entrepreneurs from getting the financing to grow. Expand tax relief to small businesses that are raising wages and creating good jobs. Both parties agree on these ideas. So put them in a bill, and get it on my desk this year.

You’d think the White House Office of Legislative Affairs might have the capacity to put the president’s ideas into a bill and find an ally in Congress willing to introduce it.

Over at RedState, Soren Dayton yesterday caught another example of the White House punting on legislative action, “Jake Tapper asked Jay Carney about this. Should Senate pass a budget? Does the President have an opinion on this? Turns out that the answer is no”:

TAPPER: The White House has no opinion about whether or not the Senate should pass a budget? The president’s going to introduce one. The Fed chair says not having one is bad for growth. But the White House has no opinion about whether –

CARNEY: I have no opinion — the White House has no opinion on Chairman Bernanke’s assessment of how the Senate ought to do its business.

With this response, Dayton observes,

not only is the Senate failing the American people, but President Obama is helping the Senate in dodging this responsibility. The fact is that he has no opinion on running the country like an adult. He has “no opinion” about giving business certainty.

Read the whole thing.

So concludes Michael Barone in his Saturday column as he considers Ryan Lizza’s recent New Yorker piece on the president:

Now, in an article based on leaked White House memos marked up by Obama, Lizza has done it again [writing "a story that makes his subject look bad"]

Contrarian liberal blogger Mickey Kaus sums it up: “The president’s decision-making method–at least as described in this piece–seems to consist of mainly checking boxes on memos his aides have written for him.”

A $60 billion cut in the stimulus package? “OK.” Use the reconciliation process to pass the health care bill? A check mark in the box labeled “yes.”

Include medical malpractice reform in the health care bill? The man who as an Illinois legislator often voted “present” writes, “We should explore it.”

According to Lizza, Obama prefers getting information and making decisions by staying up late and reading memos rather than meeting with people — a temperament that’s a liability because face time with the president is one of his major sources of political capital.

Read the whole thing.  Barone notes further than Lizza provides “minimal” evidence that “that Obama ever seriously considered Republican approaches”, adding “Obama seems to live in a cocoon in which Republicans are largely absent, offscreen actors that no one pays any attention to.”

The impression I had reading Barone’s piece yesterday and Kaus’s piece (via Instapundit) last week is that Obama doesn’t really like being president.  When Clinton faced off against a Republican Congress in the second half of his first term, he delighted in the game.  Obama stays aloof from it.

Sometimes, it seems, the Democrat doesn’t want a second term as president, but instead just to be vindicated at the polls.

US-Egypt standoff worsens (H/t Powerline)