“Why,” asks the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley writing about the excerpt in Vanity Fair from David Maraniss’s soon-to-be released biography of Barack Obama,

. . . didn’t we know all these details four years ago – even though some of them were published in a best-selling autobiography that was sold to us as if it was a fifth gospel? And yet we knew everything there was to know about Sarah Palin, despite the fact that she was in the race for a much shorter space of time than Obama – and only running for veep.

Via Powerline Picks where John Hinderaker, who has read a good chunk of the excerpt, highlights an event that Obama apparently manufactured for his memoir, Dreams From My Father. Genevieve Cook, a woman he once dated in New York, says he never took her to the theater despite Obama’s claim that he had taken a girlfriend in New York to the show:

No such play, no such dialogue. Maraniss charitably supposes that the event involved a different, later girlfriend in Chicago who was part of the “composite” girlfriend character. But Obama places the play in New York, not Chicago. My guess is that the incident never happened at all: one nice thing about fictionalizing an autobiography and including fake characters is that it gives you license to include events that didn’t happen but, from an artistic standpoint, should have.

When people who read my novel asked if it were autobiographical, I quipped that I changed the facts to make the truth more manifest, but I made clear that I was writing a novel.  I made clear I wasn’t telling the story of my life. By calling his a memoir, Obama indicates that he is telling the story of his.

There is a real question here not just about the misrepresentation, but also about the stories Obama chooses to tell (and apparently invents) to define who he is.

*NB:  Changed the title to more accurately reflect the meaning of the post.

And this story then deserves far greater consideration than inquires into Mitt Romney’s mode of transporting his pet in the early 1980s.  And Ann Romney’s wardrobe.  More on this anon.

UPDATE:  ”The composite girlfriend“, writes James Taranto, (more…)

A journalist committed to “accountability journalism” would ask the Attorney General about this video:

Via GatewayPundit and Instapundit.

Readers of this blog are well aware of the high regard in which I hold Peggy Noonan, having dubbed her the Athena of punditry in 2005.  She lost a lot of favor with conservatives at the tail-end of the 2008 presidential campaign when she commented favorably on the Democratic nominee for president and his campaign.

Her hope for ability to unite the nation and transform its politics has changed.  She has long since soured on the Democrat, having castigated him earlier this year for (and again on Friday) for his policies mandating “that agencies of the Catholic Church would have to provide birth-control services the church finds morally repugnant.”

In that same piece, she questioned whether the president has a relationship with the American people:

A president only gets a year or two to forge real bonds with the American people. In that time a crucial thing he must establish is that what is on his mind is what is on their mind. This is especially true during a crisis.

From the day Mr. Obama was sworn in, what was on the mind of the American people was financial calamity—unemployment, declining home values, foreclosures.

As the American people were thinking about such things, the Democrat’s mind was elsewhere:  ”on health care.”

Read the whole thing and note especially the “entirely abstract sense of America” held by what she dubs the incumbent’s “hermetically sealed inner circle”.

And she offers the defining irony (perhaps) the president’s most intense reelection campaign:  Obama “is said by all who know him to be deeply competitive, but . . . doesn’t seem to like his job that much.”  He wants to win for the sake of winning — and not for the job that comes with the laurels*.  No wonder he’s been holding so many fundraisers.  (And still has “has less cash on hand in his re-election bid than [did] his predecessor.)

* (more…)

He gets Catholics upset. Now, we learn this (check out the last headline):

Must be part of the Democrats’ plan.

Glenn linked this yesterday; it does show the former Speaker, rhetorically at least, at the top of his game. He makes his point clearly, but does it hold water?

Perhaps the greatest irony of the tension between congressional Republicans, who want to hold the line on federal spending and the growth of government, and President Obama, who has ratcheted up federal spending and spurred the growth of the federal leviathan, is that he has outmaneuvered them on a plan to reduce the flow of revenue to Washington:

A payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans, set to expire at the end of this month, would be extended through December under a bipartisan deal announced early on Thursday by U.S. congressional leaders.

The accord would also renew expiring jobless benefits for millions of others and prevent a pay cut for doctors of elderly Medicare patients.

The comprehensive agreement represents a victory for President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats in Congress, and allows Republicans to put behind them a tax debate that threatened to hurt them in the November elections.

Seems the Democrat learned well from Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.  Tax cuts are good for the economy and popular with voters.

The president, however, hasn’t indicated how he plans to compensate for the funds that will no longer flow to Social Security.  ”The payroll tax,” as Mario Loyola reminds us, “is a uniform (non-progressive) tax invented as a way for all American workers to pay into the Social Security and Medicare benefits that virtually all of them will be eligible for when they retire.”  And we learned this week that Social Security Is Failing Even Faster Than We Thought. (more…)

Concluding his post on the president’s budget, Larry Kudlow observes, “The U.S. is in a heap of fiscal trouble — on the verge of bankruptcy“, then asks, “What are we going to do about it?”

The man who as presidential candidate contended we were “living beyond our means” has put forward, as president, yet another budget under which the federal government would act in the manner he decried on the campaign trail.  Obama, Jennifer Rubins writes, “has once again demonstrated his lack of political courage by refusing to lead on fiscal discipline.”  Calling the president the “punter in chief,” Frank Donatelli derides the budget for  kicking “all our fiscal problems down the road, to a day of reckoning“.

This is not a serious budget.  If anything, it is as Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) put it an “entirely political document,” a means to show the special interests which make up his party’s base that he’s committed to their causes.

Even the AP got it, beginning its article with a far more accurate summary than that of Huffington Post:

Taking a pass on reining in government growth, President Obama unveiled a record $3.8 trillion election-year budget plan Monday, calling for stimulus-style spending on roads and schools and tax hikes on the wealthy to help pay the costs. The ideas landed with a thud on Capitol Hill.

He’s not raising taxes to pay down the debt, but as Kudlow put it, “this is a budget that says we must raise taxes in order to raise spending.”

“After having presided over three of the largest deficits in our history” writes Yuval Levin, “the president wants to go for four, and to end his term having added $6.4 trillion to the nation’s gross debt (about as much total debt in four years as the United States amassed in its first 225 years combined). ”  By contrast, “The national debt increased $4.9 trillion during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush.” 30% higher in half the time.

“Keynesians should rejoice,” opines Veronique de Rugy. ”austerity is not coming to the United States anytime soon.”   (more…)

Finding “a lot of 1980 in the 2012 presidential election,” Peggy Noonan opined on Friday that

The incumbent looks smaller than previous sitting presidents, as did Jimmy Carter. His efforts in the Oval Office have not been generally understood as successful. There’s a broad sense it hasn’t worked. And Democrats don’t like him, as they didn’t Jimmy Carter.

This continues as one of the most amazing and underappreciated facts of 2012—the sitting president’s own party doesn’t like him. The party’s constituent pieces will stick with him, having no choice, but with a feeling of dissatisfaction. It is not only the Republicans who have been unhappy this year. All this will have some bearing on the coming year.

Anecdotal evidence suggests some truth to this assertion.  Like the Athena of punditry, I live in a very blue island and find many of the incumbent’s erstwhile supporters less than satisfied with his performance in office, with one Democratic friend dubbing his party’s standard bearer a “failure.”  Seems Noonan has had heard similar complaints.

We see this in polls showing Democrats dispirited about voting in 2012.   A December 14 poll showed Republicans far more enthusiastic than Democrats.  Yet, Obama’s approval remains strong among Democrats.  Perhaps that approval is only lukewarm?  Or reflects his recent battle with House Republicans over the payroll tax rate?

Whatever the case, there do seem to be many dispirited Democrats in blue enclaves.  So, what’s your view?  Is Peggy right?  Do you have a sense from talking to your Democrat friends that they don’t make care for the incumbent President of the United States?

A few days ago in the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes contended that President Obama has been “utterly transparent . . . , it’s abundantly clear that he has one thing in mind these days: getting reelected.”

The Democrat showed this most recently in the back-and-forth with House and Senate Republicans over the payroll tax cut–when he dropped the surtax on millionaires.  In order to score a political point or two (and he may have scored as many as three), he offered a tax cut that wasn’t paid for.  Recall that he faulted his predecessor for giving us “tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 that were not paid for.”

And now he’s gone and done the same thing.  He’s given us a tax cut that’s not paid for.

It’s all politics for him.  He postures as a tax cutter without offering compensating cuts.  He hasn’t offered a plan to cut the deficit, heck, heck, he didn’t even put forward a budget this year that could garner a single Democratic vote in the U.S. Senate.  Instead of bring people together, as he promised in his campaign, he’s dividing us — so he can rally his base and win votes.

“If Republicans had championed the payroll tax reduction,” Barnes quipped, “Obama would no doubt be accusing them of bankrupting Social Security.”

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Kurt calls the “payroll tax cut extension. . .  a ridiculous political gimmick”:

it would be laughable if it weren’t so indicative of much greater problems in our political system. How was it the press could even seriously report on the “payroll tax cut extension” being worth $1,000 a year to someone who makes $50,000 when this latest vote was only over a two-month extension, or about $166.67 of that $1,000? And when has passing legislation that expired in two months ever been a sign of good or mature governance? A serious press would have called Obama and the Democrats on their divisive attempt to pass ridiculous legislation only for the purpose of scoring a few political points.

Indeed.

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…)

Once again, Charles Krauthammer is in rare form, but then again since that sage columnist is often in this form, it’s probably not entirely accurate to call it “rare.”  Well, the idiom works.

Writing on the failures of the various big-government initiatives this president had put into place, the conservative columnist quips,

So what do you do when you say you can, but, it turns out, you can’t? Blame the other guy. Charge the Republicans with making governing impossible. Never mind that you had control of Congress for two-thirds of your current tenure. It’s all the fault of Republican rejectionism.

He goes on to show how “a president whose central campaign theme is that Republicans put party over nation, sacrificing country to crass political ends” was putting party over nation, sacrificing country for crass political ends.

Krauthammer’s focus is the 1,700-mile trans-USA Keystone XL pipeline: “President Obama decreed that any decision must wait 12 to 18 months — postponed, by amazing coincidence, until after next year’s election.”  The pipeline, the columnist reminds us, “angered Obama’s environmental constituency.”  So, now the Democrat’s got them in his camp for 2012, but he has prevented private companies from providing the shovels for thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of shovel-ready jobs.

Oh, and he’s depriving the American people of access to oil from our very hemisphere — and from one of our closest allies.  As oil fluctuates near the $100 mark.

Post-partisan?  Most partisan in more like it.

The president and his team often whine about the bad set of circumstances the Democrat has had to deal with, you know all those problems they “inherited” (as if their was the first administration to face problems left unresolved by the previous president.)  The Democrat’s chief of staff put it recently, “Considering the debacle that he came in with, the tough choices he’s made and how there have been few, if any breaks, he says it himself all the time. . . .”

President Obama, as Jim Geraghty (who linked the quote above) reminds us:

. . . has been using the “run of bad luck” line on the stump, too. He cites the Arab Spring as an economic headwind, but let’s face it, Egypt or Libya or Syria or one of the Gulf states could have completely collapsed from internal uprisings. He mentions the tsunami in Japan, which as we all recall was so traumatic to the president he could only cope by going over his March Madness picks with ESPN. Yet obviously that could have been much worse, spreading much more serious radioactivity over more-densely populated areas of Japan. He cites the European debt crises, and again, it’s not hard to imagine that circumstance turning out much worse – such as a collapse of the Euro or serious social unrest in Greece and elsewhere.

Nothing is ever the fault of Obama and the team around him. It’s just that the universe seems to enjoy disappointing him, I guess.

Emphasis added.  Maybe the president wouldn’t be as upset with the universe if he took the advice of that politician who told Jay Leno that “one of the things” he was “trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.“

The president recently told a crowd of supporters that he had kept a majority of the promises he had made in the 2008 campaign:

“We’re through about 60 percent of [the list], which isn’t bad for three years,” Mr. Obama told a crowd at a fundraiser in Denver on Tuesday night. “So we know change is possible. But here’s the thing. There are a lot of people who are still hurting, and there’s still a lot more work to do. And so that other 40 percent that is not done, I’m going to need you because I need five more years. I need five more years to get it done.”

Politifact says that in fact he has kept only 151.  And how, pray tell, with a likely Republican Congress in 2013 (which we, alas, do not, Democratic talking points notwithstanding, enjoy today), will he ever get any of his big-government initiatives through?

Now, what about one promise that candidate Barack Obama himself claimed he’d been talking about “throughout” the 2008 campaign, you know, proposing a “net spending cut”?

He hasn’t put that in any of the budgets he’s proposed; indeed, every proposal he’s authored to “jump start” the economy has a included a net spending increase, oftentimes a pretty substantial such increase.

Well, if the president’s jobs bill enjoys majority support as the Washington Post/ABC News poll suggests, it isn’t helping his overall approval which, according to Gallup, just slipped to 38:

Seems his poll numbers are heading in the opposite direction of the Gipper’s in the third year of his term. Many pundits have claimed that Obama could win because his numbers this year were similar to Reagan’s in 1983. Only problem was that Reagan’s polls started ticking upwards as his economic plan kicked in. Obama’s plan was supposed to start working just a few months after it was passed (more than two years ago).

Maybe that’s because as Jim Hoft reports, “In Ronald Reagan’s third September in office he created 1.1 million jobs in one month.”  (By contrast, “Employers added 103,000 jobs in [Obama's third] September [in office]. Half of those were striking Verizon workers returning to work.”)

Well, technically, the Gipper didn’t create the jobs.  He just put policies in place which made it possible for entrepreneurs and businessmen to create and expand their enterprises, thus making it necessary for them to bring on more employees.

Wow.  This from Gallup today:

• 49% of Americans believe the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. In 2003, less than a third (30%) believed this.
• A record-high 81% of Americans are dissatisfied with the way the country is being governed, adding to negativity that has been building over the past 10 years.

Oh, there’s so much more…. read the whole thing.

Hey, someone should write more about this “Low Grade Civil War” thing!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

In today’s WSJ.com’s Political Diary (available by subscription), Stephen Moore quips “The Laffer report on the two presidents”, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama “is aptly entitled ‘The Odd Couple.’ In this case Reagan would be Felix, because he cleaned up the mess; and Mr. Obama is more like Oscar, who leaves a bigger mess behind.”

Seems Democrats believe the incumbent can repeat the feat of the most successful domestic policy president of the 20th century and win reelection despite middling polls during his third year in office. Problem is is that the Gipper’s poll numbers steadily increased in 1983 while in the corresponding year of his term, Obama’s have drifted downward.

Moore is onto something when he talks about Obama having left a bigger mess behind [than the one he "inherited"]. One reason House Republicans haven’t been able to devote more time on conservative reforms is that they have had to clean up messes the previous Congress left behind, such as its failure to pass a budget and to increase the debt ceiling high enough to accommodate the spending increases it did pass.

In addition to the messes the last Democratic House left the current Republican one, there are the messes Obama will leave to his successor, including notably two of the “big” pieces of legislation he signed, the health care overhaul and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, each increasing federal control over our economy. Not to mention all the new regulations administration appointees have foisted on the private sector, particularly those imposed by the EPA.

The next president is going to have to devote the better part of his first year in office just cleaning up the messes the incumbent is making today.

Shortly after Bruce returned to blogging in June 2005, I found it uncanny how oftentimes he would post on topics that I had intended to post on, with a spin similar to that I intended to offer, but with a style that, well, a style that showed the difference between the two of us.

And then when I started blogging more often than he, oftentimes he would e-mail me thanking me for addressing a topic he had intended to address, oftentimes embedding the same video he wanted to embed or quoting the very column he sought to quote.

Today, I woke to find that Eric and Nick had respectively considered two of the issues about which I wanted to write today — though Nick approached the social issue question through Christine O’Donnell, I will (in my next post) be approaching it through the much and mercilessly maligned Michele Bachmann. Uncanny indeed!

As to Eric’s point, I was wondering if the president had any idea what his actual jobs approach would be. In the first two years of his term, he depended almost entirely on his party’s leadership in Congress to draft his key domestic initiatives.

Will his big speech just be another one of his big speeches, a lot of platitudes, emphasizing broad points, but providing no specifics? (more…)

Whoa. Jim Geraghty at NRO (and hopefully you’re subscribing to his newsletter like I do) offers the tidbit of the day from President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall yesterday (and Moe Lane provides the cued-up video):

We’re still gonna have to make some tough decisions about Defense spending, or even on programs that I like but we may not need.

Ladies and Gentlemen: I give you your Commander in Chief.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

While we know HRC’s Joe Solmonese endorsed Obama’s campaign so early to show just how besotted he and his associates are with the Democratic Party, we also wonder why the Democrat was so eager to secure the endorsement so early in the cycle.

Well, in Jim Geraghty’s piece on a teachers’ union similarly premature endorsement, we find an explanation:

Number-Cruncher writes in, “I’m under no illusion the NEA will ever endorse a Republican candidate…but why this early? There is no GOP candidate yet, wouldn’t the union membership best be served by at least giving the GOP candidate ‘a chance’ to hear out his or her proposals, thus trying to win the appeal on a bi-partisan manner? I can only think of one reason for this move, the Obama people are going into over drive to get as much into Obama’s coffers as possible, and thus asked for this explicitly.  These are action of a very desperate campaign…on both sides. The Obama administration obviously is not raising enough money; the NEA is losing friends on the Democrat side of the aisle (see Cuomo).”

Emphasis added.  It’s all about the money.  You know all the media bellyaching about the corrupting influence of special interests and campaign cash we here when Republican candidates and conservative organizations raise a lot of money to promote, respectively, themselves and their causes, wonder how much we’ll hear with all the Obama campaign’s shenanigans in order to increase its haul.

Do wonder if any intrepid reporters for the MSM, as part of a renewed commitment to accountability journalism, will investigate to see just how explicitly — and aggressively — the Obama campaign (and maybe the president himself) sought out these endorsements and their concomitant cash.

Contrasting New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie’s success at crafting a budget deal with legislative Democrats in his state, Jennifer Rubin speculates that it might be possible in Washington but for one thing:

The key ingredient missing in D.C., of course, is executive leadership. President Obama has ducked, delegated and demagogued. It is up to Senate and House leaders to forge a deal. And then to complete the task, the voters in 2012 will need to elect a president with the same fortitude and courage as Christie. Maybe Christie himself.

Emphasis addded.  Read the whole thing.