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Tony Blankley says now we can begin to fill in the blanks on Obama’s management style.
In the Middle Ages, when a young prince suddenly and prematurely became king, the royal court, the church leadership and other senior aristocrats would scrutinize his every word and habit for signs of what kind of mind would be deciding their country’s fate and their personal prosperity and safety. Today, around the world, President Barack Obama’s every word, every action, every inaction is being likewise scrutinized for similar reasons.
Prior to the November election, the only evidence we had of Mr. Obama’s managing style — and that evidence was indirect — was the management of his campaign, which was brilliant. But whether he was its active manager or merely took guidance from a shrewd Svengali remains to be known.
Since the election, we have begun to get hints of his management style in four items Mr. Obama himself has described as of the highest priority to him — and thus, one presumes, items to which he would have given his personal attention: Cabinet selection, closing Gitmo, the stimulus package and bipartisanship. …
Karl Rove is beginning to suspect the administration is winging it.
… Team Obama was winging it when it declared the stimulus would “save or create” 2.5 million, then three million, then 3.7 million, and then four million new jobs. These were arbitrary and erratic numbers, and they knew there’s no way to count “saved” jobs. Americans, being commonsensical, will focus on Mr. Obama’s promise to “create” jobs. It’s highly unlikely that more than 180,000 jobs will be created each month by the end of next year. The precise, state-by-state job numbers the administration used to sell the stimulus are likely to come back to haunt them as well.
Bipartisanship? The administration failed even to respond to GOP offers to endorse an Obama campaign proposal to suspend capital gains taxes for new small businesses.
Inexplicably, the president, in a prime-time press conference, raised expectations for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s bank rescue plan, which turned out the next day to be no plan at all. The markets craved details; they got none. When markets cratered, spokesmen didn’t acknowledge the administration’s poor planning, but blamed the markets.
Team Obama was also winging it on enhanced interrogation of terrorists. First it nullified all the Bush administration’s legal authorities before considering what rules it should have in place. When the CIA briefed White House officials on the results obtained from these techniques, the administration backtracked and organized a four-month study of what rules were appropriate.
Something similar happened with the promise to close Guantanamo Bay within a year: The administration has no idea what it will do with the violent terrorists detained there. …
Amity Shlaes says it is a myth that FDR pulled us out of the depression.
It takes only a few seconds to make history new again.
Leaders around the world are talking up economic stimulus, channeling U.S. President Barack Obama, who in turn is channeling Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Obama bases his confidence on an old story line with some appealing parallels to today:
A disastrously high stock market caused by excessive faith in the private sector generated an epic crash. A Republican, Herbert Hoover (George W. Bush), let us down. A new president, FDR (Obama), knew that action was imperative and understood the value in “bold persistent experimentation.”
FDR stimulated the Dow back up, and unemployment down, saving America and democracy. Massive wartime spending solidified the recovery in the 1940s, proving that when it comes to stimulus, more is better.
So, celebrating the $787 billion stimulus bill Obama signed yesterday depends on ramming through this version of history — and dismissing dissent. That is what Obama did at a news conference when he said those who criticize FDR’s New Deal are “fighting battles that I thought were resolved a pretty long time ago.”
In fact, this battle is far from resolved. Economists are arguing more now about the quality of the Roosevelt programs than they were a decade or two ago.
Thomas Sowell says the economic world is upside down.
From television specials to newspaper editorials, the media are pushing the idea that current economic problems were caused by the market and that only the government can rescue us.
What was lacking in the housing market, they say, was government regulation of the market’s “greed.” That makes great moral melodrama, but it turns the facts upside down.
It was precisely government intervention which turned a thriving industry into a basket case.
An economist specializing in financial markets gave a glimpse of the history of housing markets when he said: “Lending money to American homebuyers had been one of the least risky and most profitable businesses a bank could engage in for nearly a century.”
That was what the market was like before the government intervened. Like many government interventions, it began small and later grew. …
John Stossel says only real jobs create wealth.
… Exhibit B is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I don’t mean his public-works projects, like the Civilian Conservation Corps. I’m talking about his most serious job-creating operation: the draft.
In September 1940, Roosevelt signed the Selective Act, which ordered all males 21-35 to register for military service. “Of the 16 million persons who served in the armed forces at some time during the war, 10 million were conscripted, and many of those who volunteered did so only to avoid the draft … ” writes Robert Higgs in “Depression, War and Cold War.”
The draft marked the beginning of the end to the double-digit unemployment that had plagued America for a decade. Two years earlier, Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, lamented, “[A]fter eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started”. The draft was the answer they had sought all that time.
So creating jobs is not difficult for government. What is difficult for government is creating jobs that produce wealth. Pyramids, holes in the ground and war do not produce wealth. They destroy wealth. They take valuable resources and convert them into something less valuable. …
Walter Williams on the fools who think they can run an economy.
The idea that even the brightest person or group of bright people, much less the U.S. Congress, can wisely manage an economy has to be the height of arrogance and conceit. Why? It is impossible for anyone to possess the knowledge that would be necessary for such an undertaking. At the risk of boring you, let’s go through a small example that proves such knowledge is impossible.
Imagine you are trying to understand a system consisting of six elements. That means there would be 30, or n(n-1), possible relationships between these elements. Now suppose each element can be characterized by being either on or off. That means the number of possible relationships among those elements grows to the number 2 raised to the 30th power; that’s well over a billion possible relationships among those six elements. …
Ann Coulter noticed historians ranking presidents. She had an opinion too.
Being gracious winners, this week, liberals howled with delight at George Bush for coming in seventh-to-last in a historians’ ranking of the presidents from best to worst.
This was pretty shocking. Most liberals can’t even name seven U.S. presidents.
Being ranked one of the worst presidents by “historians” is like being called “anti-American” by the Nation magazine. And by “historian,” I mean a former member of the Weather Underground, who is subsidized by the taxpayer to engage in left-wing political activism in a cushy university job.
So congratulations, George Bush! Whenever history professors rank you as one of the “worst” presidents, it’s a good bet you were one of America’s greatest.
Six months after America’s all-time greatest president left office in 1989, historians ranked him as only a middling president. (I would rank George Washington as America’s greatest president, but he only had to defeat what was then the world’s greatest military power with a ragtag group of irregulars and some squirrel guns, whereas Ronald Reagan had to defeat liberals.)
At the time, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. dismissed Reagan as “a nice, old uncle, who comes in and all the kids are glad to see him. He sits around telling stories, and they’re all fond of him, but they don’t take him too seriously” — and then Schlesinger fell asleep in his soup. …
According to Borowitz, Madoff blames his problems on youth and immaturity.
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