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Karl Rove discourses on the White House attack on Rush.
Presidents throughout history have kept lists of political foes. But the Obama White House is the first I am aware of to pick targets based on polls. Even Richard Nixon didn’t focus-group his enemies list.
Team Obama — aided by Clintonistas Paul Begala, James Carville and Stanley Greenberg — decided to attack Rush Limbaugh after poring over opinion research. White House senior adviser David Axelrod explicitly authorized the assault. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel assigned a White House official to coordinate the push. And Press Secretary Robert Gibbs gleefully punched the launch button at his podium, suckering the White House press corps into dropping what they were doing to get Mr. Limbaugh.
Was it smart politics and good policy? No. For one thing, it gave the lie to Barack Obama’s talk about ending “the political strategy that’s been all about division” and “the score-keeping and the name-calling.” The West Wing looked populated by petulant teenagers intent on taking down a popular rival. …
Forbes has a piece on the rosy economic scenarios.
… The forecast is rosy from the get-go. The budget forecasters assumed that the economy would grow at a 3% annual rate starting in April and that real GDP would fall just 1.2% in 2009 from 2008. Then, from 2010 through 2013, the administration assumes that real GDP will grow at a 4% annual rate. To put this in perspective, that is twice as fast as the economy’s 2% annual rate of growth between 2004 and 2008. This is not impossible, but the only other periods that came close to this 4% growth rate for such a prolonged period of time were in the late-1990s and mid-1980s. Forgive us for pointing this out, but both of these periods followed major shifts toward freer markets and tax cuts, not bigger government and tax hikes.
There is no period in U.S. history where tax rates and the size of government both increased, and yet real GDP growth accelerated as sharply as the Obama team forecasts. …
And Obama fan Megan McArdle posts on the economic forecasts.
Our sister publication (National Journal) asks analysts whether the administration’s economic forecasts are too optimistic. They would have gotten a more interesting discussion if their query had been “Is the Pope Catholic?” Of course they’re too optimistic. In fact, the word optimistic is too optimistic. A better choice might have been “insane”. Like Greg Mankiw, I would love to find a sucker investor who is willing to take the other end of a bet that both growth and revenue will fall short of the administration’s predictions.
Having defended Obama’s candidacy largely on his economic team, I’m having serious buyer’s remorse. Geithner, who is rapidly starting to look like the weakest link, is rattling around by himself in Treasury. …
David Harsanyi thinks working on the economy should have come before the far-left agenda.
… Obama, who promised not to raise taxes during a recession, now plans to raise nearly $1 trillion in new taxes directly from the investor class. He plans to raise capital gains (a disincentive to investment), corporate taxes (for you, the consumer, to ultimately pay) and on the “rich” (which the non-partisan Tax Foundation estimates will affect 1.3 million small-business owners).
This recession already has passed the 15-month threshold, the historical average for downturns. Most presidents helped ease us out of these tough spots by easing the burden on Americans. Obama has engaged in the opposite. That’s his gamble.
And most polls show the president’s approval rating around 60 percent — similar to other modern presidents at this point. But now that Obama has used his political capital to further ideology rather than economic growth, one thing is clear: He owns this mess.
Ed Morrissey wants to know why Treasury is neglected.
President Barack Obama’s handy excuse for all sorts of goofs and missteps is that he’s too busy working on fixing the economy. In order to do that, one might expect that Obama would concentrate on building his economic team at the Department of the Treasury, where most of those efforts would originate and get managed. Instead, as noted earlier today, phones go unanswered at Treasury — and our allies and trading partners have begun complaining about the lack of effort in the White House.
Reports have floated around that “dozens” of positions remain unfilled at Treasury, most recently in the New York Times’ profile of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner: …
New Ledger.com reviews the vetting process.
… 2009 is the anti-2008 for Team Obama. Whereas, last year, the Obama campaign was able to demonstrate its supreme competence at running a campaign, raising money, and using technology to further Barack Obama’s political goals and personal ambitions, once Team Obama moved into the White House, it seemed that its hold on managerial competence disappeared. Thus, we have a Treasury Secretary whose tax delinquencies were not discovered by the Obama vetting system, and who is Home Alone at the Treasury Department because the White House can’t get its nominees confirmed quickly enough to provide the Treasury Secretary the personnel support he needs to deal with the greatest economic crisis since the recession of the early 1980s. …
If you are wondering what to think of the Freeman fiasco, James Taranto has a good backgrounder.
A year ago, Barack Obama was running for president and people were starting to pay attention to his “spiritual mentor,” Jeremiah Wright. Obama tried to have it every way: He claimed he had no idea about Wright’s crackpot ravings, which of course he did not agree with, but he proclaimed his personal loyalty to a man he portrayed as merely eccentric and avuncular. Months later, when this approach was no longer political tenable, Obama threw Wright under the bus, as the vivid campaign metaphor had it.
The pattern has repeated itself, and because Obama is president, now his choice of associates really matter. Charles Freeman, described by our colleague Bret Stephens as “Obama’s national intelligence crackpot,” met the bus’s underside yesterday, withdrawing from consideration to be chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
As Stephens notes, Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, heads an outfit called the Middle East Policy Council, “generously funded by Saudi money.” Freeman has “amply repaid” this generosity, Stephens writes–among other things by parroting the Saudi line that American support for Israel provoked the attacks of Sept. 11. Freeman’s bizarre views aren’t limited to the Middle East: He criticized Red China after the Tiananmen Square massacre–not for brutality but for being, as he put it, “overly cautious.” …
A welcome change of pace comes from a NY Times article on a cross country Amtrak adventure.
… Almost every veteran conductor I talked with on the trip lamented that something of train travel’s former magic had slipped away. Yet I witnessed something very precious that remains.
Mr. Kinsinger, the Amish butcher, had remarked in astonishment: “I met a man who said he spent 12 hours on an airplane, sitting right next to someone, and they never said a word to each other!” A former New York City cop-turned-massage-therapist from Oregon, who had ridden the Zephyr with her husband, carried cards printed with their contact information, and the headline: “There Are No Strangers on a Train.”
Abraham Lincoln’s idealism about the first transcontinental railroad’s forging national unity may have been bound up in political pragmatism and economic ambition, but a core sentiment remains true: as a train crosses borders, the boundaries between its riders dissolve. Those crosshatched lines on the map stitching the country together are also a metaphor. I witnessed community and saw everybody cherishing it.
At least for now, train travel remains in what the former flight attendant I met called an “age of innocence,” by which she meant that you can keep your shoes on to board. It is a relapse into a simpler time.
With some cash, Amtrak could add modern amenities like Wi-Fi and still preserve that slower pace that makes train travel a salve for our modern psyche, the perpetual motion lulling the rider to stillness, like a rocking cradle, and that hushing sound: choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k.
SPECTACULAR TRIPS ON 2 RAILS …
Mark Steyn Corner post on controlling cow flatulence starts the humor section.
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