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Charles Krauthammer says after getting spanked by the voters, the left will move their agenda by administrative fiat.
…Over the next two years, Republicans will not be able to pass anything of importance to them – such as repealing Obamacare – because of the presidential veto. And the Democrats will be too politically weakened to advance, let alone complete, Obama’s broad transformational agenda.
That would have to await victory in 2012. Every president gets two bites at the apple: the first 18 months when he is riding the good-will honeymoon, and a second shot in the first 18 months of a second term before lame-duckness sets in.
Over the next two years, the real action will be not in Congress but in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy. Democrats will advance their agenda on Obamacare, financial reform and energy by means of administrative regulation, such as carbon-emission limits imposed unilaterally by the Environmental Protection Agency. …
Even the NYTimes must be stunned by their polling results. Jennifer Rubin fills us in.
…Other figures evidence the electorate’s rightward shift. Women, who have of late tilted Democratic, are now evenly split between support for Democrats and Republicans. By a margin of 55 to 36 percent, respondents favored smaller government with fewer services over bigger government with more services. Fifty-three percent think Obama does not have a clear plan for creating jobs. Respondents think Republicans are more likely than Democrats to create jobs and reduce the deficit (by a 43 to 32 percent margin).
And oh, by the way, the polling sample — 38 percent Democrat and 27 percent Republican — is more dramatically skewed toward the Democrats than just about any other poll (OK, there’s Newsweek, but not even James Carville takes that seriously).
Obama has managed to lose his own standing, take his party down with him, and convince core Democratic constituencies to vote Republican. And it took him only two years.
Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, posts on the latest Gallup poll.
…Gallup has another devastating poll which makes extremely grim reading for the White House today. Gallup’s polling shows that 48 percent of Americans now regard themselves as conservative, higher than each of the last three midterms, compared to just 20 percent who describe themselves as liberals. In addition, Gallup reveals that 55 percent of likely voters next week are Republican or lean Republican, in contrast to 40 percent who are Democrat or lean Democrat. …
…The poll underscores not only the huge advantage the Republicans have going into next week’s election, but also the sheer scale of the conservative revolution in America. As Gallup shows, conservatives now outnumber liberals by an almost 2.5 to 1 ratio. Liberals make up just 20 percent of the American population. Barack Obama is the most left-wing president in US history, and is clearly out of touch with at least 80 percent of the American people, who clearly do not share his ideology. Next Tuesday looks set to be an epic disaster for the Left in America, and the capsizing of the president’s Big Government dream.
More and more liberals have seen enough. In the WaPo, Dana Milbank discusses the president’s appearance on The Daily Show. More striking than Obama’s attitude was what the interview said about Jon Stewart and liberals like him.
…Stewart, who struggled to suppress a laugh as Obama defended Summers, turned out to be an able inquisitor on behalf of aggrieved liberals. …
…”Is the difficulty,” Stewart asked, “that you have here the distance between what you ran on and what you delivered? You ran with such, if I may, audacity…. yet legislatively it has felt timid at times.”
Stewart had found the sore point between Obama and his base — and Obama was irritable. “Jon, I love your show, but this is something where I have a profound disagreement with you,” he said. “What happens,” he added, “is it gets discounted because the presumption is, well, we didn’t get 100 percent of what we wanted, we got 90 percent of what we wanted — so let’s focus on the 10 percent we didn’t get.”…
Peter Wehner also comments on President Obama and Jon Stewart.
…Throughout the interview, Obama also found himself hoisted with his own petard. It is Obama who created, by his words and promises, almost Messianic expectations for himself and his presidency. He was going to do so much, so fast, so well. Those expectations have come crashing down around Obama. Stewart’s line of questing was consistent. “Is the difficulty you have here the distance between what you ran on and what you’ve delivered,” Stewart asked the president. Mr. Obama did not seem happy with Stewart’s impertinence. But, at least, out of the interview emerged a new motto from the Obama White House. It’s based on what the president himself said: “Yes We Can — but…” as in “I think what I would say is ‘yes we can, but it’s not going to happen overnight.’”
Most of us missed the qualifiers during the campaign. …
Peter Wehner unpacks Obama’s comments to the Latino community. Wehner draws attention to Obama’s stunning narcissism and lack of perspective, when Obama calls political opponents “enemies” because it’s personal and affects the president.
I had lunch yesterday with a long-time friend who is intelligent, well informed, and a life-long Democrat. In the course of our conversation I asked for his reaction to what the president said on Univision.
If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, “We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re going to reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,” if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder.
Given how out of sync the president’s words have been, compared with his high-minded campaign rhetoric, I asked my friend, “Help me to decode Obama.” I wanted to hear his perspective as someone who had invested great hopes in the president.
His response was arresting: “He’s ruthless.” My friend proceeded to tell me that Obama should be understood in the context of the Chicago Way.
…Obama’s rhetoric — using the word “enemy” to describe members of the opposition party — has become nearly unhinged. For Obama there are, it seems, no honest or honorable critics; they are all dishonest, dishonorable, operating in bad faith, and now, apparently, out-and-out enemies. Mr. Obama’s rhetoric is more scorching toward Republicans than it is toward Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong-Il. …
Having seen enough of the unscripted president, Victor Davis Hanson suggests the prez get back on teleprompted message.
…But the problem with the first is that Obama does not do well when he’s impromptu and petulant: see “typical white person,” “spread the wealth,” “clingers,” and, more recently, “they talk about me like a dog,” his telling the Republicans that they have to sit in the back of the car, and warning “Latinos” to punish their conservative “enemies” by voting for the Obama slate. The result is that he appears either weird (at best) or Nixonian (at worst), given his now apparently insincere bring-us-together rhetoric. …
Toby Harnden, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, writes about Bill Clinton hitting the campaign trail. How does Bill Clinton diss Obama? Remember the Dem candidate for RI Governor? Bill’s campaigning for him.
…Some are speculating that Hillary might resign from State and mount a primary challenge to Obama in 2012. I think that’s highly unlikely – it would be an extremely difficult path for her to challenge the first black President. Seven years is a long, long time (and so is five, when the decision to run would be taken) but all things being equal she is currently a near cert to run in 2016.
Of course, it’s not impossible that Obama, badly damaged by the mid-terms and sick of the distinct lack of the adoration he’s always been used to, will do an LBJ and decide not to run in 2012. I’ve long wondered whether his heart is in getting re-elected. In mid-September, a “big-time Democrat” told Politico’s Roger Simon that 2010 was already lost:
“It is gone. He must now concentrate on saving 2012. But the biggest fear of some of those close to him is that he might not really want to go on in 2012, that he might not really care.”
In the event that Obama decides not to run for re-election, Hillary becomes the immediate Democratic front runner.
In the Economist Blogs – Democracy in America, A.E. posts an excellent snapshot on the power of government unions.
ON FRIDAY the Wall Street Journal provided a wonderful bit of irony: despite the howls of indignation from the Democrats over private campaign spending, it turns out that the biggest sugar daddy is the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a public-sector labour union that spends almost all of its cash for the Democrats. AFSCME accounts for roughly 30% of spending from pro-Democratic groups. A piece from US News and World Report points out that, in total, “Big Labour” is spending more private cash than the Chamber of Commerce and American Crossroads (Karl Rove’s outfit) combined.
Since the WSJ article most of the commentary has involved arguments over possible Democratic hypocrisy (pro, con), but that debate misses the point. The Democrats are electorally beholden to union support, and this often leads to bad policy.
In an essay in National Affairs previously flagged by Schumpeter, Daniel DiSalvo notes some of the negative consequences of this symbiotic relationship. He focuses on public-sector unions, which have grown while membership in their private-sector counterparts has flagged. … public-sector unions have a distinct advantage over private ones. “Through their extensive political activity,” says Mr DiSalvo, “these government-workers’ unions help elect the very politicians who will act as ‘management’ in their contract negotiations—in effect handpicking those who will sit across the bargaining table from them, in a way that workers in a private corporation (like, say, American Airlines or the Washington Post Company) cannot.” And the public-sector managers sitting across the table don’t have the same worries as private-sector bosses…
…Amid savage private-sector job cuts, one-third of the funds from the 2009 stimulus bill went to state and local governments, mainly to rescue public-sector employees. An executive order last spring strongly encouraged government agencies to use construction companies with unionised workforces for any federal construction project over $25m. That followed three other union-friendly orders. In his bail-out of Chrysler and GM unions won some special favours. And Mr Obama imposed tariffs on imports of Chinese tyres at a union’s request. …
Michael Barone also sounds off against government unions.
…The problem is that, as Roosevelt understood, public employee unions’ interests are directly the opposite of those of taxpayers. Public employee unions want government to be more expensive and government employees to be less accountable.
…Public employee union members have become, as U.S. News Editor in Chief Mortimer Zuckerman writes, “the new privileged class,” with better pay, more generous benefits and far more lush pensions than those who pay their salaries — and who are taxed to send money to their leaders’ favored candidates.
Franklin Roosevelt thought public-sector unions were a lousy idea. Do you?
Unfortunately, Sandra Day O’Connor isn’t finished making up the Constitution.
…”This is Sandra Day O’Connor calling about Ballot Question 1″ was the recorded message that greeted Nevada voters when they picked up the phone earlier this week. Justice O’Connor, who retired from the Supreme Court in 2006 but sits on lower federal courts from time to time, was pitching a Nov. 2 state initiative that would replace judicial elections with “merit selection.”
…The public campaign for merit selection has been led by O’Connor’s Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System. But behind the scenes is liberal moneyman George Soros, who has provided $45 million in grants to groups like Justice at Stake and the left-wing People for the American Way that press for an end to judicial elections.
Think of it as an investment in judicial activism. Selection boards get captured by trial lawyers, academics and antibusiness activists. They nominate plaintiff-friendly judges and state legislatures rubber-stamp them. Rather than play to the voters, would-be judges play to the special interests that dominate the commissions. This campaigning takes place behind closed doors. One Missouri judge called the process “exclusive, secretive and political.”
In “merit” states the law takes a left turn toward jackpot justice. This has played out in Alaska and Wyoming, both states in which “merit” picks have struck down common-sense tort reforms. …