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John Podhoretz thinks the prez may have an uphill battle when it comes to his re-election campaign.
As Barack Obama was delivering his speech on the nation’s long-term debt crisis, word came that JP Morgan has radically downgraded its projection of the nation’s short-term prospects for economic growth. Morgan now thinks the economy will grow at an annual rate of 1.4 percent this year. This comes hard on the heels of Macroeconomic Advisers lowering its growth projection for 2011 from 4 percent at the beginning of the year to 1.7 percent today.
These aren’t just horrible numbers for the U.S. economy. They are a potential death knell for Barack Obama’s presidency. There is no way tepid growth of this sort is going to make a dent in the nation’s overall employment numbers—and it stands to reason that if unemployment is higher at the time of the 2012 election than it was when he took office in 2009 (7.6 percent), he is exceedingly unlikely to win a second term.
Combine that with the runup in gas and food prices, and you are looking at a presidency in serious condition—not yet critical, because these are projections, after all, and who knows? Economists get this wrong all the time. There was also good potential news today on the employment front, that the number of posted job positions is at its highest since 2004. …
Peggy Noonan too.
…We all get stuck in the day-to-day and lose sight of the overarching, but the overarching fact of Mr. Obama’s presidency is that he made a bad impression his first years in office and has never turned that impression around. He spent his first 14 months moving on what he was thinking about—health care—and not what the public was thinking about—the economic crash, jobs, spending. …
…The speech was intellectually incoherent. An administration that spent two years saying, essentially, that high spending is good is suddenly insisting high spending is catastrophic.
…You would think Democratic professionals, who read the same numbers Republicans do and pick up similar trends, would be hanging their heads in despair.
They are not. They have hope. Their hope is that Republicans in the early caucus and primary states will go crazy. They hope the GOP will nominate for the presidency someone strange, extreme or barely qualified. They hope that in a mood of antic cultural pique, or in a great acting out of disdain for elites, or to annoy the mainstream media, Republican voters will raise high candidates who are unacceptable to everyone else. Everyone else of course being the great and vital center, which hires and fires presidents. …
The bad news keeps coming for the White House. Nile Gardiner blogs about recent polls.
…The latest Gallup figures are even worse than the most recent Quinnipiac University national poll released at the end of March, which tracked Obama at just 42 percent approval. As I noted in a previous piece, President Obama receives strong negativity ratings for his handling of virtually all key issues, including the economy, budget deficit, health care, foreign policy and energy policy…
And if his heavily panned performance this week on the budget deficit is anything to go by, it is unlikely that the president’s ratings will be significantly improving anytime soon. Barack Obama faces an increasingly disillusioned electorate which, as the latest RealClear Politics average of polls shows, overwhelmingly believes the country is heading down the wrong track. With deep-seated fears over the economy, including towering levels of federal debt, dominating voter concerns, the Obama presidency seems destined for another fall, perhaps on an even bigger scale than the setback the Left suffered last November.
In sharp contrast to his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton, who did survive low ratings in his third year to ultimately win a second term, Obama is drifting further to the left rather than the political centre, a move which will only further alienate independents who moved decisively against him in the mid-terms. And as for comparisons with Ronald Reagan, who also recovered from low approval ratings to bounce back in 1984, the Gipper was simply in a different league to Barack Obama, displaying the kind of decisive, principled leadership that is sorely lacking in the White House today.
True-believing Dems still think that their man has a good shot at a second term. In the New Republic, William Galston looks ahead.
…First, Obama will try to persuade the electorate (in particular, the Independents who deserted Democrats in droves last year) that he’s really the guy they thought they were voting for in 2008—the conciliator who puts partisanship and ideology aside to get things done. In that context, the lame-duck budget deal wasn’t a one-off, but rather a harbinger of things to come. That’s why the president gave more ground than many congressional Democrats liked to reach agreement on the 2011 budget, and why he now seems prepared to accept a linkage he had previously rejected between raising the debt ceiling and movement toward long-term fiscal restraint.
Second theme: Despite the expensive but necessary response to the economic emergency of 2008-2009, Obama’s not a big spender determined to expand the reach and cost of the federal government. He cares about getting deficits and debt under control, but unlike the Republicans, he wants to do it in a way that honors our values and builds our future. That’s why he has chosen to deliver a speech on long-term fiscal policy that seeks simultaneously to get him on the playing field while distinguishing his approach from that of Representative Ryan and the House Republicans.
Which brings us to the third building-block of the reelection effort. The 2011 State of the Union announced a theme—winning the future—that the Obama team seems to take seriously even if the commentariat doesn’t. The intention is to convey an optimistic vision of a better future that is within our grasp if we make the right investments. It also represents an effort to rebrand twenty-first century liberalism as looking forward rather than backward; as oriented toward growth and opportunity rather than redistribution and security. In that context, the president can be expected to defend tenaciously what he regards as key investments in the future—education, basic research, innovation, and infrastructure—against Republican attacks. The “winning the future” agenda would become Obama’s equivalent of the famous “Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment” quarter that Bill Clinton used to draw the line against Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans in 1995. …
Jennifer Rubin attended a Q&A session with Representative Paul Ryan, and shares his response to the president’s speech.
…Much of the president’s rhetoric was simply untrue. Ryan said the president had dismissed the Republicans’ plan for “cutting” taxes on the wealthy. This is simply wrong. “We don’t include his tax increases. We keep revenues where they are and reform the tax code along the lines of the debt commission.” He explained that broadening the base and taking away loopholes will at least get the wealthy to pay tax on more of their income. “Right now they aren’t paying any taxes on money they shelter,” he observed.
…He also debunked the idea that he wanted to destroy entitlement programs. He made a pass at unraveling Obama’s wild claims about his plan’s impact on seniors. But the essence of his approach, he said (sorry, libertarians), was to save the welfare state. “We believe you need to have a social safety net. We think there is a consensus on that.” He wants to allow those programs to function, but to make sure we are a “paycheck nation,” not one promoting dependency. Rather than wait for the debt crisis to arrive, as it has in Europe, where draconian cuts are immediately implemented, Ryan said, “If you do it now and fix this problem, we do it on our own terms.”
…He explained that the president’s analysis that the debt was caused by two wars and the Bush tax cuts was wrong. The debt problem has been a long time in the making. “The big drivers are entitlement programs,” he said, and he readily acknowledged that “both parties are to blame.” …
In the NYPost, Charles Gasparino tells us the back story on the debt commission.
One way to know that President Obama’s much-hyped “fiscal austerity” speech bombed is that even members of his own deficit-reduction commission apparently felt betrayed.
Sure, Erskine Bowles, the commission’s Democratic chair, and Alan Simpson, the Republican, made some nice public statement about Obama’s deficit-reduction plan after they met with him yesterday — one day after the president unveiled his scheme to miraculously cut $4 trillion without reining in the looming catastrophes of Medicare and other entitlements. But people I spoke to in corporate America got a more unvarnished reaction in private from the debt-committee chieftains.
“What these guys can’t understand is how Obama can ask them to come up with something, and then he doesn’t listen to what they proposed,” a Wall Street executive who knows both men well told me a few hours after the president’s address on Wednesday.
…The Republicans were willing to listen to them: Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan, released last week, follows the commission in proposing major tax reform — closing loopholes, lowering rates and using some of the savings to balance the federal books. …
The Gulf Of Aden Operations has interesting news of a private venture to reduce Somali piracy.
Insurers in the City of London are finalising plans to set up a private fleet of armed patrol boats in the Gulf of Aden, in a new drive to stamp out Somali piracy.
The naval protection force was conceived by leading figures in the Lloyd’s of London market. They have been working with ship owners, freight operators and governments for months, marshalling support for their plan.
The goal of the Convoy Escort Programme is to provide protection for tankers trying to navigate the seas off war-torn Somalia while also reducing the soaring costs of insuring vessels, cargo and crews against increasingly vicious attacks by pirates.
…It is understood that the industry-led project is being monitored by the Royal Navy and its counterparts. The Times understands that the Navy would regard the escorts as a trial which, if successful, would allow naval vessels to hunt pirates in other areas. If the fleet can secure funding and win the support of the shipping community, it could be up and running within six months. …