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Jennifer Rubin thinks the president is out of his depth.
…He’s articulate and can be (at the Arizona memorial, for example) an inspired speaker. But what does he know? Does anyone aside from his devoted spinners imagine that he grasped the limits of the United Nations and other international bodies, understood the frailty of Middle Eastern despots, correctly analyzed the root of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, appreciated the history of Keynesian failure or perceived the enormity of our looming debt crisis? As the problems become more acute, his limitations become more obvious. At this point it’s hard to imagine that he could hold his own on the same stage with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and debate their respective budget plans.
Obama has relied throughout his career on a mix of glossy rhetoric and clever pop psychology. But ask those who observed him during his brief Senate career if he showed a depth of understanding or interest on major legislation. You’ll find he wasn’t much concerned with the details of legislation or the substance of policy debates. Unlike Ronald Reagan, who had fixed principles and an overarching vision of the major international challenges we faced, Obama perpetually vamps. Each crisis and challenge comes as a surprise and is viewed in isolation from other events. He can’t fathom that there are flaws in his own inch-deep theories (e.g., Israeli settlements are the barrier to Middle East peace) or that there are well-reasoned alternative views (e.g., our Syria engagement policy is a moral and strategic flop).
…Obama and his defenders whine that these are tough times, tougher than any mortal could be expected to manage. But that’s poppycock. Reagan faced a collapse of American confidence, a sky-high “misery index”and an emboldened Soviet Union. George W. Bush faced the worst attack on American soil in 60 years. All presidents face challenges. The question is do they have the character, the depth of knowledge and the skill to manage them. In Obama’s case there is reason to doubt that he does.
In Contentions, Omri Ceren gives us an overview of the president’s failed strategy for renewing Middle East peace talks. Now we are learning, from Hamas, no less, the “settlement freeze” strategy was Obama’s attempt to drive a wedge between Netanyahu and the Israeli people.
The background on Obama’s 2009 and 2010 diplomatic offensives against Israel are now well-known enough that the narrative is inching toward conventional wisdom. The president entered the White House intent on putting daylight between the United States and the Jewish state. He choose settlements as a wedge issue designed to split Netanyahu from the Israeli public and topple the government, in the process changing the widely understood interpretation of “settlement freeze” from “no expansion outside existing blocs” to “no Jewish construction over the Green Line even in Jerusalem.” Either Netanyahu would halt all construction and lose the Israeli right, the thinking went, or he would put himself on the wrong side of the United States president and lose the Israeli center. Satisfyingly clever.
Of course the administration’s reading of Israeli polling data was flat wrong, and even Israeli opposition chairwoman Tzipi Livni insisted that Jerusalem was a consensus issue. The Israeli public rallied behind Netanyahu, while distrust in Obama and his reliability as an ally — a precondition to Israel taking risks for peace — skyrocketed. But having categorically stated that it was simply impossible for the Palestinians to negotiate while Jews built schools and supermarkets in East Jerusalem, the White House couldn’t then admit that a “full freeze” was just a gambit meant to weaken Netanyahu. So that continued to be the official U.S. position through the end of 2010, until the White House had to nuance the counterproductive request. Of course by that time Palestinian negotiators, unable to be less anti-Israel than the U.S. president, had incorporated it as a precondition for talks. They didn’t have the option of abandoning it when the White House did, and the peace process remained moribund.
…The question, as always, isn’t just about the decision but about the decision-making process. Which obviously clumsy advisers convinced the president that the strategy was sound, and are they still prognosticating on Israeli calculations and Palestinian intentions? What obviously inaccurate assumptions were they using, and are those beliefs still guiding our Middle East policymaking? Because generally when someone charts a course that’s flawed in precisely predictable ways, when they dismiss those precise objections with specific justifications, and when they turn out to be precisely wrong — they generally get replaced. …
In the Daily Beast, Eric Alterman compares Obama to Carter.
…• The Times also reports that “Americans are more pessimistic about the nation’s economic outlook and overall direction than they have been at any time since President Obama’s first two months in office,” with well fewer than 50 percent expressing confidence in the president’s leadership or the direction in which he’s taking the country.
• Meanwhile, Obama, like Carter, is reacting to these warning signs not by rallying his own side, or focusing on those aspects of his party’s platforms that remain popular, but by seeking to split the difference between dispirited Democrats and increasingly radicalized Republicans. According to recent polls, only 29 percent of Americans questioned believe that this rush to slash the deficit will help create jobs. Seventy-two percent favor Obama’s promise to restore pre-Bush tax rates for those enjoying incomes of $250,000 a year, but of course he caved on that in 2010, and it’s hard to see why he won’t do so again in another election year. When asked specifically about Medicare, those questioned say they are willing to pay higher taxes rather than see its services cut, and a plurality of 45 percent prefer military cuts instead.
So what does Obama propose? Well nothing so simple as his own party’s highly popular political platform for this president. He’s too smart for that. Rather, as Ezra Klein points out,, Obama’s deficit reduction plan, while not quite as brutal as the Republican Ryan plan, is even more conservative than the Simpson-Bowles plan, which was itself deeply conservative. He calls for raising less money in new taxes and far smaller cuts in the defense budget, chasing the Republicans into territory that is well to the right of anything even Ronald Reagan dared propose before his 1980 shellacking of Jimmy Carter. …
In the NYPost, Charles Gasparino explains the only incentive on Wall Street.
…In recent weeks, firms like megabank JPMorgan have been scrambling to issue reports predicting apocalypse unless Congress allows the country to borrow ourselves into oblivion.
…Just recently, Goldman economists told us that if Republicans forced the president to accept a mere $61 billion in budget cuts, the country might slip back into recession.
As one long-time Wall Street economist recently told me, “Goldman is the worst,” but every major firm’s economic department now overtly “supports government spending stimulus and Fed pump-priming” as the path to economic nirvana.
Which gets us closer to the real conflict: The free money the Federal Reserve has printed and the massive government spending under Obama have been very, very good to Wall Street.
…Wall Street surely will give us more doomsday talk as the debt-ceiling debate rages on, but consider the source. After all, some of these same guys not long ago were making huge bets that housing prices would keep rising forever. …
Toby Harnden, in the Telegraph, UK, puts the Donald into perspective.
He has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats, showered praise on Bill and Hillary Clinton and suggested that Ronald Reagan was a con man with little “beneath that smile”.
A divorcé whose current wife, number three, is a Slovenian former model and jewelry designer, he once favoured Canadian-style single payer healthcare and abortion rights. These days, he is best known as a reality television host.
…So why is brash, egotistical, big mouthed weirdo Donald Trump suddenly being treated as a realistic candidate for the Republican party nomination for the presidency? …
Jennifer Rubin says the Trump boomlet is proof of the embarrassment that is the main-stream media.
…There are plenty of rationales, none convincing, as to why the media establishment that bemoans the prospect of defunding public broadcasting (the end of serious journalism!) simultaneously chases a contrived story. Trump is not and never has been a serious political figure…His schtick is to sell himself — bombastic, obnoxious and aggrandizing — not to lead the country or offer solutions to real problems. At least Ross Perot, the last eccentric billionaire candidate, was promoting an agenda other than himself.
…Trump is not a legitimate candidate, and coverage of him isn’t news. Rather, it’s embarrassing evidence of how easy it is for the media to be employed as the PR team for celebrities. (Is the Lindsay Lohan candidacy next?) …
In Financial Times, Gillian Tett tells us how businesses get started.
…Outside America, for example, most people think that “entrepreneurship” is all about Silicon Valley kids. Not so. Right now, the highest rate of entrepreneurship is actually found in Montana and Oklahoma, where 470 out of every 100,000 adults a year are creating new businesses, according to Kauffman data. And most entrepreneurs are found in the 35-44 age range. That may be because these entrepreneurs lost their jobs (in 2009, the level of start-ups was the highest for 14 years). But another fascinating wrinkle in the data is that new companies are now hiring fewer people than before.
However, for the Kauffman Foundation, these data are just the start: it is now campaigning for a range of policy changes to create more entrepreneurs (such as less business red tape, fewer immigration controls, more supportive tax code and patent law and so on). The foundation is also trying to create entrepreneur “labs”, boost education, and expand its international reach.
So far, so worthy. After all, it is hard to dispute the value of cutting red tape, boosting education or getting better data about the world. And yet, as the Kauffman Foundation rolls on, with its vast cash pile, I cannot help chuckling at the irony of all this. Free-wheeling, dirt-poor entrepreneurs might have made America great. But these days, even the magic of innovation comes with a lobbying price tag. Or perhaps this is the ultimate form of modern entrepreneurship. In a world where money is needed to get a voice, the Kauffman Foundation is a fable for our times.
Speaking of business, Thomas Sowell writes about the business cluelessness of today’s intellectuals.
…Intellectuals who have never run any business have been remarkably confident that they know when businesses have been run wrongly or when their owners or managers are overpaid.
…Lenin said that running a business involved “extraordinarily simple operations” which “any literate person can perform,” so that those in charge of such enterprises need not be paid more than any ordinary worker.
Just three years after taking power, however, and with his post-capitalist economy facing what Lenin himself later called “ruin, starvation and devastation,” he reversed himself …
…In short, the first time that the theory of how easy it is to run a business was put to a test, it failed that test disastrously.
As the 20th century unfolded, that theory would fail repeatedly in other countries around the world, to the point where even most communist and socialist governments began to free up markets by the end of the 20th century, usually leading to higher economic growth rates, as in China and India. …