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The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait thinks the administration’s campaign ideas are deluded.
Michael Scherer, via Mike Allen, reports that the White House is listening to cheerful historical analogies:
“In June, … White House chief of staff Bill Daley arranged a secret retreat for his senior team at Fort McNair … Historian Michael Beschloss went along as a guest speaker to help answer the one question on everyone’s mind: How does a U.S. President win re-election with the country suffering unacceptably high rates of unemployment? The historian’s lecture provided a lift for Barack Obama’s team. No iron law in politics is ever 100% accurate, Beschloss told the group. Two Presidents in the past century—Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 and Ronald Reagan in 1984—won re-election amid substantial economic suffering. Both used the same two-part strategy: FDR and Reagan argued that the country, though in pain, was improving and that their opponents, anchored in past failures, would make things worse. … The President’s aides, all but resigned to unemployment above 8% on Election Day, now see in Roosevelt and Reagan a plausible path to victory. They intend to make sure voters believe a year from now that their fortunes are improving, and they plan to persuade the American people that a Republican in the White House would be a step backward. …”
This is a reporter summarizing another’s reporter’s summary of an event no reporter actually attended, so we are looking through the glass darkly. That caveat aside, this sounds like pure delusion. Roosevelt in 1936 and Reagan in 1984 had high unemployment, yes. But they also had very rapid economic growth. …
Daily Beast’s Jill Lawrence says the suit against Boeing is going to be a wonderful weapon for the GOP in 2012.
It’s easy to imagine the 30-second TV ad: “You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a union member near Seattle because the Obama administration wants to kill jobs and capitalism and tell corporations where to expand.”
Readers of a certain age may recognize the echo of an incendiary and strategically successful 1990 campaign ad for Sen. Jesse Helms. Back then, the job had to go to “a minority because of a racial quota.” The 2012 version, rooted in a complaint the National Labor Relations Board has lodged against Boeing over a new plant in South Carolina, resonates just as deeply. Forget its bureaucratic origins: This is a tale of regional tensions, existential labor struggles, and millions of stressed-out Americans with shrinking incomes or no jobs at all.
To recap: Boeing has just built and opened a non-union 787 Dreamliner assembly plant in North Charleston. The expansion into the right-to-work state came after executives warned that strikes by the company’s unionized workforce in Everett, Wash., had set back production and affected their deliberations on where to locate the new plant. The International Association of Machinists, which is trying to protect jobs in the Puget Sound area, calls that illegal retaliation; Boeing says hogwash. Absent a settlement, the federal complaint could take years to resolve.
Several Democrats told me voters don’t and won’t care about a technical case at an obscure agency. But Republicans are working hard to make voters care .
Jennifer Rubin thinks Maureen Dowd has changed.
Maureen Dowd has had it. “Republicans who are worried about being political props have a point. The president is using the power of the incumbency and a sacred occasion for a political speech. Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed. The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.” Ouch.
John Podhoretz worked in the Reagan White House and reported on the H.W. Bush version. So he knows how one should run. He says this one is a mess.
… I spent six months working in the Reagan White House in 1988, and in a working life of 30 years, I’ve never seen any organization function as smoothly. Everybody knew his job; everybody knew how to do his job; there were systems in place to handle conflicts and arguments.
In September 1991, I began a reporting project on the re-election efforts of the White House of George H.W. Bush that carried through to the election he lost in 1992. As I watched and interviewed, it was clear that the White House organization Bush had inherited from Ronald Reagan had ceased to function effectively.
Senior officials failed to relay work goals and aims to their underlings. There was no effective process for determining policy, and the process by which the White House communicated to the rest of the government and to the public was even worse.
One telling result of this confusion and chaos was that all kinds of little things began to go wrong. Events were poorly planned. Rival drafts of speeches circulated, and no one knew which one was the official draft and which was the effort to undercut it.
The sense of directionlessness and confusion was crystallized when President Bush went to New Hampshire and read the words “Message: I Care” off a card provided by his staff. He wasn’t supposed to speak them, but to talk extemporaneously and give the impression that he cared. But no one had bothered to tell him that was the approach of the day, or that the cards weren’t speech texts. …
Michael Barone on the speech flap.
I can’t remember a more stunning rebuke of a president by a congressional leader than Speaker John Boehner’s refusal to agree to Barack Obama’s demand — er, request — that he summon a joint session of Congress to hear the president’s latest speech on the economy at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 7.
Obama’s request was regarded as a clever move by some wise guys in the left blogosphere since that was the exact time of a long-scheduled Republican presidential candidate debate at the Reagan Library. Take that, you guys!
But Boehner smoothly responded that, with Congress reconvening late that afternoon, the security sweep necessary for a presidential visit would be impossible, and invited the president to speak on Thursday. White House officials quickly agreed, scheduling the speech at 7 p.m. Eastern to avoid overlap with the first game of the National Football League season.
Not such a big deal, some people are saying. I disagree. I think it illustrates several of the weaknesses of this presidency. …
Rich Lowry has more on Solyndra.
We have seen the future, and it went bankrupt.
If the praises of high-ranking Obama-administration officials were a viable business plan, the solar-panel maker Solyndra would be an industrial juggernaut. Vice President Biden insisted that the jobs created by the California-based firm would “allow America to compete and to lead like we did in the 20th century.”
In a visit to Solyndra in May 2010, President Obama called it “a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism.” He all but redefined the traditional statement of Americanness to encompass motherhood, apple pie, and the conversion of sunlight into electricity through cylindrical thin-film solar cells, the specialty of Solyndra.
Obama and Biden were literally invested in Solyndra’s success. The company got a half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee, the first in a highly vaunted Department of Energy green-jobs program, as part of the stimulus. This was supposed to be the new economic model: government and its favored industries cooperating to lead the country into a green, politically approved recovery.
The showcase firm is now filing for Chapter 11 in an embarrassing blow to the premises of Obamanomics. At least the Obama administration can’t be accused of practicing industrial policy the old-fashioned way and picking winners. It is evidently quite ready to pick losers, too. …
Jennifer Rubin thinks Jeb Bush is part of the GOP’s strong bench.
It is fair to say that if his last name were not Bush, he would have been the consensus choice for president in 2012. Jeb Bush says that he isn’t running, and unless the current field collapses (always possible) and he can be dragged into the race he is not going to be the nominee this time around. However, he can tell Republicans a lot about what sort of candidate they should look for.
He does not represent a particular faction or region. He appeals to many constituent groups, but he does not identify with one or the other. He is unifying, not divisive within the party.
He is easy on the ears. Not every sentence ends with an exclamation mark. He does not insult or rant; he speaks as if he is having a conversation with voters. He wears well.
His ideas are revolutionary, but he is no radical. He wants to reform government, not blow it up. He’s interested in the substance of governing and can talk intelligently on a variety of issues with a level of specificity uncommon among politicians. …
Another “green” pipedream gets the once over from Margaret Wente in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
Wouldn’t you love to have an electric car? They’re clean, green and righteous. And once we make the switch, we can pull the plug on fossil fuels, air pollution, imported oil and Middle Eastern autocrats, and create millions of green jobs into the bargain.
No wonder progressive governments are so eager to plow money into electric cars. This week, Ontario’s McGuinty government (which likes to brag that Ontario is Canada’s greenest province) showered Magna International with nearly $50-million to develop new electric vehicle technologies. Magna, which is rolling in dough, admits it doesn’t need the money. But in a world where capital and jobs are mobile, such gratuities are expected.
Dalton McGuinty is a true believer in electric cars. He hopes that, by 2020, 5 per cent of the vehicles on Ontario’s roads will be electric. That’s why he’s also plowing money into charging stations and battery technologies.
There’s just one problem. The fantasy that electric cars are right around the corner doesn’t survive even the most cursory reality check. As Dennis DesRosiers, a leading auto consultant, points out, consumers simply won’t pay a $20,000 premium for a vehicle that doesn’t go very far, isn’t very convenient, and runs out of juice as soon as you turn on the air conditioner.
Consider hybrids. After a decade on the market, they’ve captured only 3 per cent of sales. To get to Mr. McGuinty’s 2020 target, green-minded Ontarians would have to buy at least 100,000 electric cars a year every year, starting right now. Total U.S. sales of electric vehicles are about 10,000 a year. …
The College Fix reports disturbing news about education majors.
Those who can’t do, teach? According to a new report, it might be true: Education majors get easier grades in college.
The study by Dr. Cody Koedel, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Missouri, compares the grades of education students with non-education students at two large state schools—and finds a gap. According to the report, “Students who take education classes at universities receive significantly higher grades than students who take classes in every other academic discipline.”
In the two schools examined in the study, Indiana University and the University of Missouri, the average grade point averages for education students were 3.66 and 3.80, and at Missouri, “every single student received an A (that is, 4.0) in one out of every five (non-freshman) undergraduate education classes.”
The high grades aren’t just exclusive to Indiana and Missouri, though. Another report by Koedel, uses data from other schools to show similar grade distributions across the country.
“The data consistently show that education departments award exceptionally favorable grades to virtually all their students in all their classes,” Koedel said. ..
NY Times has on Op-Ed in praise of teachers. Seems fitting we balance the last item. However, it is instructive that this piece is an anecdote, because other than anecdotal evidence, it is hard to find shining news coming out of the education milieu.
… From the first through third grades, I went to school in a neighboring town because it was the school where my mother got her first teaching job. I was not a great student. I was slipping in and out of depression from a tumultuous family life that included the recent divorce of my parents. I began to grow invisible. My teachers didn’t seem to see me nor I them. (To this day, I can’t remember any of their names.)
My work began to suffer so much that I was temporarily placed in the “slow” class. No one even talked to me about it. They just sent a note. I didn’t believe that I was slow, but I began to live down to their expectations.
When I entered the fourth grade, my mother got a teaching job in our hometown and I came back to my hometown school. I was placed in Mrs. Thomas’s class.
There I was, a little nothing of a boy, lost and slumped, flickering in and out of being.
She was a pint-sized firecracker of a woman, with short curly hair, big round glasses set wider than her face, and a thin slit of a mouth that she kept well-lined with red lipstick.
On the first day of class, she gave us a math quiz. Maybe it was the nervousness of being the “new kid,” but I quickly jotted down the answers and turned in the test — first.
“Whoa! That was quick. Blow, we’re going to call you Speedy Gonzales.” She said it with a broad approving smile, and the kind of eyes that warmed you on the inside.
She put her arm around me and pulled me close while she graded my paper with the other hand. I got a couple wrong, but most of them right.
I couldn’t remember a teacher ever smiling with approval, or putting their hand around me, or praising my performance in any way.
It was the first time that I felt a teacher cared about me, saw me or believed in me. It lit a fire in me. I never got a bad grade again. ..