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Salon features someone asking what can be done about Obama destroying the Dem party.
From the debt ceiling fiasco to the recent rescheduling of a jobs speech at the behest of Speaker Boehner, it has not been a good summer for President Obama. Like Chinese water torture, Gallup’s daily tracking poll has shown a steady and unrelenting drip of bad news. He has been in and out of the high 30s for his approval, and in the low to mid-50s for his disapproval.
George W. Bush’s approval rating didn’t drop this low until Katrina hit. And on the economy, 71 percent of Americans disapprove of how Obama is doing his job. Even among reliably Democratic groups — union households, women and young people — he’s now unpopular.
No one, not even the president’s defenders, expect his coming jobs speech to mean anything. When the president spoke during a recent market swoon, the market dropped another 100 points. Democrats may soon have to confront an uncomfortable truth, and ask whether Obama is a suitable choice at the top of the ticket in 2012. They may then have to ask themselves if there’s any way they can push him off the top of the ticket.
That these questions have not yet been asked in any serious way shows how weak the Democratic Party is as a political organization. …
Splice Today, another liberal site asks the question, ” Is Barack Obama dumb?” The heresy of the question has them open thus;
A mere four months ago, most readers looking at the above headline would undoubtedly shake their heads and think the author was a gun-for-hire Tea Party provocateur and quickly click away from the page. But the political climate has changed dramatically this summer, and even hard-core liberals are wondering about the smarts of President Obama as they consider the perceived nightmare of President Rick Perry (who was victim of the same headline last week on Politico). It’s a measure of Obama’s current electoral pickle that some of those questioning the President’s decisions (or lack thereof) write for The New York Times and openly wonder if the man can get re-elected, whether it’s Perry or Mitt Romney who wins the GOP nomination next year.
There are usual caveats: Of course Obama isn’t illiterate or Bush-dumb because as Jesse Louis Jackson once said, “God doesn’t make junk,” and the intelligence-challenged just aren’t allowed near Harvard, much less become editor of that university’s Law Review. And man, he sure can deliver (teleprompter notwithstanding) an inspiring speech! Let’s get this out the way now: in my view, without meeting either man, it’s silly to call either Obama or Perry “dumb.” Obama’s first three years in the White House have been, depending upon your views, disappointing, lackluster or just plain disastrous. But, unlike The Wall Street Journal’s excellent op-ed columnist Bret Stephens, who argued, “Stupid is as stupid does, said the great philosopher Forrest Gump.
WaPo’s Fact Checker examines one of the president’s claims and gives him the worst rating – 4 Pinocchio’s.
… Obama’s claim of having passed the “biggest middle-class tax cut in history” is ridiculous. He might have been on more solid ground if he had claimed the “broadest” tax cut, but that doesn’t sound very historic.
We went back and forth over whether this was a three or four Pinocchio violation, until we found evidence that Obama knew he was saying a whopper. Here’s how he put it in his 2010 State of the Union speech: “We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families.” That phrasing, at least, would not have been so misleading.
Toby Harnden want to know if Hoffa and Biden will be censured by the administration.
… the statements today by Jimmy Hoffa Jr and Vice President Joe Biden demean the presidency and, tactically speaking, are stupid own goals.
Hoffa, the Teamsters president, was warming up a Detroit crowd when he said: “President Obama, this is your army, and we are ready to march. Everybody here’s got a vote. If we go back, and we keep the eye on the prize, let’s take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong.”
Biden, whose mouth has long been a liability for Obama, was at an AFL-CIO rally when he told union members: “You are the only folks keeping the barbarians from the gates…the other side has declared war on labour’s house.”
These comments were not nearly as bad as the statement last week by Congressman Andre Carson that members of the Tea Party want black people “hanging from a tree”. Let’s not get too sanctimonious here – they’re fairly common sentiments behind the scenes on both sides of the political divide.
The difference, of course, is that they were uttered publicly by someone chosen by the White House to introduce Obama and by the sitting vice-president at a time when Obama is calling for a bipartisan coming together to tackle the economy. …
More questions on the Hoffa comment from Victor Davis Hanson.
… A growing problem for Barack Obama is Barack Obama. Because he chose to be a sermonizing president, he is bound to practice what he so commonly preaches — otherwise he risks the fate of an Elmer Gantry, or sanctimonious Jimmy Carter. But on a number of topics, he has simply lost all credibility. How can Obama ever again lecture Americans on “civil discourse” and the need for common standards of polite public speech after following Hoffa’s mean-spirited rant and offering him praise? How, after these first family elite vacations to Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, Vail, etc., can Obama ever again credibly lecture on the dangers of indulgent “millionaires and billionaires,” “corporate jet owners,” “spread the wealth,” and “fat cats” whose lives are so very different from our own? And how — after confessing that his “shovel-ready” $800 billion “stimulus” targeted at “investments” and “infrastructure” in fact “was not as shovel ready as we expected” — can he request to borrow hundreds of additional billions for shovel-ready investments in infrastructure? What has now changed to ensure the next near trillion will be “shovel-ready”? …
Debra Saunders is in San Francisco so she’ll have interesting thoughts on Solyndra.
Last year, President Obama came to the Bay Area to tout “green jobs” at an event at solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra’s Fremont plant. Quoth the president: “The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra.”
On Wednesday, Solyndra announced it was shuttering its remaining Fremont factory, laying off 1,100 workers and filing for bankruptcy. It was a sorry day for the Bay Area.
I remember that day, May 26, 2010, vividly. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to greet the president and wave to the hard hats. Venture capitalists preened. Just to show how brainy and farsighted the solar crowd is, Obama reminded the audience that his energy secretary, Steven Chu, is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.
Rube that I am, I didn’t understand what Obamaland was thinking. Solyndra had not turned a profit since it was founded in 2005. The plant in which Obama stood was bankrolled with a $535 million federal loan guarantee. Two months before, PricewaterhouseCoopers questioned Solyndra’s “ability to continue as a going concern.”
If the president wants to send a positive message on the U.S. economy, I wondered, then couldn’t his people have found a California company that didn’t rely on a federal loan and actually made money? …
We started with a couple of liberals trashing the One. Now, Karl Rove takes a turn.
We can’t yet judge President Barack Obama’s speech Thursday before a joint session of Congress. But it’s not too early to render a judgment on the run-up to the address: It’s been amateur hour in the West Wing.
Eight days ago, Mr. Obama announced he would address Congress on the same evening that a Republican presidential debate was scheduled at the Reagan Library. White House press secretary Jay Carney claimed it was merely a “coincidence.” But his denial was soon undermined by comments to reporters by unnamed White House aides, who made it clear they intended to have the president drown out the GOP debate.
In any event, House Speaker John Boehner rightly nixed the date, pointing out that Wednesday was Congress’s first day back from its August recess and both the House and Senate must first pass resolutions inviting the president to appear.
Mr. Boehner was making an important point about institutional prerogatives. By setting the date and time of his own appearance, Mr. Obama was doing his best impression of an imperial president. A president addresses a joint session of Congress only at the invitation of the co-equal legislative branch. Mr. Obama didn’t seem to care. Mr. Boehner reminded him why he should.
So the president was forced to cave. …
It’s time for Late-Night Humor from Andrew Malcolm.
Letterman: Big Labor Day Weekend. The day each year we celebrate our work force. Do we even have a work force anymore?
Leno: So the U.S. economy created zero jobs in August. Zero. President Obama says don’t read too much into that. How can we? There’s nothing there. It’s zero!
Leno: Well, at least Hurricane Irene did something the economy couldn’t do. It got President Obama back into the White House.
Letterman: President Obama’s uncle was arrested for DUI. Here’s the odd part: His blood-alcohol level was actually higher than the president’s job approval.