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The president went to Ohio yesterday and Andrew Malcolm caught something new. The hand-picked Dem crowd laughed at Obama. Not with him, at him. Warms Pickerhead’s heart.
… Before you get into the guts of the speech, the part about how much you care about the economy and creating jobs and protecting the middle class and how screwed up Washington is because of other people and their sadly chronic partisan ways, you set up the audience with some genuine sappiness.
It’s worked every time. Something seasonal that allows you to show, seemingly offhand, how regular you are and how dedicated to the job you are. And really caring.
“I want to wish everybody a happy New Year,” Obama told the Ohio crowd Wednesday afternoon. “2012 is going to be a good year. (Applause.) It’s going to be a good year.”
“And one of my New Year’s resolutions is to make sure that I get out of Washington and spend time with folks like you. (Applause.) Because folks here in Ohio and all across the country — I want you to know you’re the reason why I ran for this office in the first place. You remind me what we are still fighting for.”
Then, out of the blue Wednesday, came a tiny incident. A minute moment. There had been no signs of trouble, nothing to reveal that the Real Good Talker’s real good talking had lost his touch or control of his sitting subjects. The rest of the speech continued normally. Many there probably didn’t even notice.
The president of the United States has said the next line so many times over these 1,080 days of his reign. He says it as a kind of democratic gesture, a compliment to a crowd of American citizens, a public obeisance that the most powerful man in the world is profoundly connected to them.
Obama said, “You inspire me.”
And you know how the members of that crowd in the most Democratic district of Ohio responded to that campaigning Democratic president’s professed sincerity this time?
They laughed at him.
“Okay,” Obama insisted, “you do.”
And the president, like a pro pol, continued with his speech, as if nothing had happened.
Writing in Bloomberg, Clive Crook says it is not a failure of capitalism in the West, but a failure of leadership.
With the world’s rich economies struggling and the leaders of the European Union intent on making things worse, the gravity of the economic crisis still confronting the West is hard to exaggerate. Nonetheless, it can be done.
According to what I read, we face not just the worst recession since the 1930s, but a challenge to the West’s entire economic order. The Great Recession exposes the poverty of orthodox economics. It constitutes an ideological crisis. It shows that capitalism itself is “fundamentally” flawed. If all this were true, I’d be a lot more worried about the coming year than I am — which is saying something.
A new year’s corrective is in order. Reports of the death of capitalism are greatly exaggerated.
What’s surprising is just how wrong those reports have been. Perhaps, as I write, the revolutionaries are organizing in secret, but I see no signs of a popular uprising. Please don’t say Occupy Wall Street, that risible stirring of the perpetually discontented whose principal goal seems to be “a general assembly in every backyard, on every street corner” (not all at once, I assume). It is a movement, if you can call it that, without an agenda, and as soon as it tries to get one, if not before, it will sputter out.
Where, meanwhile, is the revival of the organized Left? America’s Democrats are not exactly riding a surge of support. They are worried that Republicans — who brought the country to the brink of default last summer, and whose contest for the presidential nomination has shown their party at its most shambolic — might regain control of the Senate and send Barack Obama packing. Recent Gallup polls show a fall to barely 41 percent in the number of Americans who see their county as divided into “haves” and “have-nots.” Some 64 percent of Americans — and 48 percent of Democrats — see “big government” as a greater threat to the country than “big business,” a number near record levels. …
Jennifer Rubin has words for Newt.
Their speeches last night could not have been more different. Rick Santorum was humble and high-minded. Newt Gingrich was snide and angry. Santorum talked about America. Gingrich talked about negative ads. Santorum’s message was aimed at working-class voters, social conservatives, disillusioned independents and hawks. In other words, it’s a broad-based message. Gingrich’s message was entirely negative: anti-Ron Paul and anti-Mitt Romney (asking if voters really wanted “a Massachusetts moderate”). Santorum was glowing and smiling. Gingrich was unsmiling.
Gingrich certainly appeared angry last night, as if he’d been denied something rightfully his. He had expected to win, and finishing behind a candidate who thinks we brought 9/11 on ourselves and wants to take us back to the gold standard must sting.
But conservatives who vouched for him and ignored his egomania are seeing what that entails. In search of personal vindication, Gingrich will stay in the race, making it that more difficult for Santorum to mount a challenge to Mitt Romney. The new Newt? Not remotely. It has always been and will always be only about Newt. …
The Obama administration is again beating on lenders to make sub-prime loans. John Lott has the story.
Just days before Christmas, the Obama administration gave Bank of America a big lump of coal, levying a hefty $335 million dollar fine on the company for discriminating against minorities in its lending practices.
Supposedly Countrywide, a mortgage company bought by Bank of America in 2008, had not given out enough low interest rate loans to minorities from 2004 to 2008.
What the large fine reveals is that President Obama hasn’t learned anything from the recent financial crisis.
What the president sees as discrimination in awarding a mortgage, lenders saw as wise business decisions.
If a borrower can’t afford a down payment, Obama appears to view charging a higher interest rate as discrimination. Lenders also think that they shouldn’t treat borrowers whose sole source of income is welfare or unemployment insurance, the same as those applicants who have a job. But Obama, again, appears to view this as discrimination.
There is obviously a problem with no down payments: if the price of the house falls so that it is worth less than the loan, people will default and walk away. Similarly, when unemployment insurance or welfare runs out, borrowers might find they can’t keep paying their mortgage.
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act the Obama administration used to impose this fine was exactly what helped cause the mortgage crisis by forcing lenders to make risky loans that they didn’t want to make.
Yet, just last month, Obama put the blame for these risky loans going bad on banks for their “breathtaking greed” that “plunged our economy and the world into a crisis.” …
David Harsanyi is not sure he likes what Santorum represents.
Rick Santorum, like most Republican candidates, fashions himself the one true conservative running in 2012. If the thought of big, intrusive liberal government offends you, he might just be your man. And if you favor a big, intrusive Republican government, he’s unquestionably your candidate.
People are taking a look at Santorum. Important people. People in Iowa. Even New York Times columnist David Brooks recently celebrated his working-class appeal, newfound viability and economic populism, noting that the former Pennsylvania senator’s book “It Takes a Family“ was a ”broadside against Barry Goldwater-style conservatism” — or, in other words, a rejection of that Neanderthal fealty for liberty and free markets that has yet to be put down. Santorum’s book is crammed with an array of ideas for technocratic meddling; even the author acknowledges that some people “will reject” what he has to say “as a kind of ‘Big Government’ conservatism.”
Santorum grumbles about too many conservatives believing in unbridled “personal autonomy” and subscribing to the “idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do … that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom (and) we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues.” …
New York’s rent control is about to get to the Supreme Court. Richard Epstein has the story.
People who don’t live in New York City probably haven’t confronted the market-distorting injustices of rent control and similar rent-stabilization laws. But they may recall their outrage in 2008 upon reading that New York Rep. Charles Rangel worked the system by paying a total of $3,894 a month for four rent-stabilized luxury apartments in Harlem, about half the market price.
Remarkably, a serious constitutional challenge to rent-control and stabilization laws may finally be in the works. The challenge arises from James and Jeanne Harmon, who own a town house on West 76th Street in New York City. The upper floors are occupied by tenants who are entrenched under New York’s rent-stabilization law, paying rents at only a fraction of the value of their units. Mr. Harmon, a most persistent man whom I have from time to time advised, is attempting to strike down this law.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals blew off his suit in March, but Mr. Harmon has filed petition for certiorari in the Supreme Court, and, miracles of miracles, the high court has asked New York City and the tenants to respond. His story has been sympathetically featured in the New York Times, the Daily News and the New York Post. Perhaps there is still some life in the challenge to rent controls. There darn well ought to be. …
Here is the NY Times rent control article mentioned by Epstein.
James D. Harmon Jr. learned the value of a house as a child, shoveling coal into the furnace of one of two Upper West Side buildings owned by his grandfather, a French immigrant who worked as a waiter. “Jimmy, you take care of your building and your building will take care of you,” his grandfather told him.
“But the word he used in French wasn’t building” Mr. Harmon recalled the other day. “The word he used in French was ‘maison,’ which means home.”
Now Mr. Harmon, 68, who grew up in one of those buildings — a bow-fronted town house on West 76th Street near Central Park — has gone to the United States Supreme Court contending that New York City’s rent laws constitute a “taking” of his property without just compensation, a violation of his constitutional rights.
The regulations are meant to support the government’s goal of maintaining affordable housing for its citizens. Instead, he says, the laws have forced him and his family to shoulder the government’s burden and extend what is essentially “privatized welfare” to rent-stabilized tenants who are paying rent 59 percent below market rates and who have rights of succession to their lodgings in his house.
“Put yourself in our position,” Mr. Harmon, a former federal prosecutor, said of himself and his wife, Jeanne. “Suppose somebody told you, you’ve got an extra bedroom, we’d like to put someone in there for as long as they want to stay, and you have to take care of them for the rest of their lives and the rest of your life. That’s really what this is like.” …
Andrew Malcolm with late-night humor.
Conan: Kobe Bryant’s wife could make as much as $75 million from their divorce. In other words, Kobe’s wife can now afford Lakers’ tickets.
Conan: Dunkin’ Donuts is opening all over the Mideast. That’s good news because one day the Israelis and Palestinians will be too fat to fight with each other.