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NY Post OpEd compares two Dem presidents.
There is a lot of luck involved in a presidency; it wasn’t because of Jimmy Carter’s personal incompetence that the 1980 Operation Eagle Claw helicopter mission to rescue the hostages in Iran failed. Similarly, it’s not mainly President Obama’s fault that the economic recovery is so weak — but he is hardly the one to make this argument after blaming President Bush for the 2008 financial crisis. Presidential decisions aren’t always at the core of everything.
Nevertheless, the comparisons of Obama to Carter have something to them besides the dull gray feeling of each presidency, the four-year wallow in economic quicksand.
Both men were borne into office on a surge of good feeling — a clean slate, renewal, possibility bordering on exhilaration. And both men seemed hurt, embittered and overwhelmed when history fell short of hype. …
Stephen Moore compares the boom in North Dakota with the gloom in California.
In his speech last week responding to high gas prices, President Barack Obama insisted that “we can’t just drill our way out of” our energy woes. Actually, we can—and if the president wants proof, he should travel to boomtown USA: Williston, North Dakota.
Williston sits atop the Bakken Shale, which will later this year be producing more oil than any other site in the country, surpassing even Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, the longtime leader in domestic output. This once-sleepy town is what the Gold Rush might have looked like had it happened in the time of McDonald’s, Wal-Mart and Home Depot. And the oil rush is making Dakotans rich in a hurry, with farmers and other landowners becoming overnight millionaires from lucrative royalties and leases. One retired farmer tells me that, thanks to oil rigs churning on his property, he suddenly has a net worth north of $30 million.
When I ask how many people live in Williston, which had a population of 12,000 in 2005, longtime residents shrug and offer different answers: 20,000? 25,000? 30,000? Every night, hundreds of workers sleep in the hulls of their trucks or in temporary housing encampments like soldiers in a war zone. New homes are popping up at breakneck speed. McDonald’s is offering workers $18 an hour plus a “signing bonus.” In Williston, certainly, America remains the land of opportunity. …
Matthew Continetti on the president’s shameless campaign.
… Since he lacks a significant and popular domestic achievement, the president seems to have concluded that the way to a second term is through the mobilization of key constituencies rather than a broad-based appeal to middle America. He combines these appeals with cheap gimmicks to generate publicity and deflect attention from the Republican primary. Now that his job is in trouble, the man who enthralled millions during the campaign of 2008 has been reduced to just another transactional political panderer. The gloss is off. Even the liberal Washington Post writer Dana Milbank says White House hiring practices make “a joke of the spirit of reform he promised.”
The new Obama strategy was baldly transparent during the president’s recent address to the United Auto Workers conference in Washington. The inspirational rhetoric and pleas for American unity were replaced with fiery and combative words directed at opponents of the auto bailout. A majority of voters may continue to oppose the government intervention in GM and Chrysler, but you would not know that from listening to the president. GM and Chrysler’s recent good fortune has led the Democrats to pronounce the bailout a stunning success. But, if the bailout worked so well, why does the federal government still own around 30 percent of GM? (Clearly Obama understands that the bailouts are a problem: On Thursday, the government began to reduce its stake in AIG—to the ludicrously high share of 70 percent.)
The timing of Obama’s speech to the UAW could not have been accidental. As the president was delivering his broadside against his political adversaries and rallying labor’s shock troops, Republicans held primaries in Michigan and Arizona. Again and again, the president has demonstrated an eagerness to interfere with the GOP’s moments in the spotlight. Think of the time he hastily scheduled a rebuttal to Vice President Cheney’s 2009 speech on detention and interrogation policy. Or recall his Midwest bus tour, timed to coincide with the kickoff of the Republican campaign at the Ames, Iowa, straw poll. Or remember this past Tuesday, when Obama decided that the Republicans’ Super Tuesday elections would be a good time to hold his first press conference in months. …
Major Garrett says the re-elect effort is worried about GOP super pacs.
… Obama’s reelection campaign has a split personality when it comes to the general election. One side is confident and growing more so about the turbulent GOP primary, an improving U.S. economy, and better numbers for Obama in swing states. The other side harbors fears bordering on paranoia about massive spending by the GOP and outside super PACs for the party’s nominee.
“There is already unprecedented super-PAC spending going on,” Messina said. “There will be super-PAC spending in key states against us. We have to be prepared for that.”
To prepare for it, Obama’s campaign has put the rest of the Democratic Party on a starvation diet. Messina and senior White House adviser David Plouffe (Obama’s 2008 campaign manager) have told top Democrats that they won’t receive any cash transfers from Obama’s campaign or the Democratic National Committee. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sought commitments for $30 million, the amount distributed to them in the 2008 and 2010 election cycles. Not this time.
Messina said that the campaign fears outside groups will devote upward of $500 million to anti-Obama super-PAC TV ads as soon as the GOP nominee (likely to be Romney) is decided. By comparison, GOP nominee John McCain spent $333 million on his campaign, and outside groups spent $26 million supporting him. Obama spent $730 million in that campaign, and outside groups spent $88 million attacking him.
“We are in a whole new world here,” senior campaign adviser David Axelrod said. “The president has taken on some very powerful interests and the Citizens United ruling allows those interest groups to siphon off unlimited amounts of money. We would be insane not to be worried about that. We believe we have the strongest candidate, but money does matter.”
The Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case made it easier for individuals, corporations, and labor unions to donate unlimited amounts of money to independent political action committees, now known as super PACs. Super PACs supporting Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have kept those campaigns afloat, even though federal law prohibits any direct coordination.
Reid and Pelosi, according to Democrats aware of the sit-down with Plouffe and Messina, took their medicine without complaint. Democrats close to the situation said that the leaders emerged feeling that Team Obama was in full-blown panic mode about the need for campaign cash this fall. “They are just freaked out about super-PAC spending,” said one of Pelosi’s top allies. …
Turns out our next president has a sense of humor. Molly Ball has the story in The Atlantic.
When Mitt Romney, campaigning in Mississippi on Friday, said “y’all,” the collective cringe from the political world was practically audible. Another awkward moment from the GOP’s animatronic front-runner! Another terribly off-key pander!
But maybe it was something else: a wry joke.
For all the hype about his woodenness, Romney, I submit, actually has the most sophisticated — and underappreciated — sense of humor of any presidential candidate. It is dry, self-deprecating and a bit dark, a far cry from the safely hokey laugh lines of most politicians on the stump. And it bespeaks a confidence and flair not often attributed to the much-maligned candidate.
This is the man who famously went to Michigan, the state he grew up in and then left for good, and praised it thus: “The trees are the right height.” You pretty much can’t get a better absurdist parody of politicians’ vapid sure-is-nice-to-be-here patter than that.
Romney’s Southern quip was similar — a knowing play on how glaringly out-of-place he seemed. …