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Peggy Noonan says the president is coming across as devious and dishonest.

… The shift started on Jan. 20, with the mandate that agencies of the Catholic Church would have to provide services the church finds morally repugnant. The public reaction? “You’re kidding me. That’s not just bad judgment and a lack of civic tact, it’s not even constitutional!” Faced with the blowback, the president offered a so-called accommodation that even its supporters recognized as devious. Not ill-advised, devious. Then his operatives flooded the airwaves with dishonest—not wrongheaded, dishonest—charges that those who defend the church’s religious liberties are trying to take away your contraceptives.

What a sour taste this all left. How shocking it was, including for those in the church who’d been in touch with the administration and were murmuring about having been misled.

Events of just the past 10 days have contributed to the shift. There was the open-mic conversation with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in which Mr. Obama pleaded for “space” and said he will have “more flexibility” in his negotiations once the election is over and those pesky voters have done their thing. On tape it looked so bush-league, so faux-sophisticated. When he knew he’d been caught, the president tried to laugh it off by comically covering a mic in a following meeting. It was all so . . . creepy.

Next, a boy of 17 is shot and killed under disputed and unclear circumstances. The whole issue is racially charged, emotions are high, and the only memorable words from the president’s response were, “If I had a son he’d look like Trayvon” At first it seemed OK—not great, but all right—but as the story continued and suddenly there were death threats and tweeted addresses and congressmen in hoodies, it seemed insufficient to the moment. At the end of the day, the public reaction seemed to be: “Hey buddy, we don’t need you to personalize what is already too dramatic, it’s not about you.”

Now this week the Supreme Court arguments on ObamaCare, which have made that law look so hollow, so careless, that it amounts to a characterological indictment of the administration. The constitutional law professor from the University of Chicago didn’t notice the centerpiece of his agenda was not constitutional? How did that happen?

Maybe a stinging decision is coming, maybe not, but in a purely political sense this is how it looks: We were in crisis in 2009—we still are—and instead of doing something strong and pertinent about our economic woes, the president wasted history’s time. …

Liz Peek at Fiscal Times says Obamacare derailed the economic recovery.

Here we go again. All eyes are on the Supreme Court as it wrestles with whether or not President Obama’s healthcare bill is constitutional. The country is divided on the merits of the law, but this we can say with certainty: Obamacare profoundly gummed up our recovery from the financial crisis.

Like every predecessor, President Obama has made mistakes. Perhaps none will cloud his legacy more that his decision to focus on overhauling our healthcare system early in his administration – before our economic recovery had gained enduring momentum.

Assuming that the $800 billion Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the stimulus, would work the magic promised by his economics team, Mr. Obama set off on his quest to guarantee healthcare for every American. The resulting food fight over the legislation – the ugly parceling out of favors in return for votes and lies told to justify passage — permanently damaged President Obama’s reputation, divided a country desperate to heal, and distracted the White House from further efforts to build employment. It was a terrible decision, and the country continues to pay for it.

It was, ironically, a decision made by a president eager to secure his legacy. Undaunted by the abject failure of Hilary Clinton to win support for universal healthcare, Mr. Obama took up the quest with enthusiasm. Just as he admitted to excessive optimism about bringing peace to the Middle East in an interview in Time Magazine, dubbing that effort “really hard,” Mr. Obama naively staked his presidency on healthcare reform. Here’s a shocker: remaking 17 percent of the economy is also “really hard.”

James Pethokoukis agrees that the president can be blamed for the weak recovery.

Not even the most die-hard, partisan Democrats would dare argue that the Obama recovery has been especially vigorous. Instead, they argue that the new president was dealt an impossible hand.

But was he?

Nearly three years after the Great Recession officially ended, the jobless rate is still above 8 percent — the longest stretch of such high unemployment since the Great Depression. Add back in all the discouraged job seekers and the part-timers who wished they had full-time gigs, and the unemployment rate is just shy of 15 percent.

While the economy is growing, it’s not growing rapidly. At this point in the typical post-World War II recovery, the economy was growing at an average pace of nearly 5 percent. The Obama recovery has managed just over 2 percent average annual GDP growth.

Indeed, take-home pay for US workers, adjusted for rising prices, has actually fallen over the last year.

Then there’s the moribund housing market. …

Kevin Williamson catches Elizabeth Warren at a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast/roast in South Boston. This profile from National Review should convince you support for Scott Brown is almost as important as defeating the kid president. After all, she claims to have “created much of the intellectual foundation” for the Occupy crowd.

Elizabeth Warren would be a catastrophe in the Senate, but she is hell on wheels when it comes to directing human traffic, which is no small thing at the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in Boston. She goes bulling her way through a crowd of faces the color of 2 percent milk, sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Southie Irishness, or rendered rosy by the effects of seriously draining down a full bar that opened at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, plowing through like she’s just graduated from a seminar in Advanced Executive Body Language, all exaggerated masculine gestures and “Yes! I am very seriously paying attention to you!” head bobs and vigorous “This is what Sincerity looks like . . . approximately!” power nods, complemented by “Move along, sir!” shoulder grips followed by quick and vigorous “Back the Hell Off” chest pats when some florid Southie denizen moves in for a hug — she is like Moses parting the kelly green sea. She is a populist in search of a people, and the wall-eyed gang shout-singing “Southie Is My Home Town” and chasing their eggs and rashers with Jameson on the rocks isn’t it. St. Patrick’s Day, as state senator Jack Hart (“Senator Hot,” in the local pronunciation) reminds the crowd, is also celebrated in Boston as Evacuation Day, and Warren looks like she is in dire need of an emergency airlift back to Cambridge. …

Villains must be identified and crucified, plain facts be damned. And that is really the truth that Elizabeth Warren is speaking when she says of Occupy Wall Street: “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do.”

Warren is everything her admirers say she is — smart, tough, principled — and almost everything her critics say — out of touch, ideological, narrow. The one inaccurate barb thrown at her is that she’s homely — “Granny Warren,” Senator Brown’s factota call her. She isn’t. If she were lined up at a party with a representative cross section of 62-year-old American women, Warren would be the one you’d ask to dance. But there is a meanness in her, a nasty little puritanical streak gone left, and her secularized Puritanism is probably the most Massachusetts thing about her. Like Hillary Clinton, she has Methodist roots and cites the Wesleyan approach as key to the development of her political thinking.

The Dem mayor of Boston is not backing her according to The Hill.

Popular Boston Mayor Tom Menino — an influential Democrat many have credited with bringing the party’s convention to his hometown in 2004 — told WBZ this week that he wasn’t taking sides in Massachusetts’s high-profile Senate race.

But Menino’s reluctance to put the weight of his campaign operation behind Harvard professor and consumer rights activist Elizabeth Warren is a tough blow for the Democrat, who is hoping to upset incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown. …

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We can’t keep our hands off the open mic kerfuffle. Our favorites continue. Here’s Charles Krauthammer. 

You don’t often hear an American president secretly (he thinks) assuring foreign leaders that concessions are coming their way, but they must wait because he’s seeking reelection and he dares not tell his own people.

Not at all, spun a White House aide in major gaffe-control mode. The president was merely explaining that arms control is too complicated to be dealt with in a year in which both Russia and the United States hold presidential elections.

Rubbish. First of all, to speak of Russian elections in the same breath as ours is a travesty. Theirs was a rigged, predetermined farce. Putin ruled before. Putin rules after.

Obama spoke of the difficulties of the Russian presidential “transition.” What transition? It’s a joke. It had no effect on Putin’s ability to negotiate anything.

As for the U.S. election, the problem is not that the issue is too complicated but that if people knew Obama’s intentions of flexibly caving on missile defense, they might think twice about giving him a second term.

After all, what is Obama doing negotiating on missile defense in the first place? We have no obligation to do so. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a relic of the Cold War, died in 2002.

We have an unmatched technological lead in this area. It’s a priceless strategic advantage that for three decades Russia has been trying to get us to yield. Why give any of it away?

To placate Putin, Obama had already in 2009 abruptly canceled the missile-defense system the Poles and Czechs had agreed to host in defiance of Russian threats. Why give away more?

It’s unfathomable. …

The GAFFE has moved Marty Peretz to write a column.

… But really the message, the important one, concerns us, here in America. It is that the American people can’t be trusted if the president is honest with them about what he proposes. More bluntly, that the American people are not trusted by their own president. Otherwise the president would tell us the truth about his intentions. And here he is, admitting his distrust of his own people to a leader of a nasty foreign government that seeks to thwart our purposes in the Middle East and elsewhere. President Obama is in cahoots with the Russian regime against America’s very body politic.

Mr. Obama’s revealing comment, and the question of missile defense, and the question of Mr. Obama’s bizarre desire for coziness with Vladimir Putin, is a matter about which our European allies have great concerns.

Additional “give” to Moscow on the nuclear issue was not something he admitted to the relevant senators that he was contemplating when they were weighing and approving the New Start Treaty a bare year ago. Yet it is a matter of deep interest to the Kremlin which, without any moral credit and without much material credit either, seems to be charting the cartography of another Cold War. (Remember, it pursued the last one from an impoverished base.) Mr. Obama’s pliancy on the matter will encourage them to think that we are, in this matter, a patsy.

And not only in this matter, alas: Mr. Obama is presiding over what might be called a withdrawalist moment in American foreign policy. Throughout his presidency, Mr. Obama has seemed strangely unmoved by the claims and values of American nationalism as they were expressed in most of the last century—for the rights of other peoples to establish nation-states after World War I, to free Europe and Asia from the bloody rule of monstrous fascist tyrannies in World War II, to defeat the egalitarian phantasm of communism as a civilized way of life. You might say that he dislikes the 20th century and refuses to accord the lessons of its bitter experiences any pride of place in his view of the world.

I don’t mean to say that the president is altogether against the use of force. In his counterterrorism policy he has been relentless. But his stewardship of the wars he inherited reveals a leader unsure of his beliefs, or else ruled by an almost cynical devotion to his own political survival. …

Craig Pirrong remembers back in the day when Obama thought he could drive a wedge between Putin and his toady Medvedev.

… We know Barry is a slow learner.  Actually, he is a no learner.  Exhibit 1: energy.  Exhibit 2: this whole Russian fiasco. BHO is proceeding blithely as if nothing has changed.  Well, nothing has really changed, because Putin was always in charge, but Barry apparently didn’t understand that.  So if Obama was sincere in his earlier statements (I know, I know), he should believe that things have changed-and he should adjust course accordingly.   But apparently not.  He is proceeding with his grandiose Russian schemes that were predicated on exploiting an imagined split in the Russian power structure, even though it is now evident even to the dimmest of the dim that said split never existed. And he is willing to do so by actively concealing his intentions from the American people.

It is bad enough to pursue a policy that is based on a delusion that anyone remotely familiar with Russia should have known to be such.  It is beyond bad to continue to pursue that policy once it has been proven to be based on a delusion. And to do so in such a deceptive way staggers the imagination.

But that’s our Barry.

The NYT is of course utterly clueless on the subject, but even the WaPo, normally in the Obama Tank, can’t swallow this. Neither should anybody else in possession of their sanity.

Andrew Malcolm says it was the open mic comments that convinced Marco Rubio he should go ahead and endorse Romney.  

… “It’s been weighing on my mind all week,” Rubio told Lewis, adding: 

“I’ve never thought about this as a political calculation. I’m just sitting back here and watching a president that just got back from overseas — where he told the Russian president to work with him and give him space so he can be more flexible if he gets re-elected.”
 
“The stakes are so high,” Rubio noted.
 
The senator said there are others he wished had run. But they didn’t. And he concluded that given the Obama threat, that Romney was “plenty conservative” and ”way better than the guy who’s there right now.”

While Rubio endorsed Romney, Malcolm notes Medvedev endorsed Obama.

… Strangely, Medvedev went on Russian TV Tuesday to defend Obama, which should set off car alarms across this country. ”There are no secrets here,” he said at a Seoul news briefing. He endorsed President Obama as “a very comfortable partner,” which you may not see on any Obama TV ad.

And the Russian leader had some advice for American politicians, presumably Romney since the other two are out of the picture now and the third never was in it. 

“All U.S. presidential candidates (should) do two things,” Medvedev said. “Use their head and consult their reason.” He said cliched criticism “smacks of Hollywood,” adding that whatever party Obama’s critic belongs to, Medvedev suggests he look at the calendar: “We are in 2012 and not the mid-1970′s.”

Well, that’s reassuring isn’t it? In the eyes of the outgoing Russian president, who’s been doing what he’s told all these years by the incoming Russian president, a former KGB leader looking out for his dream of empire-rebuilding, Russia is not America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” as Romney called it.

All the more reason for Americans to relax then, spend more money on teachers’ unions and drastically reduce national defense spending, including cuts to U.S. troop strength of at least 100,000, as Obama vows. …

American Crossroads has a new ad using the open mic faux pas.

Time to look at the other half of our wonderful week. Mark Steyn on the healthcare court hearings.

… A land of laws decays almost imperceptibly into a land of legalisms, which is why America has 50 percent of the world’s lawyers. Like most of his colleagues, lifetime legislator John Conyers (a congressman for 47 years) didn’t bother reading the 2,700-page health care bill he voted for. As he said with disarming honesty, he wouldn’t understand it even if he did:

“They get up and say, ‘Read the bill.’ What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

It would be churlish to direct readers to the video posted on the Internet of Rep. Conyers finding time to peruse a copy of Playboy while on a commuter flight to Detroit. So let’s take him at his word that it would be unreasonable to expect a legislator to know what it is he’s actually legislating into law. Who does read the thing? “What happened to the Eighth Amendment?” sighed Justice Scalia the other day. That’s the bit about cruel and unusual punishment. “You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages? Or do you expect us to give this function to our law clerks?”

He was making a narrow argument about “severability” – about whether the court could junk the “individual mandate” but pick and choose what bits of Obamacare to keep. Yet he was unintentionally making a far more basic point: A 2,700-page law is not a “law” by any civilized understanding of the term. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there’s no equality: Instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege microregulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown and unnumbered bureaucracy. It’s not just that the legislators who legislate it don’t know what’s in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can ever hope to understand it, but that even the nation’s most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.

If the Supreme Court really wished to perform a service, it would declare that henceforth no law can be longer than, say, 27 pages – or, at any rate, longer than the copy of Playboy Congressman Conyers was reading on that commuter flight.

C’mon, Justice Kennedy. Obamacare vs. Playboy: It would be a decision for the ages – and an act of bracing constitutional hygiene.

Jennifer Rubin too.

I’m with David French on this:

“While we still don’t know the outcome of the Obamacare case, that hasn’t stopped some on the left from piling on Solicitor General Donald Verrilli for allegedly “choking” during oral arguments. While I haven’t argued in front of the Supreme Court, I’ve had more than my share of state and federal appellate arguments, and these armchair quarterbacks are overlooking a few factors.

First, it’s tough for any advocate to compare well to Paul Clement. Virtually any fair-minded liberal or conservative can tell you that Clement is just about the best in the business — one of the great oral advocates of our generation. This was his Superbowl, and he delivered a performance about as “clutch” as anyone can deliver.

Second — and more importantly — it’s tough for anyone to perform brilliantly when your argument is weak on the merits.”

I’ll add a few final thoughts and look forward to the opinion in a few months.

First, the desire to impugn Verrilli stems, maybe understandably, from the frustration on the left ( How can we be losing this?!) and the lack of understanding as to how courts make their decisions. Many eloquent advocates lose a lot of Supreme Court cases because a good advocate can make a marginal case better but rarely can he save one with a central defect. At this level of judicial advocacy it’s too hard to hide the ball. …