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Washington Examiner catches the president sounding like Jimmy Carter. 

“Gov. Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later,” President Obama said in a CBS interview last night, criticizing Romney’s reaction to the embassy attack in Cairo. Romney criticized the Obama administration’s ‘apology’ in response to the attacks on the embassy and subsequent failure to condemn the attacks right away.

Obama’s remarks, however, echo frequent criticisms made by President Jimmy Carter of Ronald Reagan, then his opponent for the presidency.    

Carter criticized Reagan’s views on foreign policy during his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1980, slamming Reagan for living in a “fantasy world” and noting his inability to understand the “complex global changes” in foreign policy.

“It’s a make believe world. A world of good guys and bad guys, where some politicians shoot first and ask questions later,” Carter said, …

However, that didn’t stop Carter from criticizing Obama. Fox News has the story. Says here Carter thinks Morsi is a peaceful democrat. Pickerhead compares that to the praise Carter had in 1980 for Robert Mugabe who laid waste to the country of Zimbabwe.

Former President Jimmy Carter spoke to students at DrakeUniversity in Des Moines today and was asked if he agreed with what Obama said about Egypt:

Carter: “Egypt is an ally of the US, we know Egypt well.”

President Obama had earlier stated during an interview, “You know, I don’t think that we would consider them an ally, but we do not consider them an enemy.”

Carter went on to talk about Egypt’s new President, Mohamed Morsi, saying that he knew him well and that they had met.  He added that Morsi was dedicated to peace and a democratic government.

Daniel Halper mines another nugget from Woodward’s book. Seems ex Budget Director Peter Orszag gave Valerie Jarrett a preview of one of his NY Times columns after he left the White House.

… Orszag sent his draft to Valerie Jarrett. It was about three days before the column was scheduled to run. Here’s a draft, he wrote in an email to her. Let me know if you have any comments.”

Jarrett did have a comment for Orszag, according to Woodward:

“Thanks, Jarrett wrote back. She offered no comments on the draft. The column ran as scheduled, unchanged from the draft Orszag had provided the White House.

Orszag was in an airport when he got Jarrett’s email. “How could you have done this? It’s ridiculous. You’re so disloyal.”

“You have got to realize the health care bill is wildly unpopular”, Orszag replied. “Every single speech I give, if I lead with this reflection on its imperfections, the dynamic changes. People will then listen. You can’t hold this law out as perfect. It won’t sell. People think it’s a piece of crap. The weaknesses must be acknowledged. Then it’s credible to say, here’s why it is good and why it is the only thing that will work.”

Jarrett’s answer was delivered with Politburo finality: “You have burned your bridges.” …

Ever hear of Norman Borlaug? Michigan Capitol Confidential tells how he saved hundreds of millions of lives.

Called “arguably the greatest American in the 20th century,” during his 95 years, Norman Borlaug probably saved more lives than any other person.

He is one of just six people to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And yet Borlaug, who died three years ago today, is scarcely known in his own country.

Born in Iowa in 1914, Borlaug spent most of his life in impoverished nations inventing, improving and teaching the “Green Revolution.” His idea was simple: Make developing countries self sufficient in food by teaching them how to use modern agricultural techniques that are easy to implement. Borlaug spent most of his time in Mexico, Pakistan and India, and focused on five areas: crop cultivars (seeds), irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides and mechanization. His successes were remarkable.

In 1950, Mexico imported over half of its food. Thanks to Borlaug’s efforts to convince farmers there to try his techniques, Mexican food production increased 10-fold by 1970, and the country had become a net exporter. …

… Shockingly, the Green Revolution was almost entirely funded by developing countries and private charities (notably the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations), rather than by the governments of prosperous nations. At the time, the overwhelming view of academic and political elites in the wealthy countries was that it was already too late.

Biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller “The Population Bomb” typified this attitude. Ehrlich wrote, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over … In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” He later said, “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971,” and “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.” Required reading at many colleges, Ehrlich’s book stated that it was “a fantasy” that India would “ever” feed itself.

Ehrlich, who was wrong about several things, was ignorant of what Norman Borlaug was already in the process of accomplishing. …

… No good deed goes unpunished, so we shouldn’t be surprised that Borlaug was attacked by proponents of the trendy new faith of radical environmentalism because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Gregg Easterbrook quotes Borlaug saying the following in the 1990s:

“(Most Western environmentalists) have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.” …

The above piece mentioned the execrable Paul Ehrlich and this is a good place for another great writing effort by John Tierney. This time it is about the famous wager between the free market economist Julian Simon and Ehrlich, who was the darling of the bien pensants during the last half of the 20th Century. Johnny Carson had Ehrlich on the Tonight Show 20 times.

In 1980 an ecologist and an economist chose a refreshingly unacademic way to resolve their differences. They bet $1,000. Specifically, the bet was over the future price of five metals, but at stake was much more — a view of the planet’s ultimate limits, a vision of humanity’s destiny. It was a bet between the Cassandra and the Dr. Pangloss of our era.

They lead two intellectual schools — sometimes called the Malthusians and the Cornucopians, sometimes simply the doomsters and the boomsters — that use the latest in computer-generated graphs and foundation-generated funds to debate whether the world is getting better or going to the dogs. The argument has generally been as fruitless as it is old, since the two sides never seem to be looking at the same part of the world at the same time. Dr. Pangloss sees farm silos brimming with record harvests; Cassandra sees topsoil eroding and pesticide seeping into ground water. Dr. Pangloss sees people living longer; Cassandra sees rain forests being decimated. But in 1980 these opponents managed to agree on one way to chart and test the global future. They promised to abide by the results exactly 10 years later — in October 1990 — and to pay up out of their own pockets.

The bettors, who have never met in all the years they have been excoriating each other, are both 58-year-old professors who grew up in the Newark suburbs. The ecologist, Paul R. Ehrlich, has been one of the world’s better-known scientists since publishing “The Population Bomb” in 1968. More than three million copies were sold, and he became perhaps the only author ever interviewed for an hour on “The Tonight Show.” When he is not teaching at StanfordUniversity or studying butterflies in the Rockies, Ehrlich can generally be found on a plane on his way to give a lecture, collect an award or appear in an occasional spot on the “Today” show. This summer he won a five-year MacArthur Foundation grant for $345,000, and in September he went to Stockholm to share half of the $240,000 Crafoord Prize, the ecologist’s version of the Nobel. His many personal successes haven’t changed his position in the debate over humanity’s fate. He is the pessimist.

The economist, Julian L. Simon of the University of Maryland, often speaks of himself as an outcast, which isn’t quite true. His books carry jacket blurbs from Nobel laureate economists, and his views have helped shape policy in Washington for the past decade. But Simon has certainly never enjoyed Ehrlich’s academic success or popular appeal. On the first Earth Day in 1970, while Ehrlich was in the national news helping to launch the environmental movement, Simon sat in a college auditorium listening as a zoologist, to great applause, denounced him as a reactionary whose work “lacks scholarship or substance.” Simon took revenge, first by throwing a drink in his critic’s face at a faculty party and then by becoming the scourge of the environmental movement. When he unveiled his happy vision of beneficent technology and human progress in Science magazine in 1980, it attracted one of the largest batches of angry letters in the journal’s history.

In some ways, Simon goes beyond Dr. Pangloss, the tutor in “Candide” who insists that “All is for the best in this best of possible worlds.” Simon believes that today’s world is merely the best so far. Tomorrow’s will be better still, because it will have more people producing more bright ideas. He argues that population growth constitutes not a crisis but, in the long run, a boon that will ultimately mean a cleaner environment, a healthier humanity and more abundant supplies of food and raw materials for everyone. And this progress can go on indefinitely because — “incredible as it may seem at first,” he wrote in his 1980 article — the planet’s resources are actually not finite. Simon also found room in the article to criticize, among others, Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, Newsweek, the National Wildlife Federation and the secretary general of the United Nations. It was titled “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of False Bad News.”

An irate Ehrlich wondered how the article had passed peer review at America’s leading scientific journal. “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off his shoes to count to 20?” Ehrlich asked in a rebuttal written with his wife, Anne, also an ecologist at Stanford. They provided the simple arithmetic: the planet’s resources had to be divided among a population that was then growing at the unprecedented rate of 75 million people a year. The Ehrlichs called Simon the leader of a “space-age cargo cult” of economists convinced that new resources would miraculously fall from the heavens. For years the Ehrlichs had been trying to explain the ecological concept of “carrying capacity” to these economists. They had been warning that population growth was outstripping the earth’s supplies of food, fresh water and minerals. But they couldn’t get the economists to listen.

“To explain to one of them the inevitability of no growth in the material sector, or . . . that commodities must become expensive,” the Ehrlichs wrote, “would be like attempting to explain odd-day-even-day gas distribution to a cranberry.”

Ehrlich decided to put his money where his mouth was by responding to an open challenge issued by Simon to all Malthusians. Simon offered to let anyone pick any natural resource — grain, oil, coal, timber, metals — and any future date. If the resource really were to become scarcer as the world’s population grew, then its price should rise. Simon wanted to bet that the price would instead decline by the appointed date. Ehrlich derisively announced that he would “accept Simon’s astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in.” He then formed a consortium with John Harte and John P. Holdren, colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley specializing in energy and resource questions.

In October 1980 the Ehrlich group bet $1,000 on five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — in quantities that each cost $200 in the current market. A futures contract was drawn up obligating Simon to sell Ehrlich, Harte and Holdren these same quantities of the metals 10 years later, but at 1980 prices. If the 1990 combined prices turned out to be higher than $1,000, Simon would pay them the difference in cash. If prices fell, they would pay him. The contract was signed, and Ehrlich and Simon went on attacking each other throughout the 1980′s. …

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Nile Gardiner posts on Obama’s latest snub to Israel.

… It is hard to think of another item on the president’s agenda that week which is more important than talks with the Israeli prime minister against the backdrop of the rising threat on the horizon of a nuclear-armed Iran. Significantly the president has reportedly found time to make another appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman during the same time period.

The snub to the Israeli prime minister reflects both Barack Obama’s personal dislike of Benjamin Netanyahu as well as a broader lack of empathy on the part of the Obama administration for Israel. As I’ve noted in previous pieces, the Obama White House and State Department have a long track record of insulting Israel and its leaders amidst significant tensions between Washington and Jerusalem over a range of issues, from Israeli settlements on the West Bank to differences of approach towards the Iranian nuclear threat.

For a revealing insight into Obama’s sneering disdain for the Israeli PM, look no further than this report by  Israeli media outlet Ynetnews (based on French sources) following last year’s G-20 summit, which captured the unguarded private views of both the US and French presidents when discussing the Israeli leader: …

 Noemie Emery says there is one area where the president excels. 

Barack Obama is a wonderful salesman of a singular product: himself. His effect and biography make a spectacular package. Slender and graceful, with a remarkable speaking voice, his facsimiles stare at you from fashion spreads everywhere, while his life story — up from obscure and unlikely beginnings, black and white, Kenya and Kansas, the strange and the all too corny and familiar — is the story of how life should be.

Obama tells his story through his personal medium really well: writing best-selling biographies before he was 40, making himself a senator on the strength of these stories, and then president on the strength of a speech. The upside of this is that he portrays himself beautifully. The downside is that this seems to be all he can do.

In the Illinois state Senate, he voted “present.” In the United States Senate, he sponsored little in the way of real legislation. As president, he has failed so badly to do what he promised that he has been forced to downgrade his slogan from “Yes, We Can!” to “No One Could Have Done It,” to “Maybe We Can’t Do It Yet.” …

Lo and behold, a NY Times columnist thinks buying organic food is as wasteful as recycling. Pickerhead made up the thing about recycling. However, a long time ago John Tierney writing in the Times Magazine suggested recycling is wasteful.   

At some point — perhaps it was gazing at a Le Pain Quotidien menu offering an “organic baker’s basket served with organic butter, organic jam and organic spread” as well as seasonally organic orange juice — I found I just could not stomach the “O” word or what it stood for any longer.

Organic has long since become an ideology, the romantic back-to-nature obsession of an upper middle class able to afford it and oblivious, in their affluent narcissism, to the challenge of feeding a planet whose population will surge to 9 billion before the middle of the century and whose poor will get a lot more nutrients from the two regular carrots they can buy for the price of one organic carrot.

An effective form of premium branding rather than a science, a slogan rather than better nutrition, “organic” has oozed over the menus, markets and malls of the world’s upscale neighborhood at a remarkable pace. In 2010, according to the Organic Trade Association, organic food and drink sales totaled $26.7 billion in the United States, or about 4 percent of the overall market, having grown steadily since 2000. The British organic market is also large; menus like to mention that bacon comes from pampered pigs at the Happy Hog farm down the road.

In the midst of the fad few questions have been asked. But the fact is that buying organic baby food, a growing sector, is like paying to send your child to private school: It is a class-driven decision that demonstrates how much you love your offspring but whose overall impact on society is debatable.

So I cheered this week when Stanford University concluded, after examining four decades of research, that fruits and vegetables labeled organic are, on average, no more nutritious than their cheaper conventional counterparts. The study also found that organic meats offered no obvious health advantages. And it found that organic food was not less likely to be contaminated by dangerous bacteria like E.coli.

The takeaway from the study could be summed up in two words: Organic, schmorganic. That’s been my feeling for a while. …

And here is the 1996 John Tierney article on the wastefulness of recycling.

AS THEY PUT ON PLASTIC GLOVES FOR THEIR first litter hunt, the third graders knew what to expect. They knew their garbage. It was part of their science curriculum at Bridges Elementary, a public school on West 17th Street in Manhattan. They had learned the Three R’s — Reduce, Reuse, Recycle — and discussed how to stop their parents from using paper plates. For Earth Day they had read a Scholastic science publication, “Inside the World of Trash.” For homework, they had kept garbage diaries and drawn color-coded charts of their families’ trash. So they were primed for the field experiment on this May afternoon.

“We have to help the earth,” Natasha Newman explained as she and her classmates dashed around the school collecting specimens. Their science teacher, Linnette Aponte, mediated disputes — “I saw that gum wrapper first!” — and supervised the subsequent analysis of data back in the classroom. The students gathered around to watch her dump out their bags on the floor

Do you see any pattern as I’m emptying it?” Miss Aponte asked.

“Yeah, it stinks.”

“Everybody’s chewing Winterfresh.”

“A lot of paper napkins.”

“It’s disgusting.”

“They’re throwing away a folder. That’s a perfectly good folder!”

“It’s only half a folder.”

“Well, they could find the other half and attach them together.”

Miss Aponte finished emptying the last bag. “We’ve been learning about the need to reduce, reuse and recycle,” she said, and pointed at the pile. “How does all this make you feel?”

“Baaaad,” the students moaned.

Miss Aponte separated out two bottles, the only items in the pile that could be recycled. She asked what lesson the students had learned. The class sentiment was summarized by Lily Finn, the student who had been so determined to save the half folder: “People shouldn’t throw away paper or anything. They should recycle it. And they shouldn’t eat candy in school.”

Lily’s judgment about candy sounded reasonable, but the conclusion about recycling seemed to be contradicted by the data on the floor. The pile of garbage included the equipment used by the children in the litter hunt: a dozen plastic bags and two dozen pairs of plastic gloves. The cost of this recycling equipment obviously exceeded the value of the recyclable items recovered. The equipment also seemed to be a greater burden on the environment, because the bags and gloves would occupy more space in a landfill than the two bottles.

Without realizing it, the third graders had beautifully reproduced the results of a grand national experiment begun in 1987 — the year they were born, back when the Three R’s had nothing to do with garbage. That year a barge named the Mobro 4000 wandered thousands of miles trying to unload its cargo of Long Islanders’ trash, and its journey had a strange effect on America. The citizens of the richest society in the history of the planet suddenly became obsessed with personally handling their own waste.

Believing that there was no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that recycling was their only option. Their intentions were good and their conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes makes sense — for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. And since there’s no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there’s no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren’t good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups — politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations — while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.

The obvious temptation is to blame journalists, who did a remarkable job of creating the garbage crisis, often at considerable expense to their own employers. Newspaper and magazine publishers, whose products are a major component of municipal landfills, nobly led the crusade against trash, and they’re paying for it now through regulations that force them to buy recycled paper — a costly handicap in their struggle against electronic rivals. It’s the first time that an industry has conducted a mass-media campaign informing customers that its own product is a menace to society.

But the press isn’t solely responsible for recycling fervor; the public’s obsession wouldn’t have lasted this long unless recycling met some emotional need. Just as the third graders believed that their litter run was helping the planet, Americans have embraced recycling as a transcendental experience, an act of moral redemption. We’re not just reusing our garbage; we’re performing a rite of atonement for the sin of excess. Recycling teaches the themes that previous generations of schoolchildren learned from that Puritan classic, “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

Andrew Malcolm with late night. 

Leno: Bill Clinton says Obama inherited a deeply-damaged economy and if reelected, he’ll inherit an even more deeply-damaged economy.

Conan: President Obama’s campaign donors are promised exclusive access to Joe Biden. And for an extra $10,000, absolutely no access to Joe Biden.

Leno: President Obama moved his big convention speech indoors from a 74,000 seat stadium over the threat of severe weather. A weather phenomenon known as empty seats.

Leno: The good news is China has decided it will loan more money to the U.S. The bad news: The co-signer is Greece.

Leno: Democrat convention at Time Warner Cable Arena and tomorrow at the Bank of America Stadium. Great thinking–the two things Americans love most–banks and cable companies.

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Here’s a 9/11 recollection from Sarah Hoyt.

Has it really been eleven years?

It was a beautiful day.  I remember that.  I got up to check email, and the AOL homepage had something about a plane flying into a building.  I thought it was a goofy thing, like that idiot who had earlier flown into – was it the EmpireStateBuilding? – in a small plane.

It was a beautiful morning, and I had a kid to take to school.  His older brother could walk on his own the five blocks to elementary, but Marshall – in Kindergarten – went in an hour later, and at any rate was too little to walk alone. (And too sleepy.  I used to get him up, bathe him, shovel breakfast into his mouth and walk him to school and if I were very lucky, he’d wake up when we got there.)

So I walked him to school, waited till the teacher took him in and walked back home, under a cloudless sky, across our little mountain village, looking forward to our writers’ group meeting that Saturday, feeling financially stable for the first time in my adult life (I’d just sold my first book) and thinking “This is when we reached adulthood.  From now on, it’s the easy part.  Things will only get better.”

When I got home, I went to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee before going up to write.  And the phone rang.  It was Rebecca Lickiss and she was screaming for me to turn on the news. …

… And as an author to an Author I have to admire the plotting touch, where the three burly and brave guys who spearheaded the fight back in flight 93 were a born again man, a Jewish man, and a gay man.  Can you imagine any group designed to give more heart burn to the enemies that brought down the towers and who tried to use flight 93 as a weapon?

I can’t either.  But, more importantly, I can’t imagine any other culture, any other country, any other place where those three would have banded together, immediately – instinctively – putting aside any perceived differences, thinking only of trying to save the defenseless, laying down their lives for others.

Their lives were forfeit, but they died free men.  They died heroes.  More importantly, they died Americans.

Surely a nation that produces such men will not perish from this Earth.

We will not go quietly into that good night.

We’re the land of the free and the home of the brave.  And we will stand.

Rolling Stone, in an effort to trash the Romney campaign, rolled out Matt Taibbi. A Fortune editor outlines Taibbi’s errors.

Very few of my friends understand private equity, let alone care about it. But some of them wrote me this past weekend, after reading Matt Taibbi’s new cover story for Rolling Stone about Mitt Romney’s time with Bain Capital. For example, this was from my former college housemate Andrew:

“I read the Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Reading it you can obviously see that the guy has a fairly biased opinion on private equity and Wall Street dealings in general. What’s the industry’s defense of PE? I assume the truth is somewhere between Mitt’s version of Bain as a massive jobs creator and Gordon Gekko-esque corporate raiders.”

Andrew has good instincts. Taibbi took out the long knives for this one, which means he sacrificed a bit of accuracy for potency.

His overall thesis is correct: There is a fundamental hypocrisy in a former leveraged buyout investor railing against America’s ballooning debt. Leveraged buyouts, by definition, add debt to a company’s balance sheet — weighing it down in the short-term so that it can (hopefully) thrive in the long-term. Romney defenders point out that America is not the same as a private equity-backed company, a truism that only goes to underscore the flimsiness of using Romney’s Bain Capital experience as a singular qualification for the Oval Office.

Unfortunately, Taibbi also takes a lot of wild swings at the broader private equity market that don’t ring true. So many, in fact, that his valid critique of Romney’s candidacy gets lost.

Here is an accounting: …

Mark Steyn comments on Sandra Fluke’s star turn at the DNC.

… Sandra Fluke is one of them. She completed her education a few weeks ago – at the age of 31, or Grade 25. Before going to Georgetown, she warmed up with a little light BS in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Cornell. She then studied law at one of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, where tuition costs 50 grand a year. The average starting salary for a Georgetown Law graduate is $160,000 per annum – first job, first paycheck.

So this is America’s best and brightest – or, at any rate, most expensively credentialed. Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. She says the choice facing America is whether to be “a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn’t apply to our bodies and our voices” – and, even as the words fall leaden from her lips, she doesn’t seem to comprehend that Catholic institutions think their “voices” ought to have freedom, too, or that Obamacare seizes jurisdiction over “our bodies” and has 16,000 new IRS agents ready to fine us for not making arrangements for “our” pancreases and “our” bladders that meet the approval of the commissars. Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she’ll be fined. What a bleak and reductive concept of “personal freedom.”

America is so broketastically brokey-broke that one day, in the grim future that could be, society may even be forced to consider whether there is any meaningful return on investment for paying a quarter-million bucks to send the scions of wealth and privilege to school till early middle-age to study Reproductive Justice. But, as it stands right now, a Cornell and Georgetown graduate doesn’t understand the central reality of the future her elders have bequeathed her. There’s no “choice” in the matter. It’s showing up whatever happens in November. All the election will decide is whether America wants to address that reality, or continue to live in delusion – like a nation staggering around with a giant condom rolled over its collective head. …

Conn Carroll says the Obama recovery is turning into the Obama depression. 

President Obama’s convention speech last week never mentioned “unemployment” or “unemployed.” Now we know why. Today’s Department of Labor monthly jobs report was an absolutely disaster for Obama and America. While U.S. employers did create 96,000 jobs last month, 368,000 Americans lost hope of finding a job and stopped looking for work entirely. Or as Paul Ryan said on CNBC, “For every net job created, nearly four people left the workforce.” Obama has now presided over a record 43 months of unemployment above 8 percent.

There simply was no good news in today’s jobs report. June and July job creation was revised down a total of 41,000. The manufacturing sector lost 15,000 jobs. If the size of the U.S. labor force rate had stayed the same as last month, unemployment would have risen to 8.4 percent. If the same number of Americans were looking for work today, as were looking for work when Obama came into officer, unemployment would have risen to 11.2 percent.

In fact, as the chart below shows, the U.S. economy actually lost jobs according to the survey the Labor Department uses to calculate the unemployment rate. And not for the first time. The U.S. workforce has declined for each of the last two months as has the number of employed Americans. The Obama recovery is rapidly descending into the Obama recession.

Ed Morrissey has more on Woodward’s book. This is a good read. Among other items you will learn Obama called Paul Ryan – Jack Ryan and you can see the White House try to lie its way out of the fact they trashed Ryan on purpose.

Bob Woodward’s new book The Price of Politics might make a lot of political trouble for Barack Obama in this election.  The book looks at the leadership failures that led to the debt-ceiling and budget crises last year, and the historic downgrading of US bonds in August 2011.  One of the reasons for the intense polarization was a speech given by Obama earlier in the year that attacked the House Budget Chair’s proposals as un-American — while he sat in the (room).  In interviews conducted by Woodward for the book, Obama admitted that the attack was “a mistake“: …

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Rand Simberg on how Romney can fight the Democrat’s false narratives.

How Romney can fight back against “The Big Lie.”

We know what we’re going to hear from the Democrats this week at their convention, and for the next nine weeks until the election. They clearly are having trouble making the case for their tenure, not even being able to articulate a consistent and coherent answer to the question of whether we’re better off than we were four years ago.

So they are going to have to somehow make the voters fear the unknown over their recent bitter economic experience. We’ve already heard the talking point from the president himself: that Romney is proposing that we go back to the bad, old, failed Bush policies that created the mess we’re currently in. In fact (like much of the Obama campaign strategy), it is a retread from 2008, when (on zero basis) the theme was that a McCain victory would be a continuation of the Bush administration.

Accepting this argument requires that two premises be acknowledged: First, that it was the Bush policies that created the mess; and second, that Romney’s proposals are a return to them. Both of these premises are false, but the Republicans have done a poor job of pushing back against either of them. If they don’t do a better one, there is some danger that they will actually gain traction with swing voters.

The first premise is not just false, but actually turns things on their head. …

… The real cause of the current mess (ignoring the upcoming fiscal disaster caused by uncontrolled spending and deficits) was the housing boom and bust. The boom was caused by policies going back decades to encourage people to buy houses they couldn’t afford and to coerce and extort banks to lend them the money to do so. While this had some support from Republicans, it was a policy primarily driven by Democrats. It wasn’t just the free hand given to Fannie and Freddie, something that the Bush administration attempted to rein in, but to no avail thanks to corrupt Democrats like Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. It was also the action of “community organizers” like Barack Obama, who himself sued Citibank in the 1990s to compel them to give out loans to people who couldn’t afford them. As The Independent pointed out four years ago, Democratic fingerprints were all over the housing crisis: …

IBD Editors lay the blame for the real estate bust at Clinton’s feet.

History has rarely seen anything as surreal as former President Clinton riding into Charlotte as a hero rescuing America and President Obama from failed Republican economic policies.

Clinton was the architect of the financial crisis, yet he was able to use the Democratic National Convention to polish his phony credentials as economic genius.

He brazenly warned that GOP challengers Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would wreck the economy by going back to “the same old policies that got us in trouble in the first place.”

“They want to cut taxes for high-income Americans even more than President Bush did. They want to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit federal bailouts.”

This may be Clinton’s biggest whopper yet. Truth is, it was his own reckless housing policies that wrecked the economy.

Compared to his plan to nationalize the health care system, his housing policy seemed a small and rather innocuous plank in his domestic agenda, and few paid it much mind. But under his National Homeownership Strategy, Clinton took more than 100 executive actions to pry bank lending windows wide open.

First, using his executive order powers, he marshaled 10 federal agencies under the little-known Interagency Task Force on Fair Lending to enforce new “flexible” mortgage underwriting guidelines to combat “lending discrimination in any form.”

For the first time, banks were ordered to qualify low-income minorities with spotty credit.

The 1994 policy planted the seeds of the mortgage crisis, as lenders abandoned prudent underwriting standards altogether. …

Jennifer Rubin lists 10 surprises at the conventions.

Political conventions are heavily scripted and hardly ever make news. But the Democratic and Republican conventions did have their share of surprises. Here are my favorites:

1. Clint Eastwood’s remarks were more memorable and more effective than President Obama’s. The empty-chair metaphor never seemed so apt as during the Obama drone-a-thon.

2. The press, even liberal commentators, admitted that Obama had bombed. Sure, there were bitter-enders who claimed all was fine, but the cable TV talking heads and the vast majority of columnists were brutally honest. MSNBC personalities were downright glum.

3. Knowing the president has a problem with pro-Israel voters, the Obama campaign made a mess for itself by fiddling with platform language and then allowed the matter to fester for two days. The display of booing and confusion when the language was reinstated may be the most memorable thing about the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Even more surprising, Obama did not mention Jerusalem and gave short shrift to both Israel and Iran in his speech. …

Peggy Noonan outlines the soft extremism of the Dems convention.

… Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.

There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn’t what you love if you’re American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don’t see all this the same way, and that’s fine—that’s what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.

The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge “No!” vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration’s own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn’t liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream. …

Tough week for Debbie WasserFace. Or, as the Free Beacon calls her – Debbie Disaster.

… It has been a tough week for Wasserman Schultz. She told an audience in North Carolina that Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, had told her Republican policies were “dangerous” for Israel—a claim that the ambassador called an untruth in a sharply worded statement. Then she said the reporter who broke the story, Washington Examiner columnist Philip Klein, had “deliberately” misquoted her—a claim proven false by Klein’s audio recording of her remarks. Wasserman Schultz told Washington Free Beacon senior writer Adam Kredo that she had no intention of apologizing to Klein for impugning his character.

Wasserman Schultz was also involved in the negotiations that led initially to the words “God” and “Jerusalem” being removed from the Democratic Party platform—a decision later reversed after presidential intercession and amid widespread boos and catcalls from Democratic Party delegates. …

Victor Davis Hanson says some Dems are giving lying a bad name.

All politicians lie, at least in the sense of exaggerating their opponents’ lapses and downplaying their own. But there are a few rules of politically lying: the most important being that one cannot insult the intelligence of the listener by saying something that is demonstrably untrue and/or refuted by the speaker’s own mutually contradictory statements. Do that and we enter Baghdad Bob territory.

Not long ago on national television, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, asserted that she knew no details of Democratic super-PAC commercial-prop Joe Soptic’s life story — although Cutter herself, as an audio clip revealed, had earlier hosted an Obama conference call where Soptic had outlined in detail his bio as part of a general complaint against Mitt Romney. Cutter, in other words, simply lied that she was unfamiliar with something she was very familiar with — as the two tapes demonstrated. …

Chicago is having real problems these days and Mayor Rahm is fundraising for Obama.  Contentions has the story.

The city of Chicago, the third largest in America, is crumbling into anarchy. The murder rate is so out of control that federal authorities have agreed to assist the Chicago Police Department in their efforts to curb soaring violence. The city has seen over a thirty-percent rise in its murder rate this year and in the last eight days of August, 82 people were killed or wounded by gun violence. With his city in a violent downward spiral, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been focusing on what’s important: banning Chik-fil-A from Chicago.

On Wednesday, during Bill Clinton’s address to the DNC in Charlotte, cameras panned to Emanuel, laughing in the audience. While he was enjoying his stay in Charlotte at least three people were murdered back home in Chicago just that night. What could be more important than taking charge of one of the most violent cities in America? Apparently, for Emanuel, it’s fundraising for his old boss President Barack Obama. …

Maybe if Rahm Emanuel took care of business, people who move to Chicago from Gambia would not be thinking about moving back. SunTimes has the story.

They came to the U.S. from Gambia — in search of a better life.

But two tough decades later, some of Kenwood Academy High School student Muhammed Kebbeh’s family say they are considering going back to Africa after he became the city’s 370th murder victim this year and second of his six siblings to be gunned down on the South Side in the last six months.

“I want to pack everything up and go back,” his oldest brother, Momadu Kebbeh, 36, said Wednesday, as his devoutly Muslim family mourned and prayed at their WashingtonPark home. “What’s the point of staying here?”

Muhammed, 19, was sitting with his girlfriend when he was shot dead by masked gunmen in a drive-by shooting in the 8100 block of South Ingleside shortly after 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. Relatives say they had been especially worried about him ever since his 23-year-old brother Omar Kebbeh became Chicago’s 68th murder victim of 2012 back in February.

Muhammed moved out of the family apartment in the 5800 block of South Indiana — just a few blocks from the spot where Omar Kebbeh was killed as he walked home from work — soon after to stay with friends and wouldn’t come back, despite repeated entreaties, his brother Hajie said. …

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Josh Kraushaar says the Dem party is feeling the Obama magic. Like everything else he touches, it is suffering. The party shows evidence of decline when you look at its thin bench.

Nearly two years ago, then-Rep. Artur Davis, still a Democrat in good standing, was lamenting the future of his now-former party. In an interview I had with him back then, he expressed concern that Democrats talk the talk when it comes to diversity, but the party is surprisingly thin when it comes to recruiting and electing viable minority statewide candidates. The comments came in the wake of his disappointing primary loss for Alabama governor, and then-Rep. Kendrick Meek’s third-place finish in the Florida Senate race, where Meek got little support from party leaders.

Initially, I thought he was overstating things. After all, an overwhelming number of minority voters back Democratic candidates. But look at the Democrats’ list of convention speakers, and the lack of a deep, diverse bench is painfully evident. The party is highlighting the stars of yesteryear–former President Clinton, Sen. John Kerry, and defeated Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. Among the party’s Senate recruits, the only minority candidate is Richard Carmona of Arizona, who faces a steep challenge in a solidly Republican state.

Davis’ critics may call him a turncoat, but his new party features more minorities holding Senate seats and governors’ offices, and they made sure convention viewers knew it. The tale of the tape: Republicans boast five minorities as governors or senators–Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, and New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez–and should have a sixth when Ted Cruz wins a gimme Senate race in Texas. Democrats have only four: Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, and the two senators from Hawaii, Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka. Of the four, only Patrick has been touted as a possible contender for a future presidential ticket.

The problem, as Davis explained to me, was that most of the Democrats’ minority representation comes from House members who hail from overwhelmingly liberal, majority-minority districts. Most of these members of Congress don’t have the broad political coalition to appeal to a wider swath of voters. …

… For all the hype about the historic nature of President Obama’s presidency, he has brought along with him precious few Democrats who present the same post-racial appeal he showcased in 2008. He’s been single-mindedly focused on his own reelection at the expense of assisting down-ballot allies, as The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. …

Kimberley Strassel has similar thoughts.

… By 2009, President Obama presided over what could fairly be called a big-tent coalition. The Blue Dog caucus had swelled to 51 members, representing plenty of conservative America. Democrats held the majority of governorships. Mr. Obama had won historic victories in Virginia and North Carolina. The prediction of liberal demographers John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s 2004 book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority”—lasting progressive dominance via a coalition of minorities, women, suburbanites and professionals—attracted greater attention among political analysts.

It took Mr. Obama two years to destroy this potential, with an agenda that forced his party to field vote after debilitating vote—stimulus, ObamaCare, spending, climate change. The public backlash, combined with the president’s mismanagement of the economy, has reversed Democrats’ electoral gains and left a party smaller than at any time since the mid-1990s.

Of the 21 Blue Dogs elected since 2006, five remain in office. The caucus is on the verge of extinction, as members have retired, been defeated in primaries waged by liberal activists, or face impossible re-elections. The GOP is set to take Senate seats in North Dakota and Nebraska, and maybe to overturn Democratic toeholds in states from Montana to Virginia. There is today a GOP senator in Massachusetts. Republicans claim 29 governorships and may gain two to four more this year. …

… The liberals who supported Mr. Obama’s expansion of the entitlement state are pinning everything on Mr. Obama’s re-election, assuming it will cement their big-government gains and allow them to grind back congressional majorities in the future.

But contemplate the situation if he loses. Consider a Democratic Party that may hold neither the White House nor Congress, that has disappeared in parts of the country, and that has few future Obama-like stars. Compare that to 2008. This is the party Barack Obama un-built. …

Now a NY Times columnist has noticed the wasteland that will be left behind by this administration. It’ll be interesting to see if Maureen Dowd keeps slamming The One.

How did the one formerly known as The One go for two?

In his renomination acceptance speech here on Thursday night, he told us that America’s problems were tougher to solve than he had originally thought.

And that’s why he has kindly agreed to give us more time.

Because, after all, it’s our fault. …

… We admit we like our solitude — maybe a little too much given our chosen profession. We could have opened up our weekend golf foursomes to a few pols — even women! — rather than just the usual junior aides.

And we could probably stomach giving lifts in the limo to some mayors and members of Congress, and actually pretend that we care about their advice — not to mention their votes.

Maybe we could drop the disdainful body language. For that matter, shouldn’t we put a little more effort into helping elect Democrats to Congress? Just because we only did a cameo in the Senate doesn’t mean some people there don’t think of it as a star turn.

Apparently, etiquette matters. We could send out a few thank-you notes to big donors and celebrities who give benefit concerts. Oddly, it turns out folks like to frame notes signed by the president and hang them on the wall.

Maybe we relied too much on Valerie Jarrett, a k a the Night Stalker and Keeper of the Essence. She says people should woo us. But could it be that we need to woo them as well?

How could we have let the storybook president lose his narrative? …

The jobs report gets a look from some of our favorites. Craig Pirrong is first.

We now understand exactly why Obama gave such a listless performance last night.  He knew the jobs report would be abysmal.

And abysmal it is. Anemic payroll growth of 96,000, along with downward revisions of the July numbers.  The unemployment rate declined-but only because labor force participation fell to its lowest level in 31 years.

And like clockwork, the administration trotted out its Chief of Economic Advisors, Alan Krueger, to say  it was “important not to read too much into any one monthly report.”

That is truly comical.  Krueger has been saying that every month.  I figured he would say it again, so I Googled “Krueger one monthly jobs report” and bingo, up came that link.

Not too predictable.  But too pathetic.  This pointillism-trying to discredit each single jobs report as not particularly informative-rings quite hollow when each successive jobs report is anemic.  Individually-yes, probably not important.  Collectively: damning. I wonder how Krueger maintains his self-respect.  But I guess you have to check that at the door when you take that job in troubled times.

So I guess Recovery Summer will have to wait until 2013, having failed to appear in 2010, 2011, and 2012. …

Mort Zuckerman says the jobs report is actually worse than it looks.

… The best single indicator of how confident workers are about their jobs is reflected in how they cling to them. The so-called quit rate has sagged to the lowest in years.

Older Americans can’t afford to quit. Ironically, since the recession began, employment in the age group of 55 and older is up 3.9 million, even as total employment is down by five million. These citizens hope to retire with dignity, but they feel the need to bolster savings as a salve for the stomach-churning decline in their net worth, 75% of which has come from the fall in the value of their home equity.

The baby-boomer population postponing its exit from the workforce in a recession creates a huge bottleneck that blocks youth employment. Displaced young workers now face double-digit unemployment and more life at home with their parents.

Many young couples decide that they can’t afford to start a family, and as a consequence the birthrate has just hit a 25-year low of 1.87%. Nor are young workers’ prospects very good. Layoff announcements have risen from year-ago levels and hiring plans have dropped sharply. People are not going to swallow talk of recovery until hiring is occurring at a pace to bring at least 300,000 more hires per month than the economy has been averaging for the past two years.

Furthermore, the jobs that are available are mostly not good ones. More than 40% of the new private-sector jobs are in low-paying categories such as health care, leisure activities, bars and restaurants.

We are experiencing, in effect, a modern-day depression. Consider two indicators: First, food stamps: More than 45 million Americans are in the program! An almost incredible record. It’s 15% of the population compared with the 7.9% participation from 1970-2000. Food-stamp enrollment has been rising at a rate of 400,000 per month over the past four years.

Second, Social Security disability—another record. More than 11 million Americans are collecting federal disability checks. Half of these beneficiaries have signed on since President Obama took office more than three years ago.

These dependent millions are the invisible counterparts of the soup kitchens and bread lines of the 1930s, invisible because they get their checks in the mail. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that millions of people who had good private-sector jobs now have to rely on welfare for life support.

This shameful situation, intolerable for a nation as wealthy as the United States, is not going to go away on Nov. 7. No matter who wins, the next president will betray the country if he doesn’t swiftly fashion policies to address the specific needs of the unemployed, especially the long-term unemployed.  …

David Harsanyi

If the work force continues shrinking at this pace, we’ll get the unemployment rate down to that 5 percent President Obama promised us before you know it. …

And Jennifer Rubin reminds the report is even worse because of the downward revisions to June and July reports.

On the heels of the president’s widely panned speech, a dreadful August jobs report was released this morning. The expectation was 125,00 to 130,000 new jobs; only 96,000 were added. Moreover, July and June job reports were adjusted downward. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported: “The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for June was revised from +64,000 to +45,000, and the change for July was revised from +163,000 to +141,000.” …

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One of the wonderful by-products of Obama’s November loss will be the steady stream of tell-all books outlining the disasters in the administration and confirming what we always knew. It has started already. Rick Klein of ABC News introduces us to Bob Woodward’s new book.

An explosive mix of dysfunction, miscommunication, and misunderstandings inside and outside the White House led to the collapse of a historic spending and debt deal that President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner were on the verge of reaching last summer, according to revelations in author Bob Woodward’s latest book.

The book, “The Price of Politics,” on sale Sept. 11, 2012, shows how close the president and the House speaker were to defying Washington odds and establishing a spending framework that included both new revenues and major changes to long-sacred entitlement programs.

But at a critical juncture, with an agreement tantalizingly close, Obama pressed Boehner for additional taxes as part of a final deal — a miscalculation, in retrospect, given how far the House speaker felt he’d already gone. …

… The failure of Obama to connect with Boehner was vaguely reminiscent of another phone call late in the evening of Election Day 2010, after it became clear that the Republicans would take control of the House, making Boehner Speaker of the House.

Nobody in the Obama orbit could even find the soon-to-be-speaker’s phone number, Woodward reports. A Democratic Party aide finally secured it through a friend so the president could offer congratulations.

While questions persist about whether any grand bargain reached by the principals could have actually passed in the Tea Party-dominated Congress, Woodward issues a harsh judgment on White House and congressional leaders for failing to act boldly at a moment of crisis. Particular blame falls on the president.

“It was increasingly clear that no one was running Washington. That was trouble for everyone, but especially for Obama,” Woodward writes. …

… Obama found that he had little history with members of Congress to draw on. His administration’s early decision to forego bipartisanship for the sake of speed around the stimulus bill was encapsulated by his then-chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel: “We have the votes. F— ‘em,” he’s quoted in the book as saying.

Obama’s relationship with Democrats wasn’t always much better. …

… Woodward portrays a president who remained a supreme believer in his own powers of persuasion, even as he faltered in efforts to coax congressional leaders in both parties toward compromise. Boehner told Woodward that at one point, when Boehner voiced concern about passing the deal they were working out, the president reached out and touched his forearm.

“John, I’ve got great confidence in my ability to sway the American people,” Boehner quotes the president as having told him.

But after the breakthrough agreement fell apart, Boehner’s “Plan B” would ultimately exclude the president from most of the key negotiations. The president was “voted off the island,” in Woodward’s phrase, even by members of his own party, as congressional leaders patched together an eleventh hour framework to avoid default.

Frustration over the lack of clear White House planning was voiced to Obama’s face at one point, with a Democratic congressional staffer taking the extraordinary step of confronting the president in the Oval Office.

With the nation facing the very real possibility of defaulting on its debt for the first time in its history, David Krone, the chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told the president directly that he couldn’t simply reject the only option left to Congress.

“It is really disheartening that you, that this White House did not have a Plan B,” Krone said, according to Woodward.

 

More on this book from Conn Carroll. 

Arrogant, aloof, and unprepared is how Bob Woodward portrays President Obama in his new book The Price of Politics, set to be released next week.

The book recounts Obama’s troubled relationship with Congress, from his inauguration through last summer’s failed debt-limit negotiations, with Woodward concluding, “It is a fact that President Obama was handed a miserable, faltering economy and faced a recalcitrant Republican opposition. But presidents work their will — or should work their will — on important matters of national business. . . . Obama has not.”

Snippets of the book, as reported by The Washington Post, include:

‘The book portrays Obama as a man of paradoxical impulses, able to charm an audience with his folksy manner but less adept and less interested in cultivating his relationships with Reid and Pelosi. While the president worries that he can’t rely on the two leaders, they are portrayed as impatient with him. As the final details of the 2009 stimulus package were being worked out on Capitol Hill, Obama phoned the speaker’s office to exhort the troops. Pelosi put the president on speakerphone so everyone could hear.

“Warming to his subject, he continued with an uplifting speech,” Woodward writes. “Pelosi reached over and pressed the mute button. They could hear Obama, but now he couldn’t hear them. The president continued speaking, his disembodied voice filling the room, and the two leaders got back to the hard numbers.” ’ …

Why is this such a nasty campaign? John Harris, one of Politico’s heavyweights, says the fault is largely Obama’s.

A crabby, negative campaign that has been more about misleading and marginal controversies than the major challenges facing the country? Barack Obama and Mitt Romney can both claim parenthood of this ugly child.

But there is a particular category of the 2012 race to the low road in which the two sides are not competing on equal terms: Obama and his top campaign aides have engaged far more frequently in character attacks and personal insults than the Romney campaign.

With a few exceptions, Romney has maintained that Obama is a bad president who has turned to desperate tactics to try to save himself. But Romney has not made the case that Obama is a bad person, nor made a sustained critique of his morality a central feature of his campaign.

Obama, who first sprang to national attention with an appeal to civility, has made these kind of attacks central to his strategy. The argument, by implication from Obama and directly from his surrogates, is not merely that Romney is the wrong choice for president but that there is something fundamentally wrong with him.

To make the case, Obama and his aides have used an arsenal of techniques — personal ridicule, suggestions of ethical misdeeds and aspersions against Romney’s patriotism — that many voters and commentators claim to abhor, even as the tactics have regularly proved effective.

The unequal distribution of personal putdowns — Obama and his team indulging in them far more frequently than Romney — has been largely obscured by two factors. …

Jay Nordlinger gives his impressions of Fauxcahontas at the DNC.

…   Over and over, Warren said, “The game is rigged. The system is rigged against you.” This is not just a lie, it is a harmful one — a lie with consequences. Because it locks people into the grievance culture (the same culture Condi Rice spoke against in that marvelous speech at the Republican convention).

We are damn lucky to be in America. The “system” is less rigged against us than it is against people practically everywhere else. We have a fairer shot than almost anybody.

Sometimes I think, “Americans are simultaneously the luckiest and most griping people in all the world.” This is why immigrants are sometimes shocked by us: Don’t we know how good we have it? No, we don’t, really.

  I don’t know about you, but I was taught that America was a racist country, and almost a uniquely racist one. A singularly racist one. Then I grew up and found out: It’s damn near the least racist country in the entire world! Ever visited, studied, or lived in an Asian country, an Arab country, an African one?

We don’t know from racism.

  In her speech, Warren expressed her gratitude for America, and in a charming way: “I’m grateful, down to my toes, for every opportunity that America gave me.” But much of the rest of her speech was grievance, grievance, grievance; blame, blame, blame. And not necessarily legitimate grievance and blame either. …

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Daily Caller says Alan Dershowitz is not happy about the Dems refusal, in their platform, to call for Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel.

… On the issue of Jerusalem, this year’s Democratic platform doesn’t take the stand that the city is the capital of Israel, while in past platforms it was explicitly stated.

Dershowitz said he is concerned that this year’s Democratic Party platform will make Israel a partisan issue, something he thinks is not good for the U.S.-Israel relationship.

“My goal is always to keep support for Israel a bi-partisan issue and never make a national election any kind of referendum on Israel,” he said. “I don’t think it is a good thing that the Republican platform seems to be more pro-Israel than the Democratic platform.”

Dershowtiz said that this is not the last the Democratic Party has heard about the platform as he is personally going to get to the bottom of what happened.

“As soon as I hang up with you, I will call people I know in the White House and in the Democratic Party and find out what’s going on,” he said.  ”But believe me this is not the last the Democrats will have heard about this issue. They will hear from me on this one.” …

More on this from Jennifer Rubin.

The Democrat’s Israel debacle goes on. When last we left things, Democratic National Committee chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (R-Fla.) was effectively called a liar by the Israeli ambassador, whom she claimed had accused Republicans of endangering Israel. Well that got worse. Wasserman Schultz called Phil Klein, the reporter who exposed her comment, a liar; he then produced an audiotape. Will no one call for this woman’s resignation? Is there no level of duplicity that is intolerable to the Democrats? (No need to answer; we know.) The White House apologized for smearing Charles Krauthammer over the Churchill bust incident, but can the DNC muster an apology for Klein?

Meanwhile, the fight over the Democratic Party platform on Israel and the Obama team’s unsuccessful and insulting effort to claim pro-Israel leaders approved weakening the 2008 platform language has gotten, if possible, worse. …

Those items out of the way, we can continue with something we started yesterday. We allude to the roughing up the Dems are getting from the mainstream media. Politico ran a piece on how Obama is “egotistical, selfish, dull.”

For over a year now, the political press has been writing the ever-evolving book on Mitt Romney. But as the Democratic National Convention gets under way in Charlotte, major media outlets are sending President Barack Obama through the spin cycle, lobbing five high-profile bombs at the incumbent in a single holiday weekend.

The New York Times ran a front-page piece Monday with the unmistakable subtext that Obama is a hyper-competitive egotist who often is not as good as he thinks he is at endeavors ranging from politics to poker.

The Washington Post noted the continued controversy over Obama’s “you didn’t build that” line, and how the clumsy remark continues to leave him vulnerable to criticism that he doesn’t understand free enterprise.

The Huffington Post argued that, for all his promises of a new kind of politics, Obama has “played the same old game.”

The Wall Street Journal weighed in with a piece that portrayed Obama as stingy with fundraising — and vocal support — for fellow Democratic candidates. …

Then Politico ran a piece on the 8 snarkiest things Clinton said about Obama.

There is only one president who actually came from Hope.

Former President Bill Clinton — a native of Hope, Ark. — is expected to offer a rousing endorsement of President Barack Obama in his speech Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention. But four years ago, while his wife Hillary competed for the Democratic nomination, Clinton wasn’t always so supportive of Obama’s “hope and change” message.

Here are Bill Clinton’s most controversial quotes about Obama:

1. “The idea that one of these campaigns is positive and the other is negative when I know the reverse is true and I have seen it and I have been blistered by it for months is a little tough to take. Just because of the sanitizing coverage that’s in the media doesn’t mean the facts aren’t out there.” — Jan. 7, 2008

Not to be left out, The Economist’s Democracy in America Blog takes a swipe at Valerie Jarrett.

THIS morning at Bloomberg’s convention office (a temporarily converted Gold’s Gym) Valerie Jarrett was the featured speaker. Ms Jarrett’s title is senior advisor to the president, but in reality she is much more than that; she is the White House gatekeeper, the point of contact between the president and the business world in particular, and according to most knowledgeable folk the most powerful person in the building not named Obama. She has seen off three chiefs of staff already. She also very rarely talks to the press.

I found her impressive but also rather alarming, answering questions at remarkable speed, but without ever smiling or indeed engaging with anyone in the room. And because she was so relentlessly on message, the session was entirely predictable and not very illuminating. Except when she was asked what mistakes the Obama administration has made, always a very thorny question for a politician. If you say none, you look absurd. If you admit to error, the press jump all over you, as I am about to do.

What she said was the mistake had come in not working harder to communicate to voters all the benefits that the administration’s policies have brought. “If people voted their self-interest, they would vote for him”, she said. It was only because of a weakness in communication that they might not.

Leave aside that Mr Obama was supposed to be a great communicator (I actually think he is a great orator, but not a very good communicator; the two skills are distinct). This, I think, goes to the heart of one of the Obama administration’s weaknesses, one that certainly cost him the 2010 mid-terms and might cost him the presidency itself in two month’s time. It is the idea that if only people were in full command of the facts, they would immediately see that the president was wise and right. It is arrogant, and, when you think about it, fundamentally anti-democratic. And it leads you to push policies that voters don’t actually like.

CNN wants in on the act. They decide to fact check the Dem claim of 4.5 million new jobs created by the administration.

… Nonfarm private payrolls hit a post-recession low of 106.8 million that month, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The figure currently stands at 111.3 million as of July.

While that is indeed a gain of 4.5 million, it’s only a net gain of 300,000 over the course of the Obama administration to date. The private jobs figure stood at 111 million in January 2009, the month Obama took office.

And total nonfarm payrolls, including government workers, are down from 133.6 million workers at the beginning of 2009 to 133.2 million in July 2012. There’s been a net loss of nearly 1 million public-sector jobs since Obama took office, despite a surge in temporary hiring for the 2010 census.

Meanwhile, the jobs that have come back aren’t the same ones that were lost.

According to a study released last week by the liberal-leaning National Employment Law Project, low-wage fields such as retail sales and food service are adding jobs nearly three times as fast as higher-paid occupations.

Conclusion:

The figure of 4.5 million jobs is accurate if you look at the most favorable period and category for the administration. But overall, there are still fewer people working now than when Obama took office at the height of the recession.

Rich Karlgaard thinks the second NY Times story we carried yesterday could cost Obama the election.

A Sunday New York Times front page story — New York Times! — might have killed President Obama’s re-election hopes.

The story is called “The Competitor in Chief — Obama Plays To Win, In Politics and Everything Else.” It is devastating.

With such a title, and from such a friendly organ, at first I thought Jodi Kantor’s piece would be a collection of Obama’s greatest political wins: His rapid rise in Illinois, his win over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, the passage of health care, and so on.

But the NYT piece is not about any of that. Rather, it is a deep look into the two outstanding flaws in Obama’s executive leadership:

1. How he vastly overrates his capabilities:

But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. The cloistered nature of the White House amplifies those tendencies, said Matthew Dowd, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, adding that the same thing happened to his former boss. “There’s a reinforcing quality,” he said, a tendency for presidents to think, I’m the best at this.

2. How he spends extraordinary amounts of time and energy to compete in — trivialities. …

In a piece that should be read by every American, Phil Gramm compares the policies of Reagan to those of Obama. 

Only twice since World War II has the U.S. unemployment rate reached 10%: It was 10.8% in 1982 and 10% in 2009. The different responses of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama—Reagan lowering taxes and lifting regulatory and other barriers to economic growth, Mr. Obama increasing the size and reach of the government—represent polar extremes in policy. And in results.

Fifty-five months after the recession started in July 1981, the Reagan recovery had created 7.8 million more jobs than when the recession started, and real per capita gross domestic product was up by $3,091. Fifty-five months after the recession that began in December 2007, there were four million fewer Americans working than when the recession started, and real per capita GDP was down $803.

The trajectory of household income is even more telling. According to Sentier Research analysis of monthly U.S. Census data, during the current recovery American households have lost more income than they lost during the recession. In December 2007, real median household income was $54,916. It had fallen to $53,508 when the recession ended 18 months later. But by June 2012, real median family income had fallen to $50,964.

During the Reagan recovery from 1981 to 1986, real median household income on an annualized basis rose by $3,380 or 7.7%.

There are other, deeply troubling differences between the Reagan and Obama recoveries.

Mona Charen says the economy did not have to do so poorly. When Clinton lost the ’94 elections he changed course. When Obama got spanked by the voters he dug in.

… After suffering a rebuke in 1994, Clinton backed away from Hillarycare, tax increases, opposition to welfare reform and huge increases in federal spending. With Republicans controlling the Congress, Bill Clinton — after some resistance and after insisting it couldn’t be done — signed a balanced budget.

The combination of the end of the Cold War and the dot.com bubble gave Clinton’s first term respectable economic growth of 3.2 percent. But the real boom came toward the latter half of his second term, after Clinton (reluctantly) signed welfare reform, a dramatic cut in the capital gains tax from 28 percent to 20 percent, and a phased-in reduction in the estate (or death) tax, which exempted estates up to $1 million from $600,000. Clinton lobbied for and got the North American Free Trade Agreement and maintained a strong dollar. With Republicans in Congress demanding spending restraint, the federal government — younger readers may be incredulous — ran a surplus.

The results, as Charles Kadlec recalls in Forbes, were impressive. Economic growth jumped to 4.2 percent. Unemployment fell from 5.4 to 4 percent. Average real wages improved. Millions of Americans shared in the general prosperity as their 401(k)s swelled with the rising stock market. Investors responded with enthusiasm to the sense that America was a business-friendly country. Venture capital exploded.

Obama has chosen the exact opposite response to voter disaffection. Unlike Clinton, Obama is a committed leftist. He doubled down on Obamacare, ramming it through in an ugly, totally partisan vote. He refuses to budge on his insistence on tax increases — though he has himself acknowledged that tax hikes are counterproductive in a weak economy. He has attempted to undo the key feature of welfare reform, the work requirement. And he has presided over the downgrading of America’s AAA credit rating as he races heedlessly into crippling levels of federal debt. …

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From time to time we have items written by Josh Kraushaar of National Journal which is part of the main stream media. Kraushaar, however, has an independent mind. Here’s something he wrote before Ryan was picked that illustrates the point.

… I’m having an increasingly difficult time reconciling the buzz that Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty are the clear favorites, even as I’m finding it harder to see what they add to the ticket. Given Romney’s tendency to play it safe, GOP operatives insist they’re the front-runners, but my gut instinct and contrarian nature make me think we could be in for a preconvention surprise. …

… By picking Wisconsin’s Rep. Paul Ryan, he could send a message that he’s willing to undertake the tough but necessary entitlement reforms to get the economy back on track. Romney always finds himself in his element when he preaches the merits of the free market. Why not embrace the wonkery and go with a fresh-faced pol who has maintained widespread appeal in a competitive district despite the many attacks on him from the left?

That said, picking Ryan also carries the most risk of any of the prospective candidates. Romney badly needs to win over the remaining undecided working-class voters, who don’t naturally connect with his privileged background. By picking a running mate whose driving theme is reforming (read: trimming) entitlement programs that many depend on, Romney could push some of them into Obama’s camp. …

… Of course, each of these choices carries varying degrees of risk. Jindal’s unstinting social conservatism could turn off women, Rubio faces murmurs about ties to ethically-tainted Florida politicians, Christie’s Jersey bluntness may not play well in other parts of the country, and Ayotte is untested on the national stage. But the reality is that the so-called safe picks – Pawlenty and Portman – offer just as much risk, if not more. Their biggest risk is that they don’t offer Romney much other than the “Good Housekeeping Seal of Establishment Approval.

Romney holds a fundamental advantage over President Obama in the November election: He controls his own destiny. Obama already has used up most of his best attack ads against Romney and is merely hoping that the economy doesn’t get any worse. He’s largely at the mercy of forces beyond his control now. Most voters have already made up their minds about him. But by picking a talented running mate and delivering a winning convention acceptance speech, Romney has the opportunity to convince the skeptics and redefine the election.

 

Three weeks after the above by Kraushaar, he penned an approving piece on the Romney decision to attack Obama’s ideology.

… Remember: Obama isn’t actively campaigning on most of the policies he advanced during his three years in office, save for the bailout of GM and Chrysler. He’s relying on caricaturing Romney as a crude capitalist, while broadly contrasting his agenda as protecting the middle class. No mention of the stimulus, with only sparing mentions of his health care law and historic support of gay marriage — usually to his most ardent supporters at fundraisers.

Polls show the economy being the most important factor in voters’ decisions, but all these tangential issues have direct impact in their views of the candidates’ economic competence. The Romney campaign, for example, is making the case that trimming spending and tackling entitlement reform, are steps to ensure the economy’s long-term health.

One of the most significant takeaways from the national polling over the last several months is that Obama’s job approval rating has remained relatively stable even as their perception of the economy have dropped markedly. There’s a plausible argument that voters are resigned to a “new normal” — it’s a theory that my colleague Ron Brownstein first broached last month.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Romney campaign reached the same conclusion, even if they won’t admit it. They’ve tacked away from a generic critique of Obama’s economic performance — the “prevent defense” strategy — and gone full bore with the ideological red meat. So far, it’s working.

There is something strange going on at the NY Times. There have been a number of items on the administration that are not very favorable. First on Saturday there was a page one piece on Valerie Jarrett.

President Obama was in a bind, and his chief of staff could not figure out how he had ended up there.

Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church were up in arms last fall over a proposal to require employers to provide health insurance that covered birth control. But caving in to the church’s demands for a broad exemption in the name of religious liberty would pit the president against a crucial constituency, women’s groups, who saw the coverage as basic preventive care.

Worried about the political and legal implications, the chief of staff, William M. Daley, reached out to the proposal’s author, Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary. How, he wondered, had the White House been put in this situation with so little presidential input? “You are way out there on a limb on this,” he recalls telling her.

“It was then made clear to me that, no, there were senior White House officials who had been involved and supported this,” said Mr. Daley, who left his post early this year.

What he did not realize was that while he was trying to put out what he considered a fire, the person fanning the flames was sitting just one flight up from him: Valerie Jarrett, the Obamas’ first friend, the proposal’s chief patron and a tenacious White House operator who would ultimately outmaneuver not only Mr. Daley but also the vice president in her effort to include the broadest possible contraception coverage in the administration’s health care overhaul.

A Chicagoan who helped Mr. Obama navigate his rise through that city’s aggressive politics, Ms. Jarrett came to Washington with no national experience. But her unmatched access to the Obamas has made her a driving force in some of the most significant domestic policy decisions of the president’s first term, her persuasive power only amplified by Mr. Obama’s insular management style.

From the first, her official job has been somewhat vague. But nearly four years on, with Mr. Obama poised to accept his party’s renomination this week, her standing is clear, to her many admirers and detractors alike. “She is the single most influential person in the Obama White House,” said one former senior White House official, who like many would speak candidly only on condition of anonymity.

The next Times hit piece was on Obama’s competitiveness by Jodi Kantor.

… For someone dealing with the world’s weightiest matters, Mr. Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits. He has played golf 104 times since becoming president, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who monitors his outings, and he asks superior players for tips that have helped lower his scores. He decompresses with card games on Air Force One, but players who do not concentrate risk a reprimand (“You’re not playing, you’re just gambling,” he once told Arun Chaudhary, his former videographer).

His idea of birthday relaxation is competing in an Olympic-style athletic tournament with friends, keeping close score. The 2009 version ended with a bowling event. Guess who won, despite his history of embarrassingly low scores? The president, it turned out, had been practicing in the White House alley.

When he reads a book to children at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, Mr. Obama seems incapable of just flipping open a volume and reading. In 2010, he began by announcing that he would perform “the best rendition ever” of “Green Eggs and Ham,” ripping into his Sam-I-Ams with unusual conviction. Two years later at the same event, he read “Where the Wild Things Are” with even more animation, roooooaring his terrible roar and gnaaaaashing his terrible teeth. By the time he got to the wild rumpus, he was howling so loudly that Bo, the first dog, joined in.

“He’s shooting for a Tony,” Mr. Chaudhary joked. (He has already won a Grammy, in 2006, for his reading of his memoir, “Dreams From My Father” — not because he was a natural, said Brian Smith, the producer, but because he paused so many times to polish his performance.)

Asked if there was anything at which the president allowed himself to just flat-out fail, Mr. Nesbitt gave a long pause. “If he picks up something new, at first he’s not good, but he’ll work until he gets better,” he said.

Mr. Obama’s fixation on prowess can get him into trouble. Not everyone wants to be graded by him, certainly not Republicans. Mr. Dowd, the former Bush adviser, said he admired Mr. Obama, but added, “Nobody likes to be in the room with someone who thinks they’re the smartest person in the room.”

Even some Democrats in Washington say they have been irritated by his tips on topics ranging from the best way to shake hands on the trail (really look voters in the eye, he has instructed) to writing well (“You have to think three or four sentences ahead,” he told one reluctant pupil).

For another, he may not always be as good at everything as he thinks, including politics. While Mr. Obama has given himself high grades for his tenure in the White House — including a “solid B-plus” for his first year — many voters don’t agree, citing everything from his handling of the economy to his unfulfilled pledge that he would be able to unite Washington to his claim that he would achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace. 

Those were not the only times Mr. Obama may have overestimated himself: he has also had a habit of warning new hires that he would be able to do their jobs better than they could. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor. 

Leno: The Democrats are getting ready for their convention in North Carolina. Or, as they’re telling Joe Biden, “South Carolina.”

Fallon: The party announced that most Democratic National Convention speakers this week will be women. Though it’s really gonna be annoying when they stop speaking, but won’t tell you why.

Leno: Tropical storm Isaac threatened to hit the GOP convention in Tampa. But thanks to Obama’s economic policies many Florida businesses are already boarded up.

Letterman: What’s great about America. They’re now making waffle-flavored vodka. See? Good things are happening under Obama.

Fallon: The Obama campaign is suggesting supporters text the word “GIVE” to donate $50. Though it’s frustrating when the phone’s autocorrect keeps changing it to: “Fix the economy!”

Leno: Joe Biden was going to visit Tampa to cause problems for the GOP convention. Then he was going up to Charlotte to do the same for the Democrats.

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Deroy Murdock lists all the states, cities and universities that invest in Bain Capital.

Democrats convened in Charlotte, NC, will double down on their claim that Bain Capital is really the Bain crime family. They will accuse Republican nominee Mitt Romney and Bain’s other “greedy” co-founders of stealing their winnings, evading taxes and lighting cigars with $100 bills on their yachts.

But Bain’s private-equity executives have enriched dozens of organizations and millions of individuals in the Democratic base — including some who scream most loudly for President Obama’s re-election.

Government-worker pension funds are the chief beneficiaries of Bain’s economic stewardship. New York-based Preqin uses public documents, news accounts and Freedom of Information requests to track private-equity holdings. Since 2000, Preqin reports, the following funds have entrusted some $1.56 billion to Bain:

* Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund ($2.2 million) …

Mark Steyn explains the new rules that can tell us what are “racist” remarks. They’re not called remarks though; the new term is “dog whistles.” 

American racism is starting to remind me of American alcoholism. At the founding of the republic, in the days when beer was thought of as “liquid bread” and a healthy nutritional breakfast, Americans drank about three-to-four times as much as they do now. Today the United States has a lower per capita rate of alcohol consumption than almost any other developed nation, but it has more alcoholism support groups than any other developed nation – around 164 groups per million people. France, which drinks about 50 percent more per capita than America, has one-twentieth the number of support groups. The French and Italians enjoy drinking, the English and Irish enjoy getting drunk, and Americans enjoy getting drunk on ever more absurd stigmatizatory excess. At Walmart they card you if you “appear to be under” – what is it up to now? 43? 57? And the citizenry take this as a compliment: Well-preserved grandmothers return from failed attempts to purchase a bottle of wine with gay cries of, “I was carded at Costco! They’ve made my weekend!”

And so it goes with American racism: The less there is, the more extravagantly the racism-awareness lobby patrols its beat. The Walmart carding clerks of the media are ever more alert to those who “appear to be” racist. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews declared this week that Republicans use “Chicago” as a racist code word. Not to be outdone, his colleague Lawrence O’Donnell pronounced “golf” a racist code word. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell observed that Obama was “working to earn a spot on the PGA tour,” O’Donnell brilliantly perceived that subliminally associating Obama with golf is racist, because the word “golf” is subliminally associated with “Tiger Woods,” and the word “Tiger” is not-so-subliminally associated with cocktail waitress Jamie Grubbs, nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel, lingerie model Jamie Jungers, former porn star Holly Sampson, etc, etc. So by using the word “golf” you’re sending a racist dog whistle that Obama is a sex addict who reverses over fire hydrants.

While we’re on the subject of GOP white supremacists, former Secretary of State Condi Rice spoke movingly of her rise to the top from a childhood in segregated Birmingham, Ala. But everyone knows that’s just more Republican racist dog-whistling for “when’s Bull Connor gonna whistle up those dogs and get me off stage?” Meanwhile, over at The Huffington Post, Geoffrey Dunn, author of “The Lies Of Sarah Palin” (St. Martin’s Press, 2011, in case you missed it), was scoffing at Clint Eastwood’s star turn at the convention – “better known as the Gathering of Pasty White People,” added Mr. Dunn, demonstrating the stylistic panache that set a-flutter the hearts of so many St. Martin’s Press commissioning editors. Warming to his theme, Mr. Dunn noted that Clint had been mayor of “the upscale and frighteningly white community” of Carmel, California. …

John Fund explains how Akin can bow out of the Missouri senate race.

… Should Akin decide that his sliding poll numbers — he now trails McCaskill by ten points and many of his own supporters want him to exit the race — dictate dropping out, he will certainly want a say in who replaces him. John Brunner, a wealthy businessman, and Sarah Steelman, a former state treasurer, both challenged him in the GOP primary and are viewed as unacceptable by Akin forces. On the other hand, Wagner is respected in the Akin camp and a sufficiently conservative presence to satisfy Tea Party members who are suspicious of anyone the Missouri GOP establishment might anoint.

Should Akin leave the race and be replaced by Wagner, both candidates would have to petition a court to get off the ballot before September 25. But state election laws would allow a swap in which Wagner took Akin’s place and he reclaimed the Republican nomination for his House seat. His current district leans strongly Republican; he would be likely to hold it against a Democratic opponent this fall.

“It’s clunky, but it would work so long as it doesn’t look like a back-room deal,” one Akin supporter who is a Missouri delegate told me. “Todd would be treated with dignity and could go back to the House and we would have a candidate with very strong skills who could beat McCaskill.” …

Joel Kotkin writes on the new class war.

… Obama’s core middle-class support, and that of his party, comes from what might be best described as “the clerisy,” a 21st century version of France’s pre-revolution First Estate. This includes an ever-expanding class of minders — lawyers, teachers, university professors, the media and, most particularly, the relatively well paid legions of public sector workers — who inhabit Washington, academia, large non-profits and government centers across the country.

This largely well-heeled “middle class” still adores the president, and party theoreticians see it as the Democratic Party’s new base. Gallup surveys reveal Obama does best among “professionals” such as teachers, lawyers and educators. After retirees, educators and lawyers are the two biggest sources of campaign contributions for Obama by occupation. Obama’s largest source of funds among individual organizations is the University of California, Harvard is fifth and its wannabe cousin Stanford ranks ninth.

Like teachers, much of academia and the legal bar like expanding government since the tax spigot flows in the right direction: that is, into their mouths. Like the old clerical classes, who relied on tithes and the collection bowl, many in today’s clerisy lives somewhat high on the hog; nearly one in five federal workers earn over $100,000.

Essentially, the clerisy has become a new, mass privileged class who live a safer, more secure life compared to those trapped in the harsher, less cosseted private economy. … 

… The GOP, for its part, now relies on another part of the middle class, what I would call the yeomanry. In many ways they represent the contemporary version of Jeffersonian farmers or the beneficiaries of President Lincoln’s Homestead Act. They are primarily small property owners who lack the girth and connections of the clerisy but resist joining the government-dependent poor. Particularly critical are small business owners, who Gallup identifies as “the least approving” of Obama among all the major occupation groups. Barely one in three likes the present administration.

The yeomanry diverge from the clerisy in other ways. They tend to live in the suburbs, a geography much detested by many leaders of the clerisy and, likely, the president himself. Yeomen families tend to be concentrated in those parts of the country that have more children and are more apt to seek solutions to social problems through private efforts. Philanthropy, church work and voluntarism — what you might call, appropriately enough, the Utah approach, after the state that leads in philanthropy.

The nature of their work also differentiates the clerisy from the yeomanry. The clerisy labors largely in offices and has no contact with actual production. Many yeomen, particularly in business services, depend on industry for their livelihoods either directly or indirectly. The clerisy’s stultifying, and often job-toxic regulations and “green” agenda may be one reason why people engaged in farming, fishing, forestry, transportation, manufacturing and construction overwhelmingly disapprove of the president’s policies, according to Gallup. …

Karl at Hot Air posts on the goals of Eastwood.

… Eastwood was not “rambling.” He improvised within a structure, making a clear and concise case for dumping Obama.

Eastwood’s approach to this performance was not accidental. Eastwood is — by reason of his resume — the foremost expert in the world on Clint Eastwood fans. Harry Callahan may have understood that a man has to know his limitations. Eastwood knows his… and he also knows his strengths. A man does not produce and star in dozens of Clint Eastwood movies without having thought deeply about and received the benefit of copious market research into what appeals to people about Clint Eastwood.

From the standpoint of political science, it would be fair to hypothesize that appeals to both disaffected and libertarian voters (which is something of a feat) in a way that Mitt Romney could never hope to do. More colloquially, it would be fair to suggest that Eastwood appeals to the sort of people who gravitated to H. Ross Perot in the Nineties. He appeals to people who distrust institutions, who think that conventional politics fails the American people. The sort of people for whom Harry Callahan, Will Munny, Frank Horrigan, Luther Whitney and Walt Kowalski have an emotional resonance.

So why would Eastwood deliver a conventional political speech? Had he delivered his material as a series of slick-sounding zingers, it would have been the sort of speech the media expected from Chris Christie’s keynote address. But that would have been: (a) not in keeping with the Romney campaign’s softer approach; and (b) diminishing and disappointing to Eastwood’s target audience. Most of the chattering class failed to grasp this. Some on Team Romney failed to grasp this. But the evidence coming in, both anecdotally and from polling, suggests Eastwood still has his finger on the popular pulse in a way pols and pundits never will.

Mark Steyn with more on this saying, “Play Clinty For Me.”

Like William F. Gavin, I hugely enjoyed Clint Eastwood’s turn last night, but I’m not sure I agree that it was “unintentionally hilarious” and that “he forgot his lines, lost his way.” Clint is a brilliant actor, and a superb director of other actors (and I don’t just mean a quarter-century ago: In the last five years, he’s directed eight films). He’s also, as Mr. Gavin observed, a terrific jazz improviser at the piano — and, in film and music documentaries, an extremely articulate interviewee. So I wouldn’t assume that the general tenor of his performance wasn’t exactly as he intended. The hair was a clue: No Hollywood icon goes out on stage like that unless he means to.

John Hayward writes:

“The intended recipient was not Mitt Romney, the convention delegates, or even Republican voters, but rather wavering independents. Clint was there to tell them it’s OK to find Obama, his ugly campaign operation, and his increasingly shrill band of die-hard defenders ridiculous. It’s OK to laugh at them.”

I’m not sure he could have pulled that off if he’d delivered a slick telepromptered pitch. …

Jim Treacher has another off the charts demonstration of Prez Narcissist. The tribute to Neil Armstrong has a picture of The One looking at the moon.

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Craig Pirrong reacts to the news that the president doesn’t think he has campaigned enough.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a looonnggg piece on Obama Agonistes, the struggler facing a tough reelection campaign.  Oh! The injustice!

In it, his confidants identify his problem: He hasn’t campaigned enough:

“Over his first term, Mr. Obama, 51 years old, has fundamentally shifted his view of modern presidential power, say those who know him well. He is now convinced the most essential part of his job, given politically divided Washington, is rallying public opinion to his side.

As a result, if he wins a second term, Mr. Obama plans to remain in campaign mode.”

Note: that was not from The Onion.  Follow the link, and you’ll find the above in the WSJ.

Umm, when has he ever been out of campaign mode?

This explanation for his failures is a variant on a theme that he personally and his minions have flogged for the past several years: his biggest mistake has been that he hasn’t taken the time to explain the brilliant wonderfulness of The One and his deeds to the boobs in the boonies and the burbs.  So he will dedicate himself to righting that mistake and instructing us slow learners. …

Roger Kimball has the Obamanation of the Day. Pickerhead asks again, how sick is this guy?

I admit it, when it comes to Barack Obama, I think pretty low. But not, apparently, quite low enough. This exchange, from an interview with Cathleen Falsani of the Chicago Sun-Times, took even my jaded breath away:

Falsani: Do you believe in sin?

Obama: Yes.

Falsani: What is sin?

Obama: Being out of alignment with my values.

Have you ever found a pithier summary of the narcissistic core of today’s “progressive” Left-liberal ideology?  I’m not sure I have.

Tim Dalrymple has another OMG example.

The liberal elites who are denigrating Clint Eastwood’s speech at the Republican National Convention last night are only hurting themselves.  Swing-state independents and undecideds like Clint Eastwood a lot more than they like liberal elites.  They will only harden in their support for Clint’s folksy commonsense the more it’s contrasted with the cheap and scornful hyper-partisanship of the Daily Kos and HuffPo crowd.

I thought the premise was brilliant.  Clint seemed a little nervous, a little out of his element, but that only made him more relatable, more like the kind of guy you’d have a beer with.  (Seriously, who wouldn’t want to have a beer with Clint Eastwood?)  But the premise was perfect.

To everyone who has not consumed the Kool Aid, Barack Obama seems strikingly insubstantial.  ”Senator Present” from Illinois became a U. S. Senator who was more interested in campaigning than legislating.  Then he became an empty promise in the 2008 campaign, a micron-thin veneer of glitz and glamor over a hollow core, an empty screen onto which everyone projected their wishes.  Six weeks after the inauguration, when he was thoroughly in the honeymoon phase and largely still campaigning against President Bush and on behalf of a stimulus, he uttered one of the most vapid and immature things I have ever heard from a President, when he told a bunch of television anchors at the White House: “I like being President, and it turns out I’m very good at it.”

That’s humility and wisdom for you: six weeks into a four-year term, and he’s already prepared to declare himself “very good at it.”  I guess that’s what happens when you’re the kind of guy who gets a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing. Thank goodness he likes being President, though — because, you know, it’s all about him. …

Mark Thiessen comes up with a list of Obama’s foreign policy failures.

(During the convention), Condi Rice took on President Obama’s foreign policy leadership, declaring “We cannot be reluctant to lead and you cannot lead from behind.” Here are ten areas where Obama’s reluctance to lead has cost America dearly in the past three-and-a-half years:

Obama has failed to lead on Iran. Sanctions and negotiations are failing, and Iran has made more progress toward a nuclear weapon in the past three-and-a-half years under Obama than it has in the three decades since the Iranian revolution – with more centrifuges, more stockpiles of high enriched uranium, and more hardened facilities than when Obama took office. Iran has no fear that Obama will take military action to stop them – because they know full well that Obama has staked his presidential legacy on ending wars, not starting them.

Obama is failing to lead in Syria.  Iran’s closest ally in the Middle East is massacring tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children while America sits on the sidelines doing nothing – because Russia and China won’t let us.

Obama is failing to lead on Afghanistan.  He launched a surge but then undermined it by announcing our withdrawal before the additional forces arrived – sending a signal to the Taliban that they could simply wait for America’s pre-announced retreat to re-take major swaths of the country and invite al Qaeda back. …

Bret Stephens has more on the global has-been who never was.

… Consider the record. His failed personal effort to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. His failed personal effort to negotiate a climate-change deal at Copenhagen in 2009. His failed efforts to strike a nuclear deal with Iran that year and this year. His failed effort to improve America’s public standing in the Muslim world with the now-forgotten Cairo speech. His failed reset with Russia. His failed effort to strong-arm Israel into a permanent settlement freeze. His failed (if half-hearted) effort to maintain a residual U.S. military force in Iraq. His failed efforts to cut deals with the Taliban and reach out to North Korea. His failed effort to win over China and Russia for even a symbolic U.N. condemnation of Syria’s Bashar Assad. His failed efforts to intercede in Europe’s economic crisis. (“Herr Obama should above all deal with the reduction of the American deficit” was the free advice German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble offered this year.)

 

In June, the PewResearchCenter released one of its periodic surveys of global opinion. It found that since 2009, favorable attitudes toward the U.S. had slipped nearly everywhere in the world except Russia and, go figure, Japan. George W. Bush was more popular in Egypt in the last year of his presidency than Mr. Obama is today. …

Powerline says Liz Warren is increasingly compared to Martha Coakley who lost to Scott Brown the last time.

“Elizabeth Warren was supposed to be the Great Liberal Hope, the one Democrat tough enough to evict Scott Brown from Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. Then she started campaigning.” So begins a devastating critique of Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy that appeared in Boston Magazine.

Shockingly, as the reader who alerted me to this article put it, the Harvard prof who lives in Cambridge isn’t connecting in the suburbs with middle class and union folks:

To nearly everyone who knows her name, Elizabeth Warren has become a symbol. But in the months since she announced her intention to unseat Scott Brown, Elizabeth Warren has become something else: a candidate. And that is proving to be the challenge. . . .

At public events, she sticks to her stump speech and rarely strays from her talking points. …