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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. …