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Mort Zuckerman explains why the country is tired of Obama.
When you accumulate some of the adjectives from the pundits, the media, and other appraisals that were not from the right but from baffled sympathizers and centrists, there is no doubt that President Barack Obama clearly lost the debate this week, as a matter of both substance and tone. Take your pick from the river of insults: listless, meandering, lazy, dull-brained, long-winded, languid, and flaccid were just some of the epithets from the pundits. Even the New York Times opined that “He lost his competitive edge.” The worst that Mitt Romney’s relatively few critics could come up with was that his tax cut was unaffordable.
All Obama could do was repeat the charge, and Romney was able to make the pledge that he would not reduce revenues through his tax cut because they would be offset by the elimination of special write-offs and loopholes. What was remarkable was that Romney, who has been in everyone’s dog house for months with an erratic campaign, has suddenly assumed the stature of a president. He was warm, articulate, logical, informed, forceful, and most important, presidential. He was more engaged, more detailed, more decisive, more animated, more aggressive in attack, and more robust in defense than the president, who was lackadaisical and without mastery of the facts or the ability to respond to what was put forth by his challenger.
But what is at issue isn’t debating style, questions of posture and demeanor, “gotcha moments,” or “You’re no Jack Kennedy” zingers. The fundamental issue for America is that we seem to have lost our way and we haven’t found it after four years of the Obama administration, thanks to a leadership so lacking that the American dream now seems to be a chimera of nostalgia. The president appears to have lost his intellectual interest.
It is all very well to raise a sword and cry “Forward!” but to what? …
Noemie Emery with the before and after of the great debate.
It was in Denver one week ago that the long-running romance between Barack Obama and the national press — aka the “Slobbering Love Affair,” as Bernard Goldberg put it — hit the wall. The motel bill, unpaid these many long months and ages, at long last came due.
It had been the real thing, not a commonplace fling with your generic Democrat, but the love of a lifetime, the genuine article, the sum of all dreams: He was not just a Democrat, he was also a liberal. He was not just a liberal, he also biracial, also multinational; also hip, cool, and clever. He was themselves as they wanted to be. Like them, he was gifted at writing and talking (and, as it turned out, not much beyond that), like them, he stood up for Metro America; like them, he viewed the people outside it with a not-very-measured disdain. “I divide people into people who talk like us and people who don’t talk like us,” said David Brooks, speaking for all of them. “You could see him as a NewRepublic writer … he’s more talented than anyone in my lifetime … he IS pretty dazzling when he walks into a room.” …
… Obama had seen that his friends would protect him, and so he believed he could mail it in Wednesday, but this was the venue that could not be spun. No filter. No edits. No choosing what to put in or leave out. No shaping of the story. Just the story itself, rolled out in real time, sans narration, before 70 million American voters, undoing six years of hype and hysterics. It revealed one small, not all that keen academic, having been inflated by the narrators beyond all recognition, dissolving before everyone’s eyes.
Jack Welch explains why the employment numbers are open to debate.
… The unemployment data reported each month are gathered over a one-week period by census workers, by phone in 70% of the cases, and the rest through home visits. In sum, they try to contact 60,000 households, asking a list of questions and recording the responses.
Some questions allow for unambiguous answers, but others less so. For instance, the range for part-time work falls between one hour and 34 hours a week. So, if an out-of-work accountant tells a census worker, “I got one baby-sitting job this week just to cover my kid’s bus fare, but I haven’t been able to find anything else,” that could be recorded as being employed part-time.
The possibility of subjectivity creeping into the process is so pervasive that the BLS’s own “Handbook of Methods” has a full page explaining the limitations of its data, including how non-sampling errors get made, from “misinterpretation of the questions” to “errors made in the estimations of missing data.”
Bottom line: To suggest that the input to the BLS data-collection system is precise and bias-free is—well, let’s just say, overstated.
Even if the BLS had a perfect process, the context surrounding the 7.8% figure still bears serious skepticism. Consider the following:
In August, the labor-force participation rate in the U.S. dropped to 63.5%, the lowest since September 1981. By definition, fewer people in the workforce leads to better unemployment numbers. That’s why the unemployment rate dropped to 8.1% in August from 8.3% in July.
Meanwhile, we’re told in the BLS report that in the months of August and September, federal, state and local governments added 602,000 workers to their payrolls, the largest two-month increase in more than 20 years. And the BLS tells us that, overall, 873,000 workers were added in September, the largest one-month increase since 1983, during the booming Reagan recovery.
These three statistics—the labor-force participation rate, the growth in government workers, and overall job growth, all multidecade records achieved over the past two months—have to raise some eyebrows. There were no economists, liberal or conservative, predicting that unemployment in September would drop below 8%. …
Michael Barone wonders why it is a president said to be a constitutional scholar is so quick to skirt the country’s laws.
“The Illegal-Donor Loophole” is the headline of a Daily Beast story by Peter Schweizer of the conservative Government Accountability Institute and Peter Boyer, former reporter at the New Yorker and the New York Times.
The article tells how Obama.com, a website owned by an Obama fundraiser who lives in China but has visited the Obama White House 11 times, sends solicitations mostly to foreign email addresses and links to the Obama campaign website’s donation page.
The Obama website, unlike those of most campaigns, doesn’t ask for the three- or four-digit credit card verification number. That makes it easier for donors to use fictitious names and addresses to send money in.
Campaigns aren’t allowed to accept donations from foreigners. But it looks like the Obama campaign has made it easier for them to slip money in. How much foreign money has come into the Obama campaign? Schweizer and Boyer say there’s no way to know.
The campaign, as my former boss pollster Peter Hart likes to say, always reflects the candidate. A campaign willing to skirt the law or abet violations of it reflects a candidate who, as president, has been doing the same thing.
Examples abound. Take the WARN Act, which requires employers to give a 60-day notice of layoffs. It was sponsored and passed by Democrats.
The WARN Act requires defense contractors to give notice on Nov. 2 of layoffs that will be necessary on Jan. 3 when the sequestration law requires big cutbacks in defense spending.
The administration has asked companies not to send out the notices. And it has promised to pay companies’ WARN Act fines. Why the solicitude? The warnings could cost Obama Virginia’s 13 electoral votes.
When did Congress give presidents the power to suspend operation of this law? What law authorizes the government to pay the fines of those who violate the law?
Or consider the welfare waivers …
Looking forward to the Romney administration, Jennifer Rubin speculates about the people who fill two important jobs.
There are four weeks to go in the presidential race and anyone who tells you they know who will win is a fool. But as the possibility of a Romney presidency becomes more likely, it is worth considering the sorts of people who would fill out his administration. I’ll for now focus on perhaps the two most important jobs. …
Media-Ite with a short on the reaction to Joe Biden from a grown-up liberal.
Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski disagreed with guest Tom Brokaw on Friday morning when discussing the previous night’s debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan.
Both Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough agreed that “to know Joe is to love him,” despite poll results pointing to the contrary. Brokaw, however, approached the Vice President’s performance a bit more critically, saying that he simply “can’t contain himself” before pointing to the fact that Biden continued to smirk or laugh while he and Ryan discussed serious, solemn issues like Iran and Libya.
“I don’t think he was laughing,” said Brzezinski, but rather showed that he was “amused” at Ryan’s approach to these issues.
It’s about tone, Brokaw argued, regardless of one’s level of amusement, and he maintained that Biden’s demeanor should have been “dialed down” during discussion about critical, serious matters.
Kim Strassel has thoughts on Biden.
… the Biden performance was nothing more than a nastier repeat of Barack Obama’s event in Denver. It wasn’t that the president had an off night or altitude sickness (as suggested by Al Gore). Mr. Obama’s problem last week was that he didn’t have answers to Mitt Romney’s challenges. In the aftermath of a debate, if your campaign’s main theme is Big Bird, you have a problem.
Within the first few minutes of this debate, it what clear that Mr. Biden’s one and only strategy was to wrap as many scare quotes around the Romney-Ryan team as humanly possible in a limited time period. In his first answer in the domestic policy section, Mr. Biden packed so many diatribes into his opening lines—Mr. Romney would let Detroit go “bankrupt”; he’d let mortgage owners sink; he’d throw the elderly under the bus; he didn’t care about he 47%; he was flacking for millionaires—that the worry was he’d run out of breath. He didn’t.
Amid it all, too, were the constant quips designed to ram home the Obama campaign’s recent desperate strategy to paint the Romney-Ryan campaign as “liars” and flip-floppers. Mr. Biden never used that word itself, but his intent was clear. “Malarkey,” he stated. “Incredible,” he snorted. “Not true, not true,” he insisted. “I may be mistaken: [Romney] changes his mind so often, I may be wrong,” he explained. “I never say anything I don’t mean,” he said by way of contrast. And then said it again, in case anyone missed it.
Not that Mr. Biden didn’t offer plenty to keep honest fact-checkers busy, were they inclined to investigation. He repeated the utterly discredited Obama line that Mr. Romney intends to cut taxes to the tune of $5 trillion. He misrepresented a Ryan plan to reform Medicare—a plan that isn’t even part of the Romney-Ryan agenda. He once again made the argument that somehow it was the war in Iraq and the Bush tax cuts that put the economy into recession—rather than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and subprime mortgages, and easy Federal Reserve money.
Yet the moments of policy discussion—such as they were—were largely obscured by the bullying Biden. …
Telegraph, UK – Where Scotland has gone wrong.
In 1926 my father, aged 19, left an Aberdeenshire farm to be a rubber planter in Malaya. Apart from a year back home after enduring a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, he didn’t return to live in Scotland until he was almost 70. He was dismayed by what he found. It seemed to him that the Scots were no longer the hard-working, energetic and self-reliant people they had been in his youth. Instead they were given to self-pity and the belief that the world owed them a living and the state would provide.
There were exceptions, of course. The oil-rich north-east was not short of people starting their own businesses. But in general he believed that the Scots were sunk in a dependency culture, and this depressed and irritated him. He was out of sympathy with modern Scotland, though he was quite typical of his own era, when the Protestant work ethic ruled and the judgment “he’s done well for himself” was an expression of approval.
My father wouldn’t have been surprised by Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader, asserting that only 12 per cent of Scottish households make a net contribution to the economy, and that Scotland is suffering from the “depression of dependency which has held our country back for so many years”. …