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A number of our favorites commented on the never ending “pivot to the economy.” Andrew Malcolm starts us off.
One way to look at President Obama’s latest speech tour beginning today:
‘President Obama takes his firm commitment to grow the American economy on the road today, stopping in Illinois and Missouri to urge creation of thousands of new jobs to continue expansion of the middle-class within the heartland and across this great nation.
“The President will deliver remarks at Knox College,” the White House announced with excitement, “to kick off a series of speeches that will lay out his vision for rebuilding an economy that puts the middle class and those fighting to join it front and center.”‘
Another way to look at Obama’s latest speech tour:
“Lord spare us, the nation’s most addicted campaigner heads out for — what? — the 84th time today to call on somebody to do something about the country’s stubbornly stagnant economy to finally create the hundreds of thousands of new jobs he and Joe promised more than four years ago when he started spending trillions of our dollars.
Obama has pivoted to the jobs meme so often since Jan. 20, 2009, that he needs new soles on his shoes. Remember when Scott Brown became the first Republican to win a Massachusetts Senate seat in four decades? Obama, who’d been pushing financial reform and ObamaCare, said he got that message loud and clear. He’d turn to j-o-b-s”.
According to Obama’s White House, which hosted the Louisville Cardinals NCAA champion basketball team Tuesday and will welcome the World Series San Francisco Giants next Monday, Republicans have taken their eye off the ball by not focusing on the country’s top challenge: Jobs.
Joe Biden, by the way, the three-letter J-O-B-S man appointed to oversee stimulus effectiveness, is off in India and Singapore these days doing something….
Before we go back to our guys, how about a certified liberal like Dana Milbank of WaPo.
“I don’t normally do this,” President Obama’s senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer wrote in the subject line of an e-mail blast to reporters Sunday night.
This was tantalizing. What would this top White House official be doing? Singing karaoke on the North Lawn? Getting a “POTUS” tattoo on his arm?
Reality was rather more prosaic. Pfeiffer was announcing the rollout of a series of economic speeches Obama would begin on Wednesday — roughly the 10th time the White House has made such a pivot to refocus on jobs and growth. What would set this one apart is that Obama would be reprising a speech he made eight years ago, when he first became a senator; Pfeiffer included a link to clips from that speech, set in part to mood music from the Canadian electronica group Kidstreet, the same music used in an Apple ad last year.
But even a reincarnated Steve Jobs would have trouble marketing this turkey: …
Here’s Byron York.
“Obama’s “new” direction is a repeat of something he has done many times in the past. At various points in his presidency — always with a backdrop of prolonged and painful unemployment — the president has directed his attention to non-economic issues, only to decide that he must “pivot” back to the economy in the face of declining poll numbers or an approaching election. Given that pattern, some Republicans found Obama’s latest move bitterly amusing.
“The president says he’s going to go out and ‘pivot’ back to jobs,” said House Speaker John Boehner Tuesday. “Well, welcome to the conversation, Mr. President. We’ve never left it.”…
Jennifer Rubin is not as polite.
… He is never so comfortable as when he is campaigning against government, assuming the posture of a professorial bystander in his own administration.
He protests that scandals are “phony,” but polls show otherwise, especially when it comes to the Internal Revenue Service. And, of course, the scandals would end more quickly if he ever came clean, disgorged all the information at the beginning and stuck to one story.
The Obama routine gets tiresome after five years. It seems not to dawn on him that his opponents don’t think his policy recommendations (new taxes, Obamacare) are good for the country. And the country on many issues agrees with them. To protest the Obama agenda is to cause “gridlock” and “play politics,” in his view.
One can imagine that the trio of speeches is intended to do little more than pump up Obama’s troops in advance of the fall budget fights. This has been his approach to governance from the get-go — rile his supporters, denigrate opponents and then complain to the voters. …
James Pethokoukis points out five job stats that did not get presidential mention.
3. About half of the jobs created during the first half of 2013, and a large majority of the jobs created in Q2 2013, appear to have been part-time jobs that offer employees as little as one hour of work per week, and up to 35 hours of work.
4. After falling from a recession high of 9.2 million to a post-recession low of 7.6 million at the end of Q1 2013, the number of people saying they are working part time because they can’t find full time work (part time for economic reasons) crept back up to 8.2 million, double pre-recession levels.
David Harsanyi says all this provides an opportunity for the GOP and they are blowing it.
… So what do Republicans do? Obama quipped that repealing Obamacare and cutting spending isn’t an economic plan. Well, actually it’s as good an economic plan Obama produced. This year, over 830,000 Americans are new part-time workers and 97,000 fewer of them have full-time positions. Poll after poll finds that small business are cutting back or hiring fewer full time workers due to Obamacare. Other polls show Obamacare’s popularity decreasing as implementation ratchets up.
Yet, broadly speaking, he’s correct; there has to be more. Republicans offer no inspiring alternative. It is incomprehensible that the GOP hasn’t devised some palpable and bold 10-step economic plan (with some nifty title like “A Better Bargain”) that deals with crony capitalism, government overreach and economic growth. Even before the speech was given, Eric Cantor’s office was touting Republican alternatives to Obama’s non-plan. 1 – Urge the Democratic controlled Senate to join the House and Pass a Job Training Bill. 2 – Approve the Keystone Pipeline. 3 – Support the Bipartisan Effort to Expand Offshore Domestic Energy Production.
Seriously? That’s it? …
James Taranto calls it the “politics of contempt.”
… Obama’s speech was a dreadful, cliché-ridden piece of writing. Here’s our favorite bit: “Rather than reduce our deficits with a scalpel–by cutting programs we don’t need, fixing ones we do, and making government more efficient–this same group has insisted on leaving in place a meat cleaver called the sequester that has cost jobs, harmed growth, hurt our military, and gutted investments in American education and scientific and medical research that we need to make this country a magnet for good jobs.”
Because as Ben Franklin sagely observed, you can’t make a magnet with cloven meat.
But wait. It’s worse than that. He’s criticizing “this same group” for leaving in place a meat cleaver. What happens when you leave a cleaver in place? Nothing!
“With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball,” the president harrumphed. There’s an image for you. Where exactly is the ball relative to the parade route?
Also, which scandals exactly are “phony”? The biggest scandal is the one that raises serious questions about the legitimacy of Obama’s re-election. Here is what President Asterisk himself had to say on the subject way back on May 13: “If you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and non-partisan way, then that is outrageous, it is contrary to our traditions. And people have to be held accountable, and it’s got to be fixed. . . . I’ve got no patience with it. I will not tolerate it.”
We’re sure his outrage over the phony scandal was genuine. …
J. Christian Adams calls him President Alinsky.
You can take the community organizer out of the South Side, but you can’t take the community organizer out of the community organizer.
Today, America heard threats from the increasingly predictable President Alinsky.
“The position of the middle class will erode further,” Mr. Obama said. “Inequality will continue to increase, money’s power will distort our politics even more. Social tensions will rise, as various groups fight to hold on to what they have, start blaming somebody else for why their position isn’t improving. That’s not the America we know.”
This is standard-fare Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Obama doesn’t even attempt to disguise it, leaving out only the original author’s name. Obama merely adds the threat of social tensions.
For that, thank speech co-author Saul Alinsky. …