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Chris Cillizza awards the president with ”The Worst Year in Washington.” Last year the same deserving recipient also received the award and Pickerhead thinks he’ll win again in 2015 after the Supremes toss out the immigration power grab along with the Affordable Care Act.
In 2014, President Obama’s past caught up with him.
His sixth year in office was, inarguably, his worst, when the problems that had been building throughout his second term all came crashing down around him.
The year began with Obama proposing a set of reforms to the National Security Agency, a result of ongoing national security leaks, and ended with midterm elections that saw his party lose its Senate majority largely because of the president’s unpopularity.
In between were continued challenges to the Affordable Care Act, America’s reentry into Iraq — a war the president had long vowed to exit — and memoirs from former Cabinet officials questioning Obama’s decision-making and judgment.
Twelve months ago, we also awarded Obama the worst year in 2013, calling 2013 his “lost year” because he spent it salvaging old accomplishments rather than building his legacy. But even then, we saw a possible path back to relevance. Now, all that appears left for the Obama presidency is a narrowing of both vision and accomplishment.
What tied together all of 2014′s failures, stumbles and necessary evils was a growing sense among the public that Obama simply isn’t up to the job to which he has been twice elected. …
Speaking of pathetic people, Jonathan Gruber’s congressional testimony is covered by John Fund.
An old Soviet joke had men carrying briefcases marching alongside tanks and soldiers in a Kremlin parade. “Why are those men in a military parade?” a boy innocently asks his father. He replies, “Those are the economists. They are the most dangerous of all.”
MIT economist Jonathan Gruber’s factually impoverished testimony on Obamacare didn’t get nearly the attention it should have, as congressional Democrats cleverly decided to release a report on CIA torture abuses on the same day. Gruber’s stonewalling about videos in which he boasted that the “stupidity” of the American people and their “lack of transparency” had been the key to passing Obamacare was buried deep inside major papers and ignored by the next morning’s network-TV shows. John Harwood of CNBC dismissed his testimony: “I’m sorry, Gruber is a nothingburger and always has been.” Mark Halperin of Bloomberg News chimed in: “This has been a sideshow. . . . It has no impact whatsoever.”
Halperin will be right if journalists continue to look the other way and fail to probe more deeply into the issues Gruber has raised. The lack of curiosity many of them display about a witness who used variations of “I don’t recall” 20 times during his testimony is remarkable. One journalist explained to me that many of his colleagues have bought into the liberal argument that Gruber was just a bit player in the Obamacare spectacle, even though many journalists played up his role just a few years ago. “He’s not a legislator. He’s not a staff guy. He’s like 300 million other Americans who can have their opinion,” now sniffs Jay Angoff, a Department of Health and Human Services official who worked on implementing the health-care legislation.
Everyone behind Obamacare appears desperate to deflect attention away from Gruber. It’s like the scene in Star Wars where Obi-Wan Kenobi uses an old Jedi mind trick to convince adversaries they’re going down the wrong path: “Those aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”
In fact, Gruber was the most influential economist advising Congress and the Congressional Budget Office on how to score the budget impact of Obamacare. …
Kevin Williamson writes on Sen. Warren.
… No doubt aware that 99 percent of those who look to her for guidance on financial regulation could not explain what a derivative is, Senator Warren did her usual dishonest shtick, engaging in her habitual demagoguery without ever making an attempt to actually explain the issue, which is a slightly complicated and technical one, to the rubes who make up the Democrats’ base. Angrily insisting that the reform is about nothing more than ensuring that “the biggest financial institutions in this country can make more money” is cheap, and it’s easier than trying to explain why many midsized banks believe that the rule puts them at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis the big Wall Street firms, to say nothing of exploring the convoluted question of why agricultural swaps are covered by the rule while interest-rate and foreign-exchange swaps are not. This led Maggie Haberman of Politico to admire Senator Warren’s “authenticity,” the choice of precisely that word being the cherry on this sundae of asininity. Senator Warren is as much an authentic champion of ordinary working people as she is an authentic Cherokee princess — and Mel Brooks and those Yiddish-speaking Indians from Blazing Saddles were more convincing in that role.
Bailout politics is still very much with us: People resent — rightly — what was done and how it was done. Many on the Tea Party right and the Occupy left intuit that there exists a dysfunctional relationship between Wall Street and Washington, though Senator Warren et al. maddeningly believe that the way to ameliorate this is to invest Washington with even greater powers, enabling even worse misbehavior and even more remorseless rent-seeking. And those who bother to keep up with such things know that neither Dodd-Frank nor anything else that has happened in Washington since the financial crisis has in fact eliminated, or even reduced, the phenomenon of financial institutions’ being considered — inevitable phrase — “too big to fail.” …
Since she is a genuine idiot, David Harsanyi thinks Liz should run.
There’s no good reason for her not to run.
When Elizabeth Warren rallied beleaguered House liberals to push back against a bank-coddling omnibus bill and the spineless White House that enabled it, she showed us some of her dynamic appeal. Her only leverage? An implicit threat to shut down the government. Hypocrisy? Sure. Consider the agitated criticism Warren and her allies threw at Republicans not very long ago. And yes, St. Warren’s righteousness was aimed at some inconsequential riders. Still, passing trillion-dollar pieces of legislation should never be easy, and disrupting the current cozy, bipartisan environment surely can’t be a bad thing.
At the same time, it’s not difficult to imagine Hillary Clinton ensconced in her penthouse suite in whatever city she’s about to give a six-figure lecture in, contemplating every conceivable political angle of this debate, tabulating every potential big-money donor’s interests, and asking obsequious staffers how polling looks before composing her own opinion on the matter. That’s because Hillary is the Democrats’ Mitt Romney. And Democrats would be engaging in a historic act of negligence if they allowed her to run unopposed for presidency. …
Seth Mandel thinks the biggest budget battle losers were Barry and Hillary.
… The big losers from last night are Obama and Hillary. The president, to borrow Bill Clinton’s quote, may still be relevant here, but not very. Obama had to use his office and his influence and his spokesmen and his advisors just to beat back a freshman senator from his own party, and just barely. Democrats, as Dave Weigel notes in an excellent tick-tock on last night’s mess, “proudly told reporters that calls from the White House — especially calls from Citigroup’s Jamie Dimon — did nothing to move them.”
Obama has dragged his party down enough. The midterms were the end of Obama as the leader of the Democratic Party, because even Democrats now understand they can win by separating themselves from Obama’s toxic legacy. And what about Obama’s chosen successor, Hillary Clinton? The Cromnibus chaos was a nightmare for her.
What the Democrats proved last night was that there exists a significant and restive segment of the base. Being Democrats, they still need someone to fall in line behind; unlike the Tea Party, these restive Democrats prefer to take orders from someone. They just would like to take orders from a different brand of statist. Elizabeth Warren is the one they’ve been waiting for.
Warren’s populism is very different from that of the Tea Party. Conservative grassroots value liberty; Warren argues for increasing state power over its citizens and is not above abusing that authority when she has the opportunity. What Warren wants is power concentrated in her hands. What Hillary’s supporters should fear is the possibility that Warren will pursue her quest for power to its logical conclusion and run for president. …
Howie Carr says you can always tell a Harvard man.
… Then there are those Harvard Law School students asking to postpone taking their final exams because of the “trauma” of Ferguson and Staten Island. Does this include the Harvard Law student who was arrested last week after he allegedly assaulted some Harvard cops in a law school dorm while intoxicated?
The biggest embarrassments, though, are Jonathan Gruber and his younger separated-at-birth brother, Ben Edelman. A couple of “doctors” from Harvard. One is the scourge of American health care, the other of local Chinese restaurants.
As a former condo owner on Harvard Street in the square, diagonally across from Pennypacker Hall, I feel eminently qualified to diagnose the causes of the Goober boys’ despicable behavior — post traumatic stress disorder.
You’d be a braggart and a bully too, if you’d spent your junior-high years getting stuffed into lockers, or enduring the indignity of daily atomic wedgies, as these two greedy geeks so obviously did.
There’s only one cure for PTSD — and that’s a Harvard Ph.D. Piled Higher and Deeper. …