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We start with a few more reactions to the president’s recent speech. George Will comments on Obama’s Afghanistan plan. Will continues to disagree with being there, but makes some good points on related topics.
WASHINGTON — A traveler asks a farmer how to get to a particular village. The farmer replies, “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.” Barack Obama, who asked to be president, nevertheless deserves sympathy for having to start where America is in Afghanistan.
But after 11 months of graceless disparagements of the 43rd president, the 44th acts as though he is the first president whose predecessor bequeathed a problematic world. And Obama’s second new Afghanistan policy in less than nine months strikingly resembles his predecessor’s plan for Iraq, which was: As Iraq’s security forces stand up, U.S. forces will stand down.
Having vowed to “finish the job,” Obama revealed Tuesday that he thinks the job in Afghanistan is to get out of Afghanistan. This is an unserious policy. …
…Many Democrats, who think the $787 billion stimulus was too small and want another one (but by another name), are flinching from the $30 billion one-year cost of the Afghan surge. Considering that the GM and GMAC bailouts ($63 billion) are five times bigger than Afghanistan’s GDP ($12 billion), Democrats seem to be selective worriers about deficits. Of course, their real worry is how to wriggle out of their endorsement of the “necessary” war in Afghanistan, which was a merely tactical endorsement intended to disparage the “war of choice” in Iraq.
The president’s party will not support his new policy, his budget will not accommodate it, our overstretched and worn down military will be hard-pressed to execute it, and Americans’ patience will not be commensurate with Afghanistan’s limitless demands for it. This will not end well. …
In the Daily Beast, Tina Brown blogs that in recent speeches, she finds the Great Orator’s meaning is unclear. Thinks he’s losing it.
It’s a strange paradox for a great wordsmith, but whenever Obama makes an important policy speech these days he leaves everyone totally confused. His first health-care press conference back in July triggered a season of raucous political Rorschach and left his hopeful followers utterly baffled about what they were being asked to support. Now White House envoys are being dispatched all over the globe to explain what the president really meant about the date when troops will or won’t be pulled out of Afghanistan. …
…Does Obama create confusion on purpose? Is this his “process” based on his confession that he’s a screen onto which people project things? Is it a strategy so that whatever bill trickles out of Congress or however many soldiers linger in Afghanistan, he can claim that the outcome is what he meant it all along? (Clinton and Gates assured nervous senators on the Hill Thursday that the August 2011 deadline was both firm and flexible, and that this position was, in Gates’ words, “not contradictory” in the least.) Or is it that for all the administration’s vaunted mastery of multiplatform communication, Rahm and Gibbs and company are actually amateurs at crafting a clear political message and launching it on the dazed American public?
Or is it that there is so much subtext to every part of this message that the simple heads of the electorate are just not pointy enough to comprehend it?
I have come to the conclusion that the real reason this gifted communicator has become so bad at communicating is that he doesn’t really believe a word that he is saying. He couldn’t convey that health-care reform would be somehow cost-free because he knows it won’t be. And he can’t adequately convey either the imperatives or the military strategy of the war in Afghanistan because he doesn’t really believe in it either. He feels colonized by mistakes of the past. He feels trapped by the hand that has been dealt him. …
In Forbes, Claudia Rosett wonders where the soaring rhetoric was.
…There was no full-throated celebration of America’s heart and soul of freedom. The president invoked “the challenges of a new age” in terms by and large so dreary they made the “malaise” of Jimmy Carter’s America sound like high old times. Forget about Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill,” or even Bush 41′s “thousand points of light.” Instead, there was the hallmark Obama apology for America: “We have at times made mistakes.” There was the damped-down phrasing with which Obama described America as having “underwritten global security for more than six decades”–a compliment of sorts, but quite a demotion from leader of the free world to underwriter of global security. …
…In speaking of Iraq, Obama gave America (and former president George Bush) no credit for leading the overthrow of a mass-murdering, war-mongering tyrant. Nor did he take into account in any way the genuine dangers averted by the removal of Saddam Hussein’s corrupt, violent and predatory regime from the heart of the Middle East. Obama’s focus was on “the wrenching debate” the “substantial rifts,” and the “extraordinary costs” of the Iraq war. He did praise the troops for their “courage, grit and perseverance.” But in this speech, it all added up to nothing more than bringing the Iraq war “to a responsible end,” and “successfully leaving Iraq to its people”–as if America in 2003 had wantonly disturbed a perfectly reasonable setup in Baghdad, and deserved credit merely for rectifying the error.
In the course of apologizing (again) for America, faulting his predecessor, reprising a mess of political infighting and lecturing his audience on the need to live up to “the values we hold dear” (while implying that may be too tall an order for a jaded country), Obama delivered the much-rehearsed news that he will send 30,000 more troops to “end” the war in Afghanistan, and will then start pulling them out within 18 months. In this speech, he also said: “The nation I’m most interested in building is our own.” Great. But when does he realize that leading this free and extraordinary country begins with looking up to his fellow Americans, not tearing them down? …
The government can employ better strategies to help the economy than a jobs summit, blogs Jennifer Rubin. She also comments on an article by Robert Samuelson.
The “jobs summit” today typifies the root of the Obama team’s misguided thinking on jobs. In place of policies that would aid in private-sector job creation, the administration has provided an oversold and ineffective stimulus plan, lots of dog-and-pony shows, much heated rhetoric about Wall Street excesses, and a grab bag of policies that makes things worse. For starters, the looming debt, as Robert Samuelson explains, has created ”the perception that the administration will tolerate, despite rhetoric to the contrary, permanently large deficits [that] could ultimately rattle investors and lead to large, self-defeating increases in interest rates. There are risks in overaggressive government job-creation programs that can be sustained only by borrowing or taxes.” But that’s not all, as Samuelson observes:
Obama can’t be fairly blamed for most job losses, which stemmed from a crisis predating his election. But he has made a bad situation somewhat worse. His unwillingness to advance trade agreements (notably, with Colombia and South Korea) has hurt exports. The hostility to oil and gas drilling penalizes one source of domestic investment spending. More important, the decision to press controversial proposals (health care, climate change) was bound to increase uncertainty and undermine confidence. Some firms are postponing spending projects “until there is more clarity,” [Moody's Economy.com Mark] Zandi notes. Others are put off by anti-business rhetoric.
The jobs summit ignores all that and offers up yet another campaign-type event in lieu of productive governance. This is at the heart of not only the jobs problem but also much of what ails the administration. Rather than a useless summit, the administration would do well to consider a package of tax cuts designed to bolster hiring and an agreement to hold off on job-killing legislation. (Gary Andres highlights a useful model for economic revival: the state of Texas.) But in fact, the administration is going in the opposition direction. That — and another dopey jobs summit — are surefire signs that the administration is a long way from getting its act together.
Jennifer Rubin posts that they are discovering the obvious at the jobs summit, and still can’t figure out the appropriate next step.
At his “jobs summit,” Obama discovered: “Ultimately, true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector.” Mon dieu! You mean lambasting business, hiking taxes, imposing a flurry of mandates, and regulating carbon emissions aren’t the way to go? No, no. The Obami still want to do all that. They just expect the private sector to grow and hire workers in spite of all that. I guess. …
…Clinton economic guru Roger C. Altman, writing in the Wall Street Journal, warns that the Democrats are heading for an electoral wipeout and suggests:
By providing new incentives for job creation and bank lending, offering more detailed and forceful commitment to deficit reduction, improving relations with industry, and taking a more forceful stance towards Wall Street, the Obama administration can reduce next year’s election risk.
Sounds like a good idea. They could have a summit. Perhaps they could call it the “Undo the Damage Summit.” Well, I’ll leave the marketing to others, but you get the idea. If you want the private sector to create jobs, you first have to stop bludgeoning employers.
Jason Zengerle, in the New Republic, discusses summit-mania at the White House in a piece titled, So Much Gasbaggery, So Little Time
…It should hardly have been a surprise, then, that Obama would go a bit summit-crazy once he was actually in the White House. Little more than a month after taking office, he held a “Fiscal Responsibility Summit” where he solicited ideas for battling the deficit; a few weeks after that he hosted a “Health Care Summit” to kick off his drive for health care reform; and later still came the “H1N1 Preparedness Summit” and the “Distracted Driving Summit.” Then there were the assortment of international summits (Summit of the Americas, NATO Summit, G-8 Summit, G-20 Summit, ASEAN Summit), head-of-state summits (Karzai, Zardari, Medvedev, Hatoyama, Hu), and, of course, the Beer Summit with Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant James Crowley. And last week Obama’s summitry comes full circle when he held another jobs summit, where he and 130 other people (including Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, and even Eric Schmidt, in case he has any new ideas he didn’t put forth 14 months ago) chewed over how to get the unemployment rate out of double digits. Add it all up and that’s an astounding amount of gas-baggery in such a relatively short period of time. …
…But at some point summits became less about results or even about drama and became all about gabbing. I’d argue that the change can be traced to December of 1992, when Bill Clinton convened his Economic Summit. …Prior to Clinton’s economic confab, the term summit had generally been given only to big international meetings or tête-à-têtes between world leaders. But Clinton took the “summit” label and slapped it on the two-day, 20-hour, 300-person gabfest he organized in a convention center in Little Rock to talk about the economy. As The New York Times reported [2] at the time:
“For nearly 10 hours, he sat in a swivel chair at the head of a large oval arrangement of tables at the downtown convention center here, taking notes, asking questions and offering his views about topics ranging from the declining military industry to rising health costs, from public works projects at home to international trade policy.”
[…]
“No new substantive ground was broken either in terms of the problems or of Mr. Clinton’s positions. The grim statistics the economists provided about the slow rate of economic growth, the staggering deficit, rising health costs and other problems are familiar to economists and politicians and were staples of this year’s election campaign.”
Sounds productive and scintillating, huh? So what did Clinton get out of his economic summit? A lot. Even if it was devoid of drama and ideas, the summit, which was nationally televised, allowed Clinton to flex his wonk muscles and deliver the message that he cared …
Here is Robert Samuelson’s article on the economy and the tough road ahead for jobs creation.
…Meanwhile, empty office buildings, shuttered retail stores and underutilized factories have depressed business investment spending. In the third quarter, it was down 20 percent from its 2008 peak. Despite huge federal budget deficits, total borrowing in the economy dropped in the first half of the year; this hasn’t happened in statistics dating to 1952.
Companies hire mainly when they see greater demand for their products and believe that extra workers will generate higher profits. More jobs then elevate confidence and demand. But for now, the logic is running in reverse. To restore profitability, companies are firing workers, and the ensuing pessimism erodes confidence and spending. Beyond households’ $12 trillion loss in net worth, mostly reflecting lower stock and home values, Americans are saving more to guard against joblessness, lost overtime or lower wages.
The good news is that the bad news may be peaking. Surplus inventories are declining; new orders will spur production. There is pent-up demand for cars and appliances. The devastated housing market is showing signs of revival — more sales, stable prices. Initial claims for unemployment insurance have dropped, as have monthly job losses (from about 700,000 per month early in the year to about 200,000 recently). Corporate profits have recovered from lows, easing pressure for layoffs. …
John Stossel has an excellent article on jobs creation.
…When government sets simple rules that everyone understands and then gets out of the way, free people create jobs.
Hong Kong demonstrates this. Last century, Hong Kong was third world poor. 50 years ago, its citizens’ average income was under $700 (in today’s dollars) per year. Today, it’s $43,800. Hong Kong got rich because Hong Kong’s rulers, stuffy British bureaucrats, practiced what I’ll call “benign neglect”: they enforced rule of law—kept people from stealing from each other, or killing each other— but then sat around and drank tea. They left people alone, and free people, left alone, created prosperity.
America’s founders did the same thing. The Constitution announced that American would be a country of limited government. That provided the simple and understandable rules that allowed America to grow into the richest country ever.
Today’s political class thinks that they can improve on that, but they can’t. Their micromanagement kills jobs. When Washington threatens to drastically change the rules of the game with health care mandates, cap and trade, financial regulation, a second stimulus, and (of course) a “jobs bill”, the private sector can’t make investments with any confidence. …
In the WSJ, Daniel Henninger says the Climategate scandal has wider implications for society’s belief in the scientific community’s standards of conduct and truthful inquiry.
…I don’t think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn’t only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called “the scientific community” had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician). …
…Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as “the precautionary principle.” As defined by one official version: “When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.” The global-warming establishment says we know “enough” to impose new rules on the world’s use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science’s traditional standards of evidence.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s dramatic Endangerment Finding in April that greenhouse gas emissions qualify as an air pollutant—with implications for a vast new regulatory regime—used what the agency called a precautionary approach. The EPA admitted “varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues.” Again, this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough. One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory. …
John Tierney writes how the Climategate scientists have hurt their cause.
As the scientists denigrate their critics in the e-mail messages, they seem oblivious to one of the greatest dangers in the climate-change debate: smug groupthink. These researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude — and ultimately undermine their own cause.
Consider, for instance, the phrase that has been turned into a music video by gleeful climate skeptics: “hide the decline,” used in an e-mail message by Phil Jones, the head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit. …
…Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium. …
…In response to the furor over the climate e-mail messages, there will be more attention than ever paid to those British temperature records, and any inconsistencies or gaps will seem more suspicious simply because the researchers were so determined not to reveal them. …
Under the category of; You Can’t Make It Up, we learn from a Corner Post that a “warm monger” is threatening to cutoff a NY Times reporter for being insufficiently dedicated to the globalony line.
… But, I sense that you are about to experience the ‘Big Cutoff’ from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included. …
Scrappleface ranks number one in sarcasm today as he portrays Obama mystified by citizens who don’t realize the critical role he has in creating jobs.
Just hours before he started his “White House to Main Street” jobs tour with a visit to Lehigh County, Pa., President Obama reportedly told top advisers he was “shocked at the level of ignorance among the common people regarding what it takes to generate jobs,” according to unnamed aides.
The tour is billed as an opportunity to get the president out of the White House, where he’s been holed up for nearly a full working day, to mingle among the citizenry in order to “take the temperature on what Americans are experiencing during these challenging economic times.” …
…”You would think that entrepreneurs and CEOs would realize the vital role the federal government plays in generating economic prosperity,” the president reportedly told his inner circle. “But instead they’ll probably prattle on about something called ‘free enterprise.’ I know now that I’ll have to spend a lot of time explaining that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, let alone a free enterprise. In this country, you have to make your money the old-fashioned way … by lobbying Congress to appropriate it, or writing memoirs and such.” …