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In the Corner, John Miller lists all the reasons why liberals have had a tough week.
1. The Democrats lost Ted Kennedy’s seat, sending their health-care takeover efforts into a tailspin.
2. The Supreme Court wiped out the central feature of McCain-Feingold, in a victory for free speech.
3. Air America declared bankruptcy.
UPDATE: A reader notes the arrival of this anniversary:
Sec. 3. Closure of Detention Facilities at Guantánamo. The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order. …
BARACK OBAMA
THE WHITE HOUSE,
January 22, 2009. …
Mark Steyn discusses trucks and other liberal issues.
…”The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” said Obama. “People are angry, and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.” …
…Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it.
…As the headline in Der Spiegel put it: “The World Bids Farewell To Obama.” …
…The Barack Obama who showed up last Sunday to help out Martha Coakley was a sad and diminished figure from the colossus of a year ago. He had nothing to say, but he said it anyway. As he did with his Copenhagen pitch for the Olympics, he put his personal prestige on the line, raised the stakes, and then failed to deliver. All those cool kids on his speechwriting team bogged him down in the usual leaden sludge. He went to the trouble of flying in to phone it in. …
Mort Zuckerman is one of the disenchanted liberals.
…In the campaign, he said he would change politics as usual. He did change them. It’s now worse than it was. I’ve now seen the kind of buying off of politicians that I’ve never seen before. It’s politically corrupt and it’s starting at the top. It’s revolting.
Five states got deals on health care—one of them was Harry Reid’s. It is disgusting, just disgusting. I’ve never seen anything like it. The unions just got them to drop the tax on Cadillac plans in the health-care bill. It was pure union politics. They just went along with it. It’s a bizarre form of political corruption. It’s bribery. I suppose they could say, that’s the system. He was supposed to change it or try to change it. …
…One business leader said to me, “In the Clinton administration, the policy people were at the center, and the political people were on the sideline. In the Obama administration, the political people are at the center, and the policy people are on the sidelines.” …
Der Spiegel reviews commentary from German newspapers on the political landscape that Obama faces.
The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:
“Of course the president rejects the interpretation that the Massachusetts election was a referendum on his first year in the White House. But he cannot ignore the fact that his health care reform package is not popular, the situation of the country’s finances is seen as threatening and many voters blame the high unemployment rate on the party in power — on the Democrats, led by Obama. The result is a second year in office full of very different challenges than the first. To save what there is to be saved, Obama will have to be prepared to fashion a bipartisan compromise on health care — a compromise with a Republican Party which has tasted blood and can now dream once again about a return to power.”
Charles Krauthammer shreds the liberal spin.
…After Coakley’s defeat, Obama pretended that the real cause was a generalized anger and frustration “not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”
Let’s get this straight: The antipathy to George W. Bush is so enduring and powerful that … it just elected a Republican senator in Massachusetts? Why, the man is omnipotent.
And the Democrats are delusional: Scott Brown won by running against Obama not Bush. He won by brilliantly nationalizing the race, running hard against the Obama agenda, most notably Obamacare. Killing it was his No. 1 campaign promise.
Bull’s-eye. An astonishing 56 percent of Massachusetts voters, according to Rasmussen, called health care their top issue. In a Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates poll, 78 percent of Brown voters said their vote was intended to stop Obamacare. Only a quarter of all voters in the Rasmussen poll cited the economy as their top issue, nicely refuting the Democratic view that Massachusetts was just the usual anti-incumbent resentment you expect in bad economic times.
Brown ran on a very specific, very clear agenda. Stop health care. Don’t Mirandize terrorists. Don’t raise taxes; cut them. And no more secret backroom deals with special interests. …
More bad news for Obama. Yuval Levin blogs about it in the Corner.
…You know an administration is in trouble when prominent officials let it be known to the press that they disagreed with one of the president’s major decisions. It happens to every president, and it’s always a very bad sign. Usually it comes after some policy goes terribly awry, and sends senior advisors running for cover. But sometimes, in the very worst cases, it happens as soon as a decision is made, before the policy in question has even had a chance to be tested—and it reveals more than dissent about one particular decision, but a broader sense that things are not well at the top.
That is why this Reuters story from yesterday was so striking. It describes Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s opposition to the bank limits President Obama announced. It seems that on the very day of the announcement, Geithner decided he needed to dispatch people close to him to make it known (anonymously) that he did not agree with the decision, and indeed that he agreed with the two key arguments offered by its staunchest critics. …
Jonah Goldberg comments on Yuval Levin’s post.
Reading Yuval’s post about the Treasury Secretary’s unease with the president’s bank plan, it seems pretty obvious that the political shop is running policy at the White House. …
…. But it does remind me that a lot of folks thought it was just terrible for Karl Rove to have any role in policy formation in the White House. Whatever the merits of this bank plan, is there any doubt that David Axelrod is playing just such a role here?
However galling the cynicism, dishonesty, and hypocrisy of the White House’s turn may be, I’m hardly scandalized that politics is influencing policy. That’s what politics is all about. My bigger concern is that such populist scapegoating rarely makes for good policy over the long haul.
Roger Simon is concerned about Obama’s next moves.
I don’t think it’s accident that the Stock Market is tanking after a very short rally that coincided with the then coming victory of Scott Brown. The business world is scared – as is evidently our Secretary of the Treasury who has wandered about as far off the reservation as cabinet officers normally go, allowing the world to know his skepticism about Obama’s new reining in of the banks. (How long before Geithner goes under the bus now?)
The scary thing is that many of us believe the President hardly knows much of anything, certainly not economics, and is surrounded by an increasingly paranoid and defensive group of advisers. It’s shades of Nixon, but worse. Tricky Dick, at least, knew what he was doing and could accomplish things. Obama is the biggest windbag to ever ascend to the presidency. He has no idea what he is doing and now things are getting rough. Frankly, I’m worried for our country because this man doesn’t really understand what the public is telling him. He just thinks we’re “angry.” He’s wrong – we’re furious and we’re furious because he blames everyone but himself and seems psychologically incapable of taking responsibility. One can imagine a ninety-year old Obama stumbling around in some rest home shaking his walking stick at George Bush. But for the moment Bush is being replaced boy. Now evidently it’s the banks’ fault. The evil bankers are to blame. It’s capitalism, stupid.
Problem is, we’ve been there, done that, a thousand times. The alternative to capitalism is socialism and it has never worked. Not once, in all its myriad permutations. In fact, it most often hurts those it was intended to help, bankrupting the society and leaving the lower classes destitute. The Soviet Union collapsed. China was deeply impoverished until it turned essentially capitalistic . Everybody knows that now, and has for years, except maybe our president. He’s after the banks and is so clueless he thinks that will impress us. Of course, it won’t. Nobody believes anything he says anymore. But he is the President and he can take executive actions. And with those actions, like a wounded animal, he may pull all of us down with him. I am deeply afraid of that because Barack Obama has never had to deal with any personal adversity in his adult life. He has lived a completely privileged existence. This is a first for him. There’s no telling how he will behave. Watch out, buckle up and hold on to your seats.
Jennifer Rubin discusses some comments that will make you cringe.
In an interview this week Obama admits that he really didn’t have a clue on how the Middle East works:
I’ll be honest with you. A: This is just really hard. Even for a guy like George Mitchell who helped bring about the peace in Northern Ireland. This is as intractable a problem as you get. …
Really hard?? The hubris is remarkable, isn’t it? One supposes that he imagined all the dolts who preceded him in the Oval Office to just not have been smart enough or him enough to get the job done. It seems as though he “overestimated” the impact of his mere presence on the parties. Really, who knew there were underlying political realities that would render the parties immune to his charms? But there is no sign he’s going to do much, if anything, differently (”we are going to continue to work with both parties to recognize what I think is ultimately their deep-seated interest in a two-state solution”). But now he knows it’s hard.
…He is, it seems, so fixed in his preconceptions of the word that basic geopolitical realities come as a surprise or disappointment. If only the world worked the way his university-professor pals and George Mitchell told him it would. …
In Commentary, Michael Totten says that the Middle East has been hard for a long time.
…The Middle East’s “Berlin Wall,” so to speak, may have cracked, but it didn’t fall. Iraq all but dismembered itself after its successful election. Hezbollah blew up the Levant and put Lebanon’s “March 14″ revolution on ice. Palestinians elected Hamas and transformed Gaza into a suppurating jihad state. It could be a while before I allow myself to feel upbeat and sunny again. The Middle East makes suckers of everyone who feels upbeat and sunny.
…The entire Middle East is difficult and dysfunctional. There is no peaceful political mainstream. Ethnic and religious violence is normal — not just between Arabs and Israelis, but also between Arabs and Persians, Arabs and Kurds, Kurds and Turks, Kurds and Persians, Muslims and Christians, and Sunnis and Shias. The idea that peace is likely to break out there any time soon was memorably ridiculed in the Adam Sandler comedy You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. “They’ve been fighting for 2,000 years,” said the main character’s mother. “It can’t be much longer.” …
…If the “peace process” is sure to fail right now — and it is — announcing it as a foreign-policy priority only sets Obama up as a weak leader who can’t deliver the goods. His credibility suffers, and so does America’s leverage. He ought to focus on conflict management and damage control, and try not to make anything worse.
David Harsanyi hits a home run.
…Fifty-eight percent of those polled by The Washington Post recently claimed they preferred smaller government with fewer services, with only 38 percent favoring a larger government with more services (and, yes, it is a terrific struggle not to place ironic quotations marks around the word services).
This is the highest number for the “smaller government” category since 2002. …
…Now, I am under no grand illusions about democracy. The electorate can be mercurial and irrational — as nearly every election proves. Nor do I believe any ethical politician should abandon his or her core values simply because polls tell them it would be expedient.
I say, keep fighting, Mr. President. Those of us who believe in capitalism need you. …
David Warren offers his thoughts on Haiti and on giving.
…Yet if our intention is to help, both short term and longer, our emphasis should not be on doing things that make us feel good about ourselves, but instead on what works. …
…This problem is exacerbated by our “culture of narcissism,” which focuses on the happyface of good intentions. Good intentions are never enough, prudence is required to convert them into useful action, yet prudence is the last thing on the minds of people jostled by headlines into a need to “do something now.”
The impulse to “write a cheque” to assuage conscience becomes more and more deeply engrained in our psyches, as we abandon the moral and spiritual underpinnings of our civilization, and indulge the habit of quantifying each issue by the amount of money we throw at it. My advice to the people who have asked me what they can most usefully do to help is, start thinking ahead to the next disaster. For Port-au-Prince is already bottlenecked with supplies. …
Leading off the cartoons is a Corner Post from Jack Fowler.