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In the Telegraph, UK, Simon Heffer comments on Obami ineffectiveness in governance.
The shock about coming to America after an absence of four months is how, in that time, respect for and confidence in President Obama has slumped. It wasn’t good in March; now the effect of what one blogger has called his apparent “impotence” has taken hold. It is not clear what Mr Obama actually does. He isn’t engaged with the economy; he certainly isn’t engaged with foreign policy; he has abandoned hope of a climate change bill this year (and probably for ever); he has seen his health care bill into law, but America awaits news of how it will be implemented; he is under attack for a casual approach to illegal immigration, notably from the Mexican narco-state. He has only just girded himself to go campaigning for his party in the mid-term elections. Last Sunday was the 100-days-to-go mark, and the talk in politics here is of little else. Joe Biden, the vice-president, has been nominated as “campaigner in chief”. Why? What is the President doing?
He appears to be reading the newspapers and the blogs and watching television. Last week, a twisted opponent put out a selectively edited video of a black Department of Agriculture official, Shirley Sherrod, apparently admitting discriminating against a white farmer. Mrs Sherrod had done nothing of the sort – either the discrimination or, therefore, the admission of it – but was immediately sacked, for fear that Fox News was about to broadcast the video. This outrageous act was followed by an even more outrageous apology by the president the next day …
…This immediate proof of mismanagement adds to the cumulative feeling on so many other fronts that Mr Obama and his team simply don’t understand governance. Last month Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, warned America that without more care being taken it could have a Greece-style debt problem. The president seemed to regard this warning as so self-evidently absurd that he quickly asked Congress for another $50 billion for various social projects. Last week, benefits for the long-term unemployed were extended for another six months at a cost of $34 billion. The health care programme is forecast to cost at least $863 billion. The total deficit this year is to be $1.47 trillion. America’s debt is likely to be $18.5 trillion by 2020, though it will be so low as that only if growth is maintained at 4 per cent: it is currently 3 per cent, and rocky.
Unemployment is 9.5 per cent and forecast to stay there for the time being. There are three million more jobless than when Mr Obama came to power, and unemployment among teenagers is around 25 per cent. …
Noemie Emery sees the same things as she catalogs the rise and fall of the Left. It is hard to think how Obama could have played his hand more poorly.
…What happened? Obama may have begun believing there was a coalition in place for the changes he wanted, but, for at least six different reasons, he and his friends were wrong. First, bad as it was, 2009 was no 1933, a perilous time when the country was not only strapped, but teetering on the raw edge of a social implosion. Second, Obama was no FDR, a political master who with one major exception—his court-packing plan after his 1936 landslide—had near-perfect pitch for what the country could take at each given moment, and seldom moved past these parameters. Third, when FDR became president, the crisis had already gone on for three years with no improvement; Obama’s crisis had gone on for just four months, and the first steps to check it had already been taken. Fourth, this crash had been caused largely by leverage and debate, which made people averse to more borrowing and spending. Fifth, when FDR came on the scene, the country arguably was undergoverned, with few regulations, and no safety nets. In 2009, this was hardly the case. Sixth and last, FDR and his voters hadn’t lived through a sorry decade like the 1970s, which had shown that while no regulation and no safety nets did not work well, too much of both didn’t work either. If trust in markets was no longer unbounded, neither was trust in the state. Those 60-plus years of experience made a very big difference. The era of big government being over was a whole lot more durable than Obama had thought.
Had Obama really been FDR, this would not have surprised him, as transformative leaders are always in touch with their times. …
…As Henninger concluded, “Barack Obama took a rising reservoir of public trust for his party .??.??. and emptied it.” Gallup’s annual Confidence in Institutions poll, conducted in the second week of July, showed that only 11 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress. “Half of Americans now say they have ‘very little’ or ‘no’ confidence in Congress, up from 38 percent in 2009—and the highest for any institution since Gallup first asked this question in 1973.” Talk about change, if you care to. And as for health care, Obama’s major achievement, when the bill passed, it was opposed by a 20-point spread by the general public, and since then it has only sunk lower. In some polls, around 60 percent of respondents say that they want it repealed. …
Jennifer Rubin comments on two governors who are bucking the big-government-is-the-answer trend.
Gov. Chris Christie continues to earn kudos from conservatives and liberals alike. Gov. Bob McDonnell has a 64 percent approval after less than a year as Virginia’s governor. Both Christie and McDonnell are garnering praise for doing what inside-the-Beltway Democrats refuse to do — cut spending, resist calls to hike taxes, and stand up to public-employee unions. … They provide a vivid contrast to Obamaism and to the notion that only by a massive increase in the size of government and corresponding tax increases can we pull out of our economic tailspin. …
RealClearPolitics.com has some wonderful quotes from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
NJ Gov. Chris Christie on “Morning Joe”: This teacher complaining, they’re getting four-to-five percent salary increases a year in a zero percent inflation world; they get free health benefits from the day they’re hired–for their entire family–until the day they die. They believe they’re entitled to this shelter from the recession when the people who are paying for that shelter are the people who have been laid off, who have lost their homes, had their hours cut back, and all we asked them to do was freeze their salary for one year and pay one-and-a-half percent of their salary for their health benefits. For the average teacher in New Jersey, you’re talking about $750 a year for full-family health coverage. Now, I don’t think that’s a lot to ask, and I don’t think we can continue anymore to be having the good people of New Jersey who have been laid off and all the rest–as much as I love teachers–you know, everyone’s got to be part of the sacrifice.
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Sorkin: Are you not worried though about spending in your state in terms of those teachers who are actually going to be taking these cuts, whether they are going to be able to keep spending in the state and what that means for the economy?
Christie: First of all, they’re not taking any cuts. I asked them to take cuts, and they said no. So, what cuts are they taking? These teachers are still getting their four or five percent increases. That interplay that you just saw was about me trying to convince people that they need to take a freeze, but, in the end, they didn’t. The state teachers union said–they had a rally in Trenton against me. 35,000 people came from the teachers. You know what that rally was? The “me first” rally. “Pay me my raise first. Pay me my free health benefits first. Pay me my pension first. And everybody else in New Jersey, get to the back of the line.” Well, you know what? I’m not going to sit by and allow that to go unnoticed, so we’ll shine a bright light on it, and we’ll see how the people react. But I think we are seeing how the people of New Jersey are reacting, and that’s how you make it politically palatable in other states in the country. Just shine a bright light on greed and self-interest.”
Michael Barone looks at polling numbers and what similar numbers have meant in the past.
…To see why, take a look at the generic ballot question — which party’s candidate will you vote for in elections to the House? The current realclearpolitics.com average shows Republicans ahead by 45 to 41 percent. …
…So the Republicans’ current lead in the generic ballot question suggests they may be on the brink of doing better than in any election since 1946, when they won a 245-188 margin in the House — larger than any they’ve held ever since.
Another metric is daunting for Democrats. Polls in House races almost always show incumbents ahead of challengers, because incumbent members of Congress are usually much better known than their opponents. An incumbent running below 50 percent is considered potentially in trouble; an incumbent running behind a challenger is considered in deep doo-doo.
…Today a lot more Democratic incumbents seem to be trailing Republican challengers in polls. Jim Geraghty of National Review Online has compiled a list of 13 Democratic incumbents trailing in polls released over the past seven weeks. …
Almost two months ago Pickings first featured some articles on the lack of long-term damage from oil spills. We featured Abe Greenwald’s piece on May 31st and a Popular Mechanics list of largest spills on June 5th. We have two pieces today that indicate the environmental problems from the Deepwater spill are already less than originally predicted.
Now it is Time magazine’s turn to display some common sense. It looks like Michael Grunwald is going to have to turn in his Liberal card. In Time, he writes about the oil spill and its minimal effects on the environment. Grunwald does slap Limbaugh around before saying Rush has a point. So maybe he’ll keep his liberal bona fides.
…Well, Limbaugh has a point. The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it’s no leak; it’s the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It’s also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. But so far — while it’s important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. “The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared,” says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana. …
Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years ago. Yes, we’ve heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but so far, wildlife-response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region’s fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana’s disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but so far, assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year. …
…The scientists I spoke with cite four basic reasons the initial eco-fears seem overblown. First, the Deepwater oil, unlike the black glop from the Valdez, is unusually light and degradable, which is why the slick in the Gulf is dissolving surprisingly rapidly now that the gusher has been capped. Second, the Gulf of Mexico, unlike Alaska’s Prince William Sound, is very warm, which has helped bacteria break down the oil. Third, heavy flows of Mississippi River water have helped keep the oil away from the coast, where it can do much more damage. And finally, Mother Nature can be incredibly resilient. Van Heerden’s assessment team showed me around Casse-tete Island in Timbalier Bay, where new shoots of Spartina grasses were sprouting in oiled marshes and new leaves were growing on the first black mangroves I’ve ever seen that were actually black. …
Even Vanity Fair sees the light. Julie Weiner posts on the search for spilled oil. If only environmentalists could find the oil, they could secure more government grants.
Scientists and government officials are currently on the hunt for much of the oil that leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, reports The Washington Post. While experts remain positive that the oil is still in the Gulf—“That stuff’s somewhere,” a researcher hypothesized to the paper—most of it is AWOL. According to the Post, “[u]p to 4 million barrels (167 million gallons), the vast majority of the spill, remains unaccounted for in government statistics. Some of it has, most likely, been cleaned up by nature. Other amounts may be gone from the water, but they could have taken on a second life as contaminants in the air, or in landfills around the Gulf Coast.” …