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This is our last post before the historic election of 2010 when the kid president gets spanked by the voters.
John Fund interviews a Dem congressman who has seen enough of Washington.
Pickerhead has been saving the next item since August. It is by Jonah Goldberg and perfectly illustrates of the weakness of Barack Obama – self love. In January, the president said 2010 midterm elections wouldn’t be like 1994 because this time, “you’ve got me.”
Somebody needs to start a blog named; “You’ve got me” or, how about “S**t my Prez Sez.”
Also here, Thomas Sowell, Michael Barone, Peggy Noonan and Toby Harnden.
And, great cartoons at the end.
Pickerhead’s prediction is for 70 house seats and 9 in the senate.
John Fund interviews retiring Washington Congressman Brian Baird, who gives a candid Democrat view of the legislation and the politics that he has seen in Congress these past two years.
It took Democrats in the House of Representatives 40 years to become out-of-touch enough to get thrown out of office in 1994. It took 12 years for the Republicans who replaced them to abandon their principles and be repudiated in 2006. Now it appears that the current Democratic majority has lost voter confidence in only four years.
How did this happen? And what does the increasing speed of voter backlash mean for Republicans who will likely take control next Tuesday?
For answers, I decided to chat up Rep. Brian Baird, a six-term Democrat from Washington state. Even though he’s never won re-election with less than 56% of the vote, Mr. Baird is retiring because the brutal congressional commute makes it impossible for him to see his twin five-year-old boys grow up. He’s not sticking around, like so many former members of Congress, to lobby inside the Beltway. That allows him to be candid about Congress and his party.
…Mr. Baird, 54, is a loyal Democrat who voted for all of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s legislative priorities, including the stimulus bill, cap and trade and ObamaCare. But he admits all three have serious flaws. …
… For some of the shortcomings of financial regulatory reform, Mr. Baird blames the disillusioning battle over ObamaCare. “When the House had to pass the Senate version of health care unchanged, some members asked why should they invest the mental effort in mastering the details” of financial reform. Mr. Baird found parts of the bill mind-numbing.
Although he voted for it, he says he was troubled that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the entities at the heart of the housing meltdown, weren’t addressed. They have clearly exercised undue influence on Capitol Hill, he notes. “When I was first elected I was puzzled why they were holding events in my honor as a mere freshman. I asked myself, why is a federal entity so involved in political activity?” …
Pickerhead has been saving this article from Jonah Goldberg since August. It is a shorthand version of the weakness of Barack Obama – self love. In January, the president said 2010 midterm elections wouldn’t be like 1994 because this time, “you’ve got me.” Somebody needs to start a blog named; “You’ve got me” or, how about “S**t my Prez Sez.”
… At the beginning of the year, retiring seven-term representative Marion Berry (D., Ark.) recounted a conversation he had with the president. Obama’s unrelenting push for health-care reform in the face of public opposition reminded Berry of the Clinton-era missteps that led to the Republican rout of the Democrats in 1994. “I began to preach last January that we had already seen this movie and we didn’t want to see it again because we know how it comes out,” Berry told a newspaper.
Or, to quote Brody in Jaws 2: “But I’m telling you, and I’m telling everybody at this table, that that’s a shark! And I know what a shark looks like, because I’ve seen one up close. And you’d better do something about this one, because I don’t intend to go through that hell again!”
Convinced that his popularity was eternal, Obama responded by saying, yes, but there’s a “big difference” between 1994 and 2010, and that big difference is, “you’ve got me.”
The funny thing is, Obama might have been right. Because things might be much worse for Democrats in 2010 than they were in 1994 — and the big difference might well be Barack Obama. …
Thomas Sowell discusses how we are losing freedom by allowing government to rule us through the arbitrary power of regulations created by government bureaucrats, rather than elected legislators.
…Other actions and proposals by this administration likewise represent moves in the direction of arbitrary rule…
These include threats against people who simply choose to express opinions counter to administration policy, such as a warning to an insurance company that there would be “zero tolerance” for “misinformation” when the insurance company said that ObamaCare would create costs that force up premiums.
Zero tolerance for the right of free speech guaranteed by the Constitution?
…Those who are constantly telling us that our economic problems are caused by not enough “regulation” never distinguish between regulation which simply enforces known rules, as contrasted with regulation that gives arbitrary powers to the government to force others to knuckle under to demands…
Michael Barone explains that Liberals have gotten history wrong as well.
…FDR’s expansion of government did not pull unemployment down below 10 per cent in the 1930s. If you look at polls towards the end of that decade, you see that most Americans felt government was spending too much, that uncertainty about levels of taxation and regulation was stopping entrepreneurs from creating jobs and that the unions had too much power. It is at least arguable that Roosevelt’s Democrats were heading for defeat in 1940. Such a defeat was avoided because by November 1940, the Second World War had broken out. Hitler and Stalin were allies, and with their confederates in Italy and Japan were in command of or threatening most of Europe and Asia, with Britain and its empire standing alone against them. In these dire circumstances, voters understandably picked the unflappable Roosevelt over his opponent, a utility executive with no experience of public office. …
…We are making history, the Obama Democrats proclaimed as they passed their health care bill, over the objections of a majority of the US electorate, expressed through polls and the unlikely medium of the voters of Massachusetts (who chose Republican Scott Brown for what had been Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat in January this year). What they had in mind was the New Deal historians’ version of history. But that was not a fully accurate picture of the 1930s, and America today is a nation even less eager to have government “spread the wealth around”, as Barack Obama told Joe the Plumber in Toledo, Ohio, in October 2008. …
Peggy Noonan highlights a Tea Party candidate in one congressional race.
…We’ll know in the early hours next Wednesday how it all turned out. But here is one way you’ll know it’s huge: Anna Little wins in New Jersey. If she wins it means the Republican wave swept all before it.
Not that she’s expected to. She’s running for Congress in the Jersey Shore’s Sixth Congressional District, which went for Mr. Obama over Mr. McCain 60% to 38%. She’s the Republican mayor of Highlands, population 5,000 up against incumbent Frank Pallone, an 11-term Democratic veteran who won in 2008 by 35 points. …
…Ms. Little takes it in stride. She says she’s not looking at Obama’s numbers. “I’m looking at Chris Christie’s numbers.” The Republican governor carried the district by 8% last November.
…I talked to a Little supporter named Lois Pongo. The tea party and the Republican establishment are supposed to be at war, I said. No, she said, they’re working together. “We need to get into a place of cooperation. It can’t be we-they. The party has structure, knowledge, experience. The tea party has principles—not just the principles but the passion to restore our country.” …
Jonathan Karl, in ABC News, notes that when the going gets tough, the Dems get personal.
…As you watch this year’s ads — and I’ve been watching all too many lately — you’ll notice a striking difference between Democratic and Republican attack ads: Democrats are attacking over personal issues, Republicans are attacking over policy.
There are, of course, many exceptions, but the overall trend is clear. Democrats are hitting their Republican opponents over past legal transgressions, shady business deals and even speeding tickets. Republicans are hammering Democrats over “Obamacare,” Nancy Pelosi and the economy.
A recent study by the Wesleyan Media Project actually quantifies this. They looked at 900,000 airing of political ads this year and concluded: “Democrats are using personal attacks at much higher rates than Republicans and a much higher rate than Democrats in 2008.” …
Toby Harnden, from the Telegraph, UK is a good one to finish up the pre-election coverage.
… Swept into power on a wave of adulation and talk of an historic new era, Obama never felt he needed to work with Republicans. It took him 18 months before he invited Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, to the White House.
Rather than Obama picking up the phone, the meeting was brokered by Trent Lott and Tom Daschle, two former Senate Majority leaders who are now lobbyists. Boehner, like Obama, is an avid golfer but the President has never seen fit to ask the Republican leader in the House to join him on the links.
Having moved serenely through life being complimented on being the first and the best at everything, Obama felt that his transcendent presence and intellect would be enough.
Believing he would be a great president, Obama wanted to tackle what he saw as the grand issues, not the small-bore concerns of Americans struggling to make ends meet. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, he calculated, so deal-making was not necessary.
The problem was that his world view was that of a conventional liberal Democrat but he was president of a nation that was centre-right. His victory came from those who wanted him to change Washington, not America.
These days, it is not difficult to find Obama voters who are disillusioned.
“I voted for him and I believed in him but I’m beginning to feel that he’s overreached,” said Christopher Quail, an English-born former Dominican priest who has lived in New Orleans for 35 years. “Something’s gone wrong. He put his favourite projects ahead of the necessities. He tackled health care instead of the economy.” …
More from Harnden.
Here in Chicago, a couple of things about President Barack Obama’s final appeal to the voters has been striking. The first is that he’s even campaigning in his home neighbourhood of Hyde Park, a liberal, university enclave on the South Side of the Windy City.
Illinois is a deep blue state yet Democrats could well lose both the governorship and Obama’s old Senate seat – a major symbolic blow to his personal prestige. At one point he pleaded: “Chicago, I need you to keep on fighting! I need you to keep on believing!”
If Obama is having to defend home turf at this stage of the election campaign, what does that say about his party’s prospects? It’s as if George W. Bush found himself having to give a stump speech in Midland, Texas.
The second striking thing is the extent to which Obama’s pitch to voters is, well, all about him. Despite Tim Kaine, DNC chairman, insisting that Tuesday’s mid-terms are not a “referendum” on the president, Obama himself clearly thinks it is. …