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You are not going to believe what an ABC reporter said about Obama and Wisconsin. The president has really hurt himself.
… In a powerhouse roundtable with George F. Will, Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, ABC Senior Political Correspondent Jon Karl and freshman Rep. Steve Southerland, R-Fla., “This Week” anchor Christiane Amanpour asked about the implications of the president injecting himself into a state dispute.
“The president was quicker and more forceful of his denouncement of Gov. Scott Walker than he was of denouncing Hosni Mubarak,” Karl said. “Madison, Wisconsin — the state of Wisconsin — this is arguably ground zero for the 2012 presidential campaign. Look, this is a state if President Obama loses, he’s almost certainly going to not win re-election.”
Karl pointed out that the state had swung significantly Republican in 2010.
“Democrats see the momentum and see real danger signs for next year,” he said. …
Clive Crook of Financial Times takes the prez to task.
… Nothing obliged Obama to take this position. He could have recused himself, as he has on, say, budget policy. And it is one thing to offer comment in support of the unions, quite another to get his staff working in “close co-ordination” with the protesters. A shame he cannot be as forthright about long-term fiscal discipline as he is about the rights of public-sector unions.
Toby Harnden says the president doesn’t get it.
Something momentous is happening in the United States right now and Barack Obama doesn’t get it. In Madison, Wisconsin last week, up to 40,000 public employees, organised by their unions, the Democratic party and the grassroots Organizing for America group that elected the president in 2008, gathered at the state capitol. Teachers left their classrooms, forcing schools to close.
Their objective? To rail against an attempt to balance the budget and curtail union power by newly-elected Governor Scott Walker, a Republican. The Democratic party’s response? Its state senators have fled Wisconsin to Illinois, dodging state troopers as they went, in order to prevent the budget being voted on. Obama branded Walker’s actions as an “assault on unions”.
It was Obama who crowed just after he entered the White House that “elections have consequences”. In Wisconsin last November, the consequences included the governorship, a Senate seat and the state senate and assembly all being lost by the Democrats. …
Jonathan Tobin catches the Times with its normal bias.
In 2009 and 2010 the New York Times covered protests against the Obama administration’s stimulus spending bill and health care plan as the barely legal revolt of an unwashed and uncivil band of reactionaries determined not only to halt what the paper considered progress but also to thwart democracy. But anyone looking at the Times’ front page article on Saturday describing protests against the effort by Wisconsin’s newly elected governor and legislature to balance the state’s books got a very different view of a protest movement.
According to the Times, the activities of the Wisconsin public sector unions — whose expensive benefits have put their state on the brink of bankruptcy — are nothing less than the moral equivalent of the demonstrations in Tunisia that brought down an authoritarian dictatorship. As the headline “Wisconsin Leads the Way as Workers Fight Cuts” indicates, the whole focus of the piece is an effort to portray the unions and their Democratic allies as revolutionaries who are on the cutting edge of a movement that will, in effect, reverse the verdict of last year’s election.
There are two points to be made about this coverage. …
Michael Barone has kudos for Gov. Scott of Florida for cancelling a high speed rail project.
Good news from Tallahassee: Florida Governor Rick Scott has rejected the proposed high-speed rail line from Orlando to Tampa and the $2.4 billion that goes with it. “The truth is that this project would be far too costly to taxpayers and I believe the risks far outweigh the benefits,” Scott said. As Scott seems to understand, projections of cost and riderships on high-speed rail lines have turned out to be grossly optimistic. If Florida opted to go ahead, it faced two dangers: that it would decide to cancel, and have to repay the federal government for funds paid out, or that it would choose to operate the rail line at a loss, subsidizing the rail line year after year. Scott decided to call a halt, even if it means losing the federal funds currently committed—the same decision Govs. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio made. …
Columbia law prof Phillip Hamburger has more to say about the problems with health-care waivers.
Although health-care waivers are unconstitutional, can they nonetheless be justified? The Department of Health and Human Services has granted almost a thousand waivers from part of the health-care law, and (as explained last week in these pages) the waivers are an unconstitutional exercise of the dispensing power. But what if the waivers are used for good purposes? What if Congress delegated the power to issue the waivers? And what if the waiver process were transparent? Might not these considerations lend legitimacy to the waivers?
Undoubtedly, waivers or dispensations can be used for good purposes — primarily, for relief from bad laws. Yet the need for relief from a burdensome law does not mean that all forms of relief are desirable. The question therefore is not merely whether a waived law is regrettable, but whether waivers are an appropriate remedy. For hundreds of years, it has been clear that waivers or dispensations were dangerous, and this has not changed.
An initial concern is favoritism. One may assume that when the executive waives compliance with a law, it will grant waivers only to the most deserving applicants. Inevitably, however, it will find deserving applicants among those who have close contact with the administration, including many who are politically aligned with it. …
AOL News asks what is government good for.
Pop quiz. What’s the biggest single job the federal government undertakes?
National defense? Nope.
Homeland security? Wrong.
Transportation? Not even close.
Law enforcement? No way.
Education? Getting colder.
Foreign aid? Are you kidding?
Nope, the biggest single thing the federal government does these days is … cut checks. …
Clive Crook notes who is trying to deal with the fiscal crisis of our governments.
… Republican governors such as Chris Christie in New Jersey, Mitch Daniels in Indiana and Scott Walker in Wisconsin face the same immediate fiscal challenge as Democratic governors such as Jerry Brown in California and Andrew Cuomo in New York – and their responses are perforce much the same. They are squeezing services severely and confronting the public sector unions that have forced pay, benefits and other terms of service out of line with private sector equivalents.
These efforts are meeting resistance, to put it mildly. Public sector workers in Wisconsin began huge protests at the end of last week, drawing national attention. What is interesting, though, is that the governors have come to a cross-party consensus about the measures that are necessary, and up to a point see each other as allies. That helps them do their job. Also, the ones who have been most forthright in explaining the fiscal facts of life to their constituents – especially the splendidly in-your-face Mr Christie – are winning respect for it beyond their states.
A troubling thought for Mr Obama, maybe, but for the moment the farce in Washington serves his purposes. Let the House GOP get on with it, the president’s advisers are telling him: keep the spotlight on them, and watch swing voters flock back. If we are really lucky, thinks the White House, the new continuing resolution will fail (remember it must pass House and Senate, still controlled by Democrats, in the same form). The government will have to shut down, as it did in 1995, financial markets will go crazy and it will be the Republicans’ fault.
Avoiding a fiscal meltdown would be good for 2012 purposes. Having one that could be blamed on Republicans would be perfect. What a way to run a country.
Daily Beast does a puff piece on Jim Webb, one of the two Obama stooges in the senate from Virginia. Says here he warned the president the healthcare bill was too much. So where was his acclaimed independent streak when he voted for the bill? The Virginia voters have been denied the chance to throw the bum out. We will save that for Mark Warner in 2014.
The end of Jim Webb’s senatorial career, with his announcement that he would not seek re-election in 2012, was far less surprising than the fact that Webb even had a senatorial career to end. He’d arrived in the Senate seeming ready to leave, having declared, in a 2006 debate with his Republican foe, George Allen, “When I go to my grave, whether I was a United States Senator or not is not gonna be high on my agenda.”
And that was when he was trying to convince Virginia voters to put him into the Senate. That 2006 Webb campaign had the feel of a forced march, a mood that very much reflected the candidate himself. His public appearances had all the spontaneous joy of a line inspection at Camp Lejeune. Webb spoke with a flat, matter-of-fact voice, always in earnest tones. He possessed none of the innate muscle memory of a natural pol—the ready banter, the easy saunter, the reflexive hand-to-shoulder intimacy. His campaign smile usually seemed the product of considerable exertion. …