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Cantor’s ode to Boehner draws a Corner post from Robert Costa.
… “We have been through a lot,” Cantor reportedly said. “The leadership team has had its differences. You made us focus on the fact that we are all on one team dedicated to the cause we came here to accomplish — to reset the size of government, to limit government.”
To House colleagues looking on, Cantor’s gift was about more than magazine spreads — it was about reminding everyone, even us reporters, that Boehner and Cantor are a team. They may not click on the little things, but on the big picture (and small frames), they are allies.
Peter Wehner says Maureen Dowd has become a neo-conservative. Here’s Dowd;
‘ The Democratic lawmakers worry that the Tea Party freshmen have already “neutered” the president, as one told me. They fret that Obama is an inept negotiator. They worry that he should have been out in the country selling a concrete plan, rather than once more kowtowing to Republicans and, as with the stimulus plan, health care and Libya, leading from behind.
As one Democratic senator complained: “The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent.” (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: “We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.” ‘
Andrew Ferguson turns his gaze to some appointments in the arts.
Among the many surprises of Barack Obama’s presidency, perhaps the most unexpected have been his appointments to the federal government’s egghead agencies—the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Even his ardent admirers might admit that the current president’s selections were sub-Bushian.
It was an article of faith with Obama’s snootier acolytes that George W. Bush was a philistine and a moron. (“Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot” was stripped across the bumper of many a Prius puttering around the reality-based community back in the day.) In fact Bush’s appointments showed he took the cultural agencies seriously. If not a man of high culture himself, he knew one when he saw one. To the NEH he brought a world-class historian of Renaissance painting, Bruce Cole. He selected Dana Gioia, one of the country’s most admired poets and literary critics, to lead the NEA.
Although unusually accomplished, these men were in line with the appointments of previous presidents, who generally picked their chairmen from the country’s large reserve of artists, scholars, and arts administrators. Even Bill Clinton had the inspired idea to pick the celebrated actress Jane Alexander to run his NEA. And he’s from Arkansas.
But Barack Obama? Memoirist, prose stylist of distinction, resident of Hyde Park, prowler of used bookstores, professor of constitutional law? The man whom Michael Beschloss (Distinguished Professor of History, Charlie Rose Tech) called “probably the smartest guy ever to become president”? Surely he would use the opportunity to look beyond the things that divide us as Americans and, drawing on our core common values that we all share as Americans, appoint chairmen who could lift us up and speak to the heart of the American narrative about who we are as Americans. Some artist or scholar—a well-known pottery maker, even. A macramé artist. Pete Seeger. I don’t know.
No, though. Instead Obama has used the agency chairmanships as spoils of political hackery. …
Ed Morrissey says guess what happened to the Obama recovery?
For the past two years, the Obama administration has tried to sell the American public on the notion that its economic policies created a substantial recovery. Friday’s GDP numbers, especially the revisions that impacted results for the past several years, has put an end to that illusion. Derek Thompson at The Atlantic lowers the boom on the supposed Obama recovery (via Instapundit):
“Yesterday, analysts thought the economy was expanding by 2.5% a year. This morning, they learned GDP grew by only 1.6% in the last four quarters. This is a remarkable discovery. It’s the difference between thinking we’re expanding at a decent, if disappointing, pace, and knowing we’re growing around half our historical norm.
Analysts also thought, as recently as twelve hours ago, that the economy declined 6.8% and 4.9% in the quarters bisected by Obama’s inauguration. It turns out the actual declines were much steeper: 8.9% and 6.7%.
To adopt the president’s favorite metaphor of the ditch and the driver: The ditch was a 33% deeper than we thought. And we’re driving 33% slower than we hoped.”
Thompson includes a couple of eye-opening charts, although nothing that we haven’t seen before. Check out his charts comparing the recession and post-recession periods of various downturns, but this one from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve on employment really tells the story better: …
According to the New Yorker, the president has not been liberal enough. Peter Wehner has the story.
What happens to an ideologue when the president in whom he invested enormous hope is increasingly seen as a failure? For one answer, see the lead “Talk of the Town” item in The New Yorker, where Hendrik Hertzberg writes this:
“Invoking the Fourteenth Amendment has always been a long shot, a last refuge. But Obama’s seeming refusal to hold it in reserve … is emblematic of his all too civilized, all too accommodating negotiating strategy–indeed, of his whole approach to the nation’s larger economic dilemma, the most disappointing aspect of his Presidency. His stimulus package asked for too little and got less. He has allowed deficits and debt to supercede mass unemployment as the emergency of the moment. He has too readily accepted Republican terms of debate, such as likening the country to a household that must ‘live within its means.’ (For even the most prudent householders, living within one’s means can include going into debt, as in taking out a car loan so that one can get to one’s job.) He has done too little to educate the public to the wisdom of post-Herbert Hoover economics: fiscal balance is achieved over time, not in a single year; in flush times a government should run a surplus, but when the economy falters deficits are part of the remedy; when the immediate problem is what it is now–a lack of demand, not a shortage of capital–higher spending is generally more efficacious than lower taxes, especially lower taxes on the rich.”
Translation: Barack Obama, the most liberal president in generations, hasn’t been liberal enough. His problem hasn’t been profligacy but frugality. During the last two-and-a-half years, as $3.7 trillion has been added to our national debt, it turns out Obama has spent too little. …
Nile Gardiner reacts to Biden’s claim the tea party folks were “terrorists.”
… There is something deeply sad and disconcerting when the vice president decides to compare opposition legislators in Congress with terrorists simply because he disagrees with their views and principles. This is the kind of ugly, threatening rhetoric that has no place at the heart of the US presidency. About a third of the country are favourable towards the Tea Party, according to Gallup – i.e. tens of millions of Biden’s fellow Americans. Does he label them terrorists too?
Working in Washington I’ve met numerous Tea Party supporters and have always found them to be unfailingly patriotic people who love their country and feel passionately about the need to rein in Big Government through the democratic process. To compare their elected representatives to terrorists who seek to destroy the United States and everything it stands for is gravely insulting to hard working Americans who have in many cases devoted their lives to serving their country. …
The WSJ has more on the Canadian miracle of limited government.
While the U.S. remains mired in debt and slogs through a subpar economic recovery, Canada is moving ahead steadily. Its unemployment rate peaked at a little over 8.5% and is now 7.4%, and there were no bank bailouts. Real GDP growth is expected to be roughly 3% this year.
Now with the first majority government since 2004, and the first Conservative majority since 1993, the country has an opportunity to vault forward. The Conservatives led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper have a chance to build on the reforms begun under previous Liberal governments that Americans can only look at with envy.
Canada’s government, for example, has grown smaller over the last 15 years. …