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In the Chicago Sun-Times, Steve Huntley writes on how the president erodes the American dream.
One of President Barack Obama’s latest campaign themes is trust — that he can be trusted and Republican nominee Mitt Romney can’t. Thanks to his own words, we know that Obama can be trusted to put ideology ahead of commonsense economic goals to put people back to work.
In an interview with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register, Obama was asked if he regretted his push to enact health-care overhaul legislation when he had huge Democratic majorities in Congress instead of emphasizing measures to fix the economy. “Absolutely not,” responded the president.
That must have come as a slap in the face to the 23 million Americans out of work, trapped in part-time jobs or given up looking for work; to the 50 percent of college grads who can’t find jobs or labor at doing something below their hard-earned college credentials, and to the 5.5 million unemployed women and the 27.5 million women in poverty, increases of, respectively, 500,000 and 3.6 million over the levels when Obama took office. …
David Harsanyi reacts to Obama’s idea of a “Department of Business.”
… But the most obvious pitfall of a Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or whatever it’ll be called, is that it would further institutionalize the absurd notion that government can foresee what consumers desire and then “invest” accordingly. When Obama talks about “jobs of the future” he means jobs the government will subsidize because people who vote for him like the sound of it. The more they fail, the more it will have to “invest.” It’s not about what you want, it’s about you need.
If the Obama Administration was an investment house, it would have tanked long ago. Its record on green energy is horrid. It has heaped federal loans and subsidies onto coal-powered electric cars — an “investment” that “will not only reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Obama said in 2009, but “put Americans back to work.” Hardly. The Chevy Volt’s been a tepid seller, at best, and without taxpayer subsidizes few could afford a $100,000 compact car. Toyota, the world’s largest carmaker has stopped mass production of a new sub-compact iQ plug-in, and offering the public 100 units. Toyota executive Takeshi Uchiyamada recently explained that, “current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society’s needs, whether it may be the distance the cars run, or the costs or how it takes a long time to charge.”
Does government care if ethanol or a windmill meets society’s needs? Does it care about cost? Toyota’s Uchiyamada risks stockholder investments — real investments — while politicians’ decision-making rests on political and ideological pressures. So how could a Department of Business be a good idea?
Debra Saunders thinks Romney can get the job done.
… Romney earned his reputation as a turnaround artist, a venture capitalist and savior of the Olympics. He balanced four state budgets and passed a landmark health care bill with the help of Kennedy, a former rival. Romney has proved that he can get things done, work across the aisle and broker deals.
I asked Martin F. Nolan, former Boston Globe Washington bureau chief, how Romney got along with the BayState’s Democratic leaders. “He didn’t love them, but he talked to them,” quoth Nolan. Romney held regular Monday meetings with the leadership, which is why “you never hear any of them trashing him.”
And he knows how to get a job done.
Nashua, NH’s paper switched this year and supports President Romney.
Four years ago, with little hesitation, we endorsed then-Sen. Barack Obama to become the 44th president of the United States, saying it was a time for “new leadership, a new approach to governing, a new way of conducting the people’s business.”
So the basic question facing The Telegraph editorial board when it met last week came down to this: Did the former Illinois senator do enough to live up to those admittedly high expectations to warrant a second term?
After several hours of spirited debate, not unlike conversations taking place in kitchens and living rooms across America, we reached a consensus that he had not. Perhaps more importantly, when we identified the key challenges facing the nation – jobs, the economy and the national debt – we concluded he was not the best candidate to meet them.
That person is former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and we hereby endorse him to become the 45th president of the United States. …
Noemie Emery on the two big reasons for Obama’s loss.
If President Obama loses next Tuesday, we will be tempted to point to two days that did it: Sept. 11, 2012, (riots in Cairo and elsewhere); and Oct. 3, (the first debate). But the real cause may lie in two paths not taken, in which unwise decisions led to bad outcomes.
The first came in January 2010, when Scott Brown, running as the 41st vote to finish Obamacare, won a special election to fill the seat of Ted Kennedy by an unexpected large margin in blue Massachusetts, which had gone overwhelmingly for the Democrats in 2008. This came after the off-year elections in Virginia and in New Jersey. These states, which also had gone for Obama, made large swings to install Republican governors, who campaigned against his ideas. Protests had dogged Democrats at town meetings, polls showed the public despised his proposals, and his approval ratings had fallen dramatically. He had two choices. One was to scale down his health care bill to a few proposals which could have won broad approval, try to win over some centrist Republicans, and have a small but real win he could take to the public. The other, which he chose, was to go big: ram the bill back through the House of Representatives, enrage the people already against him, and add to their number those made as angry by the procedure as others had been by the bill. …
Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom review the book on affirmative action by Sander and Taylor.
The moral arguments against racial preferences in higher education — racial double standards in admissions — have been made once too often. They’re powerful, but we all know them inside out: Affirmative action violates the central principle that all of us should be treated not as members of racial groups, but as individuals, judged by the content of our character. It has long been time to move on, which is precisely what Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. have done in their remarkable new book. They have shifted the focus of the entire debate. Bypassing the standard arguments about core principles, their extensive research focuses on the actual effects of racial preferences on the students they were intended to benefit. Drawing upon data never before available to independent-minded scholars, they find, to their dismay, that such policies actually do more harm than good to black and Hispanic students. From now on, it will be impossible to have a serious debate on this subject without extensive reference to the evidence provided in this volume.
The data are culled from Sander’s research over the past 15 years, and from other recent scholarly investigations. The subtitle conveniently gives us the bottom line: Institutions of higher education admit black and Hispanic students using criteria very different from those applied to white and Asian applicants, and have been killing the former with kindness. These students are thrilled to have been admitted to a highly selective school but quickly discover they cannot cope with the competition from their better-prepared classmates. Thus, they generally do poorly. If their math skills are primitive, they cannot follow a tough economics course. Those who weren’t taught much science in high school are not ready for rigorous pre-med instruction.
These students have plenty of potential for intellectual growth in institutions that are right for them. But a great many of them, alas, are at the wrong schools — “mismatched.” Preferential admissions have enabled them to attend academically rigorous schools for which they are marginally qualified at best. Not only do they fare badly in the classroom at the outset, they fall farther behind with each passing college year. In selective colleges across the land, about half of all black students rank in the bottom fifth of their class. And the gap between them and their white and Asian classmates grows wider over successive years. …