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We start with various Jennifer Rubin Contentions’ posts. First on WaPo’s lack of Obama enthusiasm.
The Washington Post editors can’t quite bring themselves to condemn the president outright, but they sure do give some hints that they aren’t pleased.
First, they dance around the tax cheats and dismal vetting: “The president’s admitted mistakes on nominations have served as a reminder that he is, after all, rather new to the game of national politics and the art of balancing the lofty aims of campaign pledges against the real-world demands of governing.” Translation: the transition looked great, but what’s the matter with the selection process over there?
Next, they hint that the stimulus was not what they had hoped:”The narrow and rushed passage of his stimulus package underscored the difficulty of living up to his grand promises of transparency; the campaign trail talk about not cutting deals behind closed doors yielded to the demands of the moment.” Translation: This is an embarrassing display of business as usual. (And we can’t bring ourselves to defend the substance of the stimulus because it’s a ludicrous mess.) …
On the lack of a Car Czar.
After much anticipation, we learn that the Obama team is not going to name a Car Czar. Instead we’re getting “an inter-agency task force” run byTim Giethner and Larry Summers and advised by a special assistant to the President of the Steelworkers Union. Let’s count the ways in which this is awful news.
First, on the heels of the administration’s failure to deliver on its promise of a detailed bank bailout, the administration now announce it isn’t making good on its stated intention, some would say obligation, to name a Car Czar. This is fast becoming the Unreliable Administration. (It’s a new management style apparently: Overpromise, Underperform.) …
On Jill Zuckman. On Obama’s stimulus tactics. And a look at Roland Burris.
Cathy Young says now we get a look at the real Obama.
… The silver lining of this month’s troubles in Washington, DC is that Obamania seems to have passed. The stimulus bill has cooled pro-Obama conservatives and libertarians who hoped Obama would be a “market liberal.” There is also growing discontent among Obama supporters on the left, unhappy with the sacrifice of “progressive” programs. Across the political spectrum, Obama has been assailed for everything from intransigence to panic-mongering excessive eagerness to compromise to lack of political maturity – and much of that criticism has come from people who supported him over John McCain, from liberal Paul Krugman to moderate conservative Kathleen Parker.
“Change we can believe in” is quickly turning out to be business as usual – the messy, day-to-day business of governing, debate, and compromise. It’s not the end of our economic woes or our social discord. It is also not the end of the republic.
Charles Gasparino says Obama lays an egg on Wall Street.
ON the day that President Obama signed the much- hyped “stimulus bill” into law – one of the largest spending plans in US history, billed as nothing short of a savior for a US economy heading toward a possible Great Depression – the stock market reacted loudly and resolutely, falling nearly 300 points.
No one can deny that Obama’s been dealt a crummy hand – he took office with a weak economy and a banking system in shambles. And the markets may ultimately rebound if the “stimulus” actually does a little stimulating.
But the consensus building on Wall Street is that this president doesn’t look to be up to the job of fixing the economy.
Talk to any investor, and he’ll tell you how Obama’s plan offers up nothing more than tired solutions, pork-barrel spending that will do little to reverse the economy’s woes – and may make a bad situation worse. …
According to the Economist, more than half the world is middle class.
THE crowd surges back and forth, hands above heads, mobile-phone cameras snapping one of Brazil’s best-known samba bands. It could be almost anywhere in Latin America’s largest city on a Saturday night. But this is Paraisopolis, one of São Paulo’s notorious crime-infested favelas (slums). Casas Bahia, the country’s largest retailer, is celebrating the opening there of its first ever store in a favela (pictured above). It is selling television sets and refrigerators in a place that, at first glance, has no running water or electricity.
Among the shacks, though, rise three-storey brick structures with satellite dishes on their tin roofs. In the new shop, Brazilians without bank accounts—plumbers, salesmen, maids—flock to buy on instalment credit. In a country with no credit histories, the system is cumbersome: the staff interview customers about their qualifications and get them to sign stacks of promissory notes, like post-dated cheques, before allowing them to take their purchases home. But it works, more or less. According to Maria, a cleaner, “Everything I have comes from Casas Bahia. Things are very expensive but the means of payment are better for people like us, without any money.” This is the emerging markets’ new middle class out shopping.
Eduardo Giannetti da Fonseca, one of Brazil’s most distinguished economists, describes members of the middle class as “people who are not resigned to a life of poverty, who are prepared to make sacrifices to create a better life for themselves but who have not started with life’s material problems solved because they have material assets to make their lives easy.” That covers a broad range of ambitions, as two other examples will show.
Back in 1992 Lu Jian was a dissatisfied mid-level bureaucrat at China’s department of transport and communications who became surplus to requirements. Taking advantage of government measures that encouraged such officials to go into business, he went off for a stint at China’s first commodity-futures trading company. Soon afterwards he found himself designing the country’s first ski resort, near the northern city of Harbin. Now, as chairman of the Nanshan Ski Village, in the desert hills near Beijing, he presides over the capital’s main winter-sports recreation ground. …
National Review had a love story symposium for Valentine’s Day. John Sullivan’s piece on Niles and Daphne from Frasier is here. Follow the link if you want more.
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