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Fred Barnes chronicles the decline of this presidency.
John Dos Passos, the novelist and historian, once said: “Often things you think are just beginning are coming to an end.” His observation was made in the 1960s. But it’s true today of Barack Obama‘s presidency and the promise of a bright future for his second term.
Mr. Obama’s re-election stirred grand expectations. The vote heralded a new liberal era, or so it was claimed. His victory was said to reflect ideological, cultural and demographic trends that could keep Democrats in the majority for years to come. His second four years in the White House would be just the beginning.
Now, six months later, the Obama administration is in an unexpected and sharp state of decline. Mr. Obama has little influence on Congress. His presidency has no theme. He pivots nervously from issue to issue. What there is of an Obama agenda consists, at the moment, of leftovers from his first term or proposals that he failed to emphasize in his re-election campaign and thus have practically no chance of passage.
Congressional Republicans neither trust nor fear the president. And Democrats on Capitol Hill, to whom Mr. Obama has never been close, have grown leery of him. In the Senate, Democrats complain privately about his interference with the biggest domestic policy matter of 2013, immigration reform. His effect, the senators believe, can only be to weaken the fragile bipartisan coalition for reform and make passage of major legislation more perilous.
The Obama breakdown was not caused by the trio of scandals—IRS, Justice Department, Benghazi—now confronting the president. The decline preceded them. It’s the result of what Mr. Obama did in his first term, during the campaign and in the two months following his re-election. …
Peter Wehner posts on two polls that suggest the American public is finally getting the picture.
Two new polls–one from Bloomberg National Poll, the other from the Wall Street Journal/NBC News–show a clear erosion in the public’s trust in Barack Obama’s honest and integrity.
Nearly half of those surveyed–47 percent–believe the president isn’t telling the truth when he says he didn’t know the IRS was giving extra scrutiny to the applications of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. More than half–55 percent–say the IRS actions raise questions about the administration’s “overall honesty and integrity.” Fifty-eight percent believe the administration’s handling of the Benghazi consulate attacks raises questions about the honesty of the White House, while the same number say the Department of Justice’s subpoenaing of reporter e-mails and phone records in its leak investigations raise concerns.
For roughly half the public to believe Mr. Obama is lying at this relatively early stage in the congressional investigation is quite high, especially since at this point there’s no direct evidence showing the president knew about these scandals prior to May of this year. (Which isn’t to say the IRS and the Treasury Department didn’t know about the IRS’s nefarious activities long before the 2012 election or that the White House chief of staff and White House counsel didn’t know about the scandal prior to when Obama says he learned of it.)
This could well have a corrosive effect on the Obama presidency. …
Remember Stephanie Cutter the white house political operative with the barely contained sneer? She was the one who claimed Romney was a felon. Turns out she was one of those meeting with the IRS head when he visited the executive mansion 157 times. Hot Air has the story.
Noted liar Stephanie Cutter is making the media rounds, furnishing Douglas Shulman with an alibi for many of those White House meetings he attended during President Obama’s first term — far more visits than most cabinet secretaries logged. Cutter insists that Shulman’s frequent presence at 1600 Pennsylvania isn’t the least bit “nefarious” because he was there to attend Obamacare implementation planning sessions. She knows this, she says, because she was in the room: …
Jeff Jacoby on the boom in Washington, DC while the rest of the country suffers.
Give Stephen Fuller credit for this much: He’s willing to admit he was wrong.
During the debate leading up to the federal budget sequester, Fuller was a voice of doom. An economist at GeorgeMasonUniversity and the director of its Center for Regional Analysis, he predicted that sequestration would be especially calamitous for Washington, D.C., and its surroundings. If Congress didn’t stop the automatic spending cuts from going into effect, Fuller warned last year, the Washington area was headed for a “devastating recession.” Some 450,000 jobs, many of them in the private sector, would be wiped out in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.
“It’s something you don’t even want to draw a picture of because it’s too scary,” he said in a radio interview last summer. In January he described the sequester’s impact on the national capital region as an “end-of-the-world kind of hit.”
But the world hasn’t ended. Not even in Washington.
In the months since President Obama signed the order to cut federal outlays by $85 billion, the Washington Post reported last week, the region has added 40,000 jobs. “Income-tax receipts have surged in Virginia, beating expectations. Few government contractors have laid off workers.” There is no sign of the economic hellfire and brimstone foretold by Fuller, who says it’s a “surprise” to him that Washington’s economy is still booming. “We’ve done better than I expected,” he confessed.
The real surprise is that anyone is still surprised by the affluence of the Washington area. …
According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Ft.Hood shooter’s defense may have undermined the claim his crime was a type of “work place violence.”
The admission by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan on Tuesday that he attacked Fort Hood in 2009 in defense of “the leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban” has suddenly undermined the Obama administration’s previous contention that the murders of 13 soldiers at the Texas base constituted an act of “workplace violence.”
Hasan’s legal argument, which is being considered by the judge, Col. Tara Osborn, may reignite the political furor over how the Obama administration has classified the shootings, as well as arguments about whether the mass shootings constituted the first major Islamic jihadist attack on the US after 9/11. As recently as May 23, President Obama said no “large-scale” terrorism attacks on the homeland have occurred on his watch.
Officials at the US Department of Defense have said there isn’t enough evidence to put Hasan on trial for an act of terrorism, and they have worried that such a claim could undermine the Army major’s right to a fair trial.
Critics argue that the FortHood incident has not been characterized as a jihadist attack in part to give the Obama administration political and policy cover. Moreover, they add, the Obama position works to the detriment of shooting victims, which includes the 32 wounded and the families of those killed. Victims would have been eligible for combat compensation under US law if the Pentagon had classified Hasan not as a murderous US Army psychiatrist but rather as an enemy combatant or an “associated force” under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, they say. …