Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Ross Douthat on the great disconnect between DC and the citizens.
THIS January, as President Obama began his second term, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to list their policy priorities for 2013. Huge majorities cited jobs and the economy; sizable majorities cited health care costs and entitlement reform; more modest majorities cited fighting poverty and reforming the tax code. Down at the bottom of the list, with less than 40 percent support in each case, were gun control, immigration and climate change.
Yet six months later, the public’s non-priorities look like the entirety of the White House’s second-term agenda. The president’s failed push for background checks has given way to an ongoing push for immigration reform, and the administration is reportedly planning a sweeping regulatory push on carbon emissions this summer. Meanwhile, nobody expects much action on the issues that Americans actually wanted Washington to focus on: tax and entitlement reform have been back-burnered, and the plight of the unemployed seems to have dropped off the D.C. radar screen entirely.
In part, this disconnect between country and capital reflects the limits gridlock puts on governance. The ideological divides in Washington — between right and left, and between different factions within the House Republican caucus — make action on first-rank issues unusually difficult, so it’s natural that politicians would look for compromises on lower-priority debates instead.
That’s the generous way of looking at it, at least. The more cynical take is that D.C. gridlock has given the political class an excuse to ignore the country’s most pressing problem — a lack of decent jobs at decent wages, with a deeper social crisis at work underneath — and pursue its own pet causes instead.
Craig Pirrong has more on the foolishness from the administration this week.
Obama gave a big speech on the environment, and specifically climate change and CO2. The left swooned. The right raged.
Me-meh.
Not that I like the content of the speech (if you can call what he said “content”)-more on this in a bit. It’s just that presidential speeches tend to be long on promises and calls to action, and very short on follow through. That’s doubly or triply true of Obama speeches. Look at all his speeches on gun control, and how little that came from them. Like nothing. This is a little different, because he can actually direct the EPA to do some things, and nothing in the speech was dependent on legislative approval (which is revealing in itself). Moreover, even the EPA process will be long and drawn out, and its outcome uncertain. Obama was equivocal on Keystone XL, basically setting out a set of criteria that he will use to evaluate it. These criteria are so elastic that it is possible to use them to justify rejection or approval, and indeed, both sides said they were encouraged by Obama’s remarks.
Righties should actually like the speech. The fact that Obama feels obliged to pander to his base should make them happy. Hedge fund billionaire Thomas Steyer had made Keystone a litmus test for continued proggy support for Obama. If he has to spend time, effort, and political capital to appease the Steyers of the world, righties should be pleased.
Insofar as the content, such as it is, goes, a couple of things jumped out.
The first is the condescending characterization of the state of the science on global warming. The snide references to the “Flat Earth Society” and the like. …
Andrew Malcolm says of course he turns to globalony. Nothing else is working.
President Obama is running out of pivot points.
So many of his bright ideas have been busts. Or worse. Let’s see, the $1 trillion jobs stimulus package that was going to produce a gazillion jobs by today.
Now, Obama’s jobs plan is a laugh line for late-night comics. Jay Leno: “Obama told MorehouseCollege graduates they have bright futures ahead. Unless they want jobs. Then, they’re totally screwed.”
That policy reset with Russia? Obama gave up the Eastern European missile defense shield as a naive sign of good faith. Got no thanks. And now he can’t even convince the Russians to get the NSA leaker out of the transit lounge at Moscow’s airport. “Passenger Edward Snowden, please check at the KGB counter if you have a minute.”
ObamaCare? Collapsing under its own weight and fundraising scandal as Democrats run from any connection to it. When’s the last time you heard even its namesake tout its value?
Virtually everything the guy touches this year turns to Shinola. He went to OhioState, urged Americans to dismiss all this silly talk about evil government out to control lives. Days later, oops, here comes the infamous ongoing series of revelations about the Internal Revenue Service harassing Obama opponents, as other government agents coincidentally knock on doors.
But the nation’s chief executive didn’t know about it. …
… jobs aren’t really Obama’s thing. Never have been. If Obama can pit more Americans against more Americans — say, coal miners worried about disappearing jobs against indebted college students who can’t find any — that suits this Alinsky acolyte just fine.
The more social turbulence and distrust the better. The less faith Americans maintain in their once-revered institutions the better for someone who wants to transform them all into something else. And still has 1,304 long days to do the deed.
Bjørn Lomborg, author of Skeptical Environmentalist, thinks we need to worry about economic growth.
… Obsession with doom-and-gloom scenarios distracts us from the real global threats. Poverty is one of the greatest killers of all, while easily curable diseases still claim 15 million lives every year–25 percent of all deaths.
The solution is economic growth. When lifted out of poverty, most people can afford to avoid infectious diseases. China has pulled more than 680 million people out of poverty in the last three decades, leading a worldwide poverty decline of almost 1 billion people. This has created massive improvements in health, longevity, and quality of life.
The four decades since The Limits of Growth have shown that we need more of it, not less. An expansion of trade, with estimated benefits exceeding $100 trillion annually toward the end of the century, would do thousands of times more good than timid feel-good policies that result from fear-mongering. But that requires abandoning an anti-growth mentality and using our enormous potential to create a brighter future. …
Jonathan Tobin asks if the Dems really want to wage a war on coal.
President Obama may think his speech today outlining an unprecedented package of measures aimed at stopping global warming will burnish his legacy. The set of executive orders announced today was exactly what his liberal base has been yearning for throughout his presidency, and the ideological tone of his speech must he highly satisfying for a president who enjoys dictating to what he considers his intellectual inferiors and despises working with a Congress that rejected these measures. But while liberals are cheering Obama’s far-reaching fiat, a lot of Democrats, especially in coal-producing states, must be far from happy.
The president’s orders that will impose new carbon emission levels on existing power plants will raise the price of energy for everyone and harm an already fragile economy that has struggled to maintain an anemic recovery. By itself that may prove to be a political liability for Democrats running in next year’s midterm elections even if by now most Americans have had their natural skepticism about global warming alarmism pounded out of them by an ideological media. But an all-too-candid Obama advisor may have made a crucial gaffe that could kill the president’s party in coal-producing states next year. …