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Andrew Malcolm looks over the last five years of speeches.
Did you ever find an old high school yearbook and shake your head at what’s changed since then? Not just the obvious clothing and hairstyles. But so many of the plans and promise of so many people.
Well, that’s what we’ve done. We went back 1,818 days to one of the first speeches Barack Obama gave as the 44th president. Back to Feb. 12, 2009, less than a month from his first morning in office when he grandly announced the imminent closing of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility.
There he was in East Peoria, Ill., at the massive Caterpillar factory, selling his then-$879 billion stimulus spending plan wending its way through the two Democrat-controlled houses of Congress. But you know what struck us as we read down memory lane?
It’s us that’s changed. wiser now about this president’s wily words. Obama hasn’t changed a bit. Well, not much. He’s changed in two minor ways.
As his poll numbers and trust have shrunk, his speeches have grown longer, much longer. As if throwing additional speeches and words at a public falling out of love with him will persuade more people. Like he threw so much of our money at so many not-really shovel-ready projects that were going to thrust us out of the recession.
The Peoria pitch was barely 2,000 words long, just 15 minutes. Today’s typical “remarks” are usually at least twice as long, even more. …
Malcolm says this time let’s get a real president by looking to the deep bench of the ranks of the GOP governors.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the 2016 presidential race and its main competitors will be determined in Washington.
It can look that way with Washington media talking to Washington inmates about Washington issues on Washington shows. Rand Paul. Hillary Clinton. Marco Rubio. Ted Cruz. Paul Ryan. Peter King. (Just kidding.)
Because these past 1,842 days with a rookie senator pretending to be the nation’s chief executive have shown how really well that works.
Have you heard a single person not employed on Capitol Hill seriously suggest we need another speech-making legislator ascending to the Oval Office?
Or have you glanced at the approval ratings of that smug crowd recently? The single digits consist mainly of family and friends.
It’s time to return to hiring an executive to be America’s chief executive.
Five of the last six presidents were governors or a sitting vice president for a former governor. That doesn’t guarantee success at home or abroad; ask Jimmy Carter. But it sure provides a better shot at a president who takes responsibility and doesn’t claim ignorance as an excuse.
Which is why politics junkies should keep their eyes elsewhere these days. Places like Texas and Florida and even California. There, quietly without much notice beyond local news outlets, several of the GOP’s impressively deep bench of state chief executives are chatting up the big money folks.
Think Scott Walker. Chris Christie. Jeb Bush. Bobby Jindal. Rick Perry. Mike Huckabee, maybe John Kasich. …
Jennifer Rubin posts on presidential pipeline paralysis.
… In the case of the XL Pipeline, the president seems oddly paralyzed. For a guy who unilaterally changed his signature health-care law multiple times and rewrote immigration law without Congress, he has on the pipeline gone to the State Department not once but twice looking for cover. So why the angst?
As the former energy secretary put it, this is not a scientific question; it is a political one. You’d think it would be a slam dunk. He should want to show that he, unlike those Republicans, you know, “believes in science.” He is forever pivoting to jobs, worrying aloud about the inequality gap and fretting about low wages. All of these factors lean in favor of approving the pipeline. Yet in this White House the left must be soothed. The temperature of Hollywood and Silicon Valley elites must be monitored around the clock. This is the White House (and increasingly the party) of university professors, glossy fashion magazine editors, racial and ethnic advocacy leaders and, of course, public employees (who don’t get anything much out of the pipeline). The money and the energy in the party is with the anti-pipeline forces. Hence, the president is conflicted.
I suspect the president will eventually have to capitulate to reason — and/or to the tears of red-state Democrats. However, the difficulty he is having and the agonizing process he is going through should suggest a fundamental conflict between his elite loyalty and his working-man appeal on inequality. This is how the Democratic Party faltered in the 1970s — the elites of the Democratic Party wound up offending what then became known as the “Reagan Democrats.” …
Roger Simon posts on the New York Observer take down of the NY Times opinion pages.
… I certainly agree about the mind-bending banality of the Times opinion page and the windiness (at best) of Friedman. But I think the reporters are off the mark on the cause. They can blame it on Rosenthal if they wish — I have no opinion, not working there — but the real problem is far greater than any one editor.
To adopt what is becoming a modern cliché — it’s the ideology, stupid.
The Times reporters complained of the page’s uniformly negative tone, but not even S.J. Perelman or P.G. Wodehouse could write with verve in the service of modern liberalism. You can’t bring a dead horse to life. No writer is that good — at least on a regular basis.
How, for example, do you write an eloquent defense of Obamacare or justify the administration’s actions in Benghazi without resorting to the kind of obfuscation that makes for convoluted, or at best tedious, writing? How do you advocate for yet more government programs in a country already so mired in debt it’s hard to see how it will ever get out? It’s Keynesian economics itself that’s the problem, not Paul Krugman.
Although I admire many of the writers at the Wall Street Journal, let’s admit they have a lot more to work with, a plethora of easy targets for a man or woman with even a modicum of wit. We live in an era when readers are distrusting big government more than ever. Where does that leave the NYT, that great tribune of of ever-expanding government? With a bunch of grumps on their hands. …
Here’s the article from The Observer.
IT’S WELL KNOWN AMONG THE SMALL WORLD of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times.
The New York Observer has learned over the course of interviews with more than two-dozen current and former Times staffers that the situation has “reached the boiling point” in the words of one current Times reporter. Only two people interviewed for this story agreed to be identified, given the fears of retaliation by someone they criticize as petty and vindictive.
The blame here, in the eyes of most Times reporters to whom The Observer spoke, belongs to Andrew Rosenthal, who as editorial page editor leads both the paper’s opinion pages and opinion postings online, as well as overseeing the editorial board and the letters, columnists and op-ed departments. Mr. Rosenthal is accused of both tyranny and pettiness, by the majority of the Times staffers interviewed for this story. And the growing dissatisfaction with Mr. Rosenthal stems from a commitment to excellence that has lifted the rest of the Times, which is viewed by every staffer The Observer spoke to as rapidly and dramatically improving.
“He runs the show and is lazy as all get-out,” says a current Times writer, and one can almost hear the Times-ness in his controlled anger (who but a Timesman uses the phrase “as all get-out” these days?). Laziness and bossiness are unattractive qualities in any superior, but they seem particularly galling at a time when the Times continues to pare valued staffers via unending buyouts.
The Times declined to provide exact staffing numbers, but that too is a source of resentment. Said one staffer, “Andy’s got 14 or 15 people plus a whole bevy of assistants working on these three unsigned editorials every day. They’re completely reflexively liberal, utterly predictable, usually poorly written and totally ineffectual. I mean, just try and remember the last time that anybody was talking about one of those editorials. You know, I can think of one time recently, which is with the [Edward] Snowden stuff, but mostly nobody pays attention, and millions of dollars is being spent on that stuff.”
Asked by The Observer for hard evidence supporting a loss of influence of the vaunted editorial page, the same Times staffer fired back, “You know, the editorials are never on the most emailed list; they’re never on the most read list. People just are not paying attention, and they don’t care. It’s a waste of money.” …
James Pethokoukis has a preliminary look at the January Jobs Report.
I will write up the January jobs report — lousy (establishment survey), pretty good (household survey) — later, but I wanted to toss something out there. The recent CBO report on the labor market effects of Obamacare has raised the general issue of whether the US is moving away from work.
Here is a stat, reflected in the above chart, to think about: Before the Great Recession, there were 122 million full-time jobs in America. Now 4 1/2 years after its end, there are still just 118 million full-time jobs in America despite a labor force that is 1.6 million larger and a nonjailed, nonmilitary adult working-age population that is 14 million larger.