REALITY IS THAT MOST OF AMERICA WAS PUNKED BY BARACK OBAMA! INTERESTINGLY, HIS BANKSTER DONORS GOT IT RIGHT!
OBAMA BANKSTER DONORS COULD NEVER HAVE KNOWN HOW MUCH ONE MAN COULD DO FOR THEM. THEY’VE PILLAGED A NATION, BROUGHT AN ECONOMY TO ITS KNEES, CONNED A MASSIVE WELFARE BAILOUT, NO REAL REGULATION, STAGGERING BONUSES, AND NOT ONE WENT TO PRISON!
LET’S CALL IT “FRIENDS IN HIGH WHITE HOUSE PLACES!”
*
Obama and Hollywood: The Honeymoon Is Over
Matt Damon is the Latest Among Hollywood's Liberal Elite to Break With the President
March 4, 2011
The honeymoon is apparently over.
Actor Matt Damon, one of the liberal elite's first
celebrity Obama backers, told CNN's Piers Morgan
Thursday that he has been disappointed in President
Obama's performance.
Asked if he was happy with the man he once so
vocally supported, the actor responded, "No. I really
think he misinterpreted his mandate. A friend of mine
said it the other day and I thought it was a great line:
'I no longer hope for audacity,'" a take on Obama's
"Audacity of Hope" book title.
On Afghanistan, Damon said he doesn't believe the
"mission there has been very well articulated. And I
think it would help to kind of reframe the way we're
thinking about being there and why we're there."
But Damon is not the first -- nor, surely, will he be
the last -- of Obama's high-profile Hollywood
supporters to express disappointment in the
president's accomplishments.
Barbra Streisand appeared on "Larry King Live" --
hosted by Morgan's predecessor -- in December
where she complained about both Obama specifically
and Democrats in general.
She conceded that Obama "has an open mind; he has
an open heart. And he's cool and he's very smart." But
Streisand said she was disappointed in him for not
having "used his executive privilege ... to get rid of
'don't ask, don't tell,'" the policy barring openly gay
Americans from military service.
Streisand said she went to Europe during last year's
midterm elections because she didn't want to be
around for a "bloodbath."
The substantial losses her party suffered were a result
of "a mistake on the Democrats' part that they have not
gotten their message across in communicating all that
they have done that is good," she said
Her take on the tax-cut compromise? "I mean, I'm one
of those people who are going to benefit," she
replied. "But it's not fair to working people in America.
It's just not fair."
Of course, Hollywood is hardly a monolith. And many
of the president's supporters continue to stand by
their man, among them George Clooney and Oprah
Winfrey.
Appearing on "Morning Joe" with Joe Scarborough last
month, Winfrey -- a longtime ardent supporter --
urged Obama's critics to show some level of respect"
for the president, even when they disagree with him.
"I believe that what he really wants is for this country
to be greater, stronger more innovative. Those
principles are what really enforces his beliefs," the
queen of daytime TV said, quipping that, "Everybody
complaining ought to try [being president] for a
week."
Damon, for his part, expressed a different sentiment
Thursday. On the president's State of the Union
address last month, Damon said, "He's doubled down
on a lot of things. ... He didn't even say the word
'poverty.' You've got millions of people languishing
in it."
Robert Redford complained last summer that Obama
was not taking enough action to clean up the BP gulf
oil spill.
"The voters sent Obama to Washington to be a bold
and visionary leader," the actor told Keith Olbermann,
the former host of MSNBC's "Countdown."
"We don't need a disaster-manager, we need a leader."
Director Spike Lee also blasted the president for his
oil-spill response, or lack thereof.
"I don't know why Obama ever trusted these BP guys.
They would lie to their mothers," Lee said to GQ in
August. "[Former BP president Tony] Hayward does
not give a [expletive]. The thing we don't talk about is
that 11 Americans lost their lives and it took seven
weeks to invite their families to the White House. I'm
not trying to bash my man, but that's a long time."
In an echo of many criticisms leveled at the Bush
administration for its response to the devastating
Katrina floods in New Orleans, Lee called Obama out
for "environmental racism."
"If this oil spill would have reached the Hamptons,
Martha's Vineyard [where Lee summers], Cape Cod,
that [expletive] would have been fixed," he said.
In an interview with the British paper Guardian
January 2010, "Glee" star Jane Lynch called Obama a
"huge disappointment" for not taking bolder action on
gay rights.
"Shouldn't there be safeguards against the majority
voting on the rights of a minority?" she asked. "If
people voted on civil rights in the '60s, it would have
never happened. It took somebody like [President]
Lyndon Johnson going, 'F*** all of you. I'm going to
do this.' Obama won't do it."
But it's not just Hollywood that has lost a lot of its
love. Obama's approval ratings fell by 11 percent
across the board in 2010, according to the most
recent Gallup poll.
Still, with all the flack the president has gotten from
the left wing of his party, one would think his
moderate bona fides should have earned him some
GOP respect by now.
One would be wrong. Newt Gingrich, the former
congressmen who spearheaded Capitol Hill's 1994
so-called Republican revolution, has announced he
may explore a 2012 bid for the presidency.
"The rule of law," Gingrich complained, "is being
replaced by the rule of Obama.
*
DO YOU THINK OBAMA PUNKED US?
IF SO, SINCE WHEN? THE FIRST DAY?
"There is a populist and conservative revolt against Wall Street and financial elites, Congress and government," Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg warned in an analysis this week. "Democrats and President Obama are seen as more interested in bailing out Wall Street than helping Main Street."
*
OBAMA’S CON JOB ON REGULATION WILL NOT IMPACT HIS LARGEST BANKSTER DONORS! WHO’D OF THOUGHT???
“Obama's rhetoric covered the whole financial industry, but the key changes will affect only a few high-profile players, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., while sparing investment banks like Goldman Sachs Group Inc.”
*
WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW ABOUT OUR ACTOR OBAMA THAT WE DIDN’T KNOW?
Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
The president's actions and tactics haven't matched his lofty language, breeding a cynicism that has doomed his cause.
Jonah Goldberg
December 22, 2009
On his own terms, President Obama is a failure.
During the presidential campaign, he fought hammer and tongs with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the best way to govern. Clinton, casting herself as a battle-scarred political veteran, argued that diligence, dedicated detail work and working the system were essential for success.
Obama, donning the mantle of a redeemer descending from divine heights, argued that his soaring rhetoric was more than "just words" but a way out of the poisonous, partisan gridlock of yesteryear. Early on in New Hampshire, he proclaimed that his "rival in this race is not other candidates. It's cynicism."
Occasionally the Obama-Clinton argument was explicit -- such as when they sparred over who was more important to the Civil Rights Act, Martin Luther King Jr. or Lyndon Johnson -- but it was always there, implicit in everything from their body language and stagecraft to position papers and platforms.
The great irony of it all is that it seems they were both wrong.
Obama's rhetoric in fact looks to be the best way to achieve a Clintonian agenda. But a Clintonian agenda is the worst possible way to live up to Obama's rhetoric.
From his 2004 keynote speech onward, Obama rejected the partisan divide. He earned points by insisting that invidious descriptions of political opponents were deleterious to civic health and distracted us from the fact that "we are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."
In a June primary victory speech, Obama said he was "absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children . . . this was the moment -- this was the time -- when we came together to remake this great nation."
So, does anyone feel like Americans are coming together?
Obama the outsider hasn't changed the way Washington works; he's worked Washington in a way that only an outsider with no respect for the place would dare.
Consider his signature domestic priority: healthcare reform. After a year of working on it, his progressive base is either profoundly disappointed with him or seethingly angry. His Republican and conservative opponents are not only furious, they are emboldened. And independents -- who've been deserting the Democrats in polls and off-year elections -- are simply disgusted with the whole spectacle. Most important, an administration that once preened over its people-power roots, can't even claim that Americans like what he's doing.
The bill does have its supporters: inside-the-Beltway pundits and Capitol Hill deal-makers, the pharmaceutical industry and the supposedly rapacious insurance companies (don't take my word for it, just ask Howard Dean -- or your stockbroker).
Under the Clintonian paradigm of governance, Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson's parlaying of his pro-life objections to the Senate bill into a windfall for his state and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' leveraging of his socialist principles for billions in special deals would be dramatic twists in a conventional story of LBJ-style arm-twisting.
But Clintonian means cannot further Obamaian ends. For the last year Obama's party has made a mockery of everything Obama was supposed to represent. The tone has gotten worse as his communications staff spent the year demonizing Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Fox News. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer called opponents of their health proposals "un-American." Just over the weekend, Rhode Island's Sheldon Whitehouse insisted that Senate opposition is being driven, in part, by "Aryan support groups."
Everywhere you look, the sizzle doesn't match the steak. He won the Nobel Peace Prize as he (rightly) sent even more men off to war. He promised the oceans would stop rising but delivered a nonbinding something-or-other in Copenhagen.
In his special healthcare address to Congress in September, he said, "I am not the first president to take up [the cause of healthcare reform], but I am determined to be the last." Those were just words, and everyone, including Obama, knew it. Indeed, the only grounds for supporting the bill, according to progressives, is that it is a "first step" or a "starter house" that they'll build on for years, even generations, to come. In other words, the healthcare debate is not only not going to end, it's going to get uglier for as far as the eye can see.
But here's the point: Obama's rhetorical audacity breeds cynicism, because utopianism always comes up short. Obama has many victories ahead of him, but his cause is already lost.
*
August 9, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Is Obama Punking Us?
By FRANK RICH
“AUGUST is a challenging time to be president,” said Andrew Card, the former Bush White House chief of staff, as he offered unsolicited advice to his successors in a television interview last week. “I think you have to expect the unexpected.”
He should know. Thursday was the eighth anniversary of “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” the President’s Daily Brief that his boss ignored while on vacation in Crawford. Aug. 29 marks the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s strike on the Louisiana coast, which his boss also ignored while on vacation in Crawford.
So do have a blast in Martha’s Vineyard, President Obama.
Even as we wait for some unexpected disaster to strike, Beltway omens for the current White House are grim. Obama’s poll numbers are approaching free fall, we are told. If he fails on health care, he’s toast. Indeed, many of the bloviators who spot a fatal swoon in the Obama presidency are the same doomsayers who in August 2008 were predicting his Election Day defeat because he couldn’t “close the deal” and clear the 50 percent mark in matchups with John McCain.
Here are two not very daring predictions: Obama will get some kind of health care reform done come fall. His poll numbers will not crater any time soon.
Yet there is real reason for longer-term worry in the form of a persistent, anecdotal drift toward disillusionment among some of the president’s supporters. And not merely those on the left. This concern was perhaps best articulated by an Obama voter, a real estate agent in Virginia, featured on the front page of The Washington Post last week. “Nothing’s changed for the common guy,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been punked.” She cited in particular the billions of dollars in bailouts given to banks that still “act like they’re broke.”
But this mood isn’t just about the banks, Public Enemy No. 1. What the Great Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged — that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few” who have “run Washington far too long.” He promised to smite them.
No president can do that alone, let alone in six months. To make Obama’s goal more quixotic, the ailment that he diagnosed is far bigger than Washington and often beyond politics’ domain. What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media.
As Democrats have pointed out, the angry hecklers disrupting town-hall meetings convened by members of Congress are not always ordinary citizens engaging in spontaneous grass-roots protests or even G.O.P. operatives, but proxies for corporate lobbyists. One group facilitating the screamers is FreedomWorks, which is run by the former Congressman Dick Armey, now a lobbyist at the DLA Piper law firm. Medicines Company, a global pharmaceutical business, has paid DLA Piper more than $6 million in lobbying fees in the five years Armey has worked there.
But the Democratic members of Congress those hecklers assailed can hardly claim the moral high ground. Their ties to health care interests are merely more discreet and insidious. As Congressional Quarterly reported last week, industry groups contributed almost $1.8 million in the first six months of 2009 alone to the 18 House members of both parties supervising health care reform, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer among them.
Then there are the 52 conservative Blue Dog Democrats, who have balked at the public option for health insurance. Their cash intake from insurers and drug companies outpaces their Democratic peers by an average of 25 percent, according to The Post. And let’s not forget the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, which has raked in nearly $500,000 from a single doctor-owned hospital in McAllen, Tex. — the very one that Obama has cited as a symbol of runaway medical costs ever since it was profiled in The New Yorker this spring.
In this maze of powerful moneyed interests, it’s not clear who any American in either party should or could root for. The bipartisan nature of the beast can be encapsulated by the remarkable progress of Billy Tauzin, the former Louisiana congressman. Tauzin was a founding member of the Blue Dog Democrats in 1994. A year later, he bolted to the Republicans. Now he is chief of PhRMA, the biggest pharmaceutical trade group. In the 2008 campaign, Obama ran a television ad pillorying Tauzin for his role in preventing Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices. Last week The Los Angeles Times reported — and The New York Times confirmed — that Tauzin, an active player in White House health care negotiations, had secured a behind-closed-doors flip-flop, enlisting the administration to push for continued protection of drug prices. Now we know why the president has ducked his campaign pledge to broadcast such negotiations on C-Span.
The making of legislative sausage is never pretty. The White House has to give to get. But the cynicism being whipped up among voters is justified. Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose chief presidential campaign strategist unapologetically did double duty as a high-powered corporate flack, Obama promised change we could actually believe in.
His first questionable post-victory step was to assemble an old boys’ club of Robert Rubin protégés and Goldman-Citi alumni as the White House economic team, including a Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who failed in his watchdog role at the New York Fed as Wall Street’s latest bubble first inflated and then burst. The questions about Geithner’s role in adjudicating the subsequent bailouts aren’t going away, and neither is the angry public sense that the fix is still in. We just learned that nine of those bailed-out banks — which in total received $175 billion of taxpayers’ money, but as yet have repaid only $50 billion — are awarding a total of $32.6 billion in bonuses for 2009.
It’s in this context that Obama can’t afford a defeat on health care. A bill will pass in a Democrat-controlled Congress. What matters is what’s in it. The final result will be a CAT scan of those powerful Washington interests he campaigned against, revealing which have been removed from the body politic (or at least reduced) and which continue to metastasize. The Wall Street regulatory reform package Obama pushes through, or doesn’t, may render even more of a verdict on his success in changing the system he sought the White House to reform.
The best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It’s a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy. If anything, the most unexpected — and challenging — event that could rock the White House this August would be if the opposition actually woke up.
*
The Mexican occupation of 38 million illegals depress wages $200 - $300 billion per year for Americans. These same Americans are forced to pay the staggering welfare costs of the occupation as well. Welfare paid to illegals in Mexican occupied Los Angeles, is nearly $40 MILLION PER MONTH. In Los Angeles, 47% of those employed are ILLEGALS.
*
Octoer 17, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Impatiently Waiting
By CHARLES M. BLOW
When, Mr. President? When will your deeds catch up to your words? The people who worked tirelessly to get you elected are getting tired of waiting. According to a Gallup poll released on Wednesday, Americans’ satisfaction with the way things are going in the country has hit a six-month low, and those decreases were led, in both percentage and percentage-point decreases, by Democrats and independents, not by Republicans.
The fierce urgency of now has melted into the maddening wait for whenever.
Take health care reform. Because of the president’s quixotic quest for bipartisanship, he refused to take a firm stand in favor of the public option. In that wake, Democrats gutted the Baucus bill to win the graces of Olympia Snowe — a Republican senator from a state with half the population of Brooklyn, a senator who is defying the will of her own constituents. A poll conducted earlier this month found that 57 percent of Maine residents support the public option and only 37 percent oppose it.
She is certainly living up to the state’s motto: Dirigo. That’s Latin for “I lead.” And the Democrats have followed. For shame.
When will the president take the risk of standing up for his convictions on health care instead of sacrificing good policies for good politics? (Or maybe not even good politics since a one-sided compromise is the same as a surrender.)
And health care is only one example.
On the same weekend that gay rights protesters marched past the White House, the president again said that his administration was “moving ahead on don’t ask don’t tell.” But when? This month? This year? This term?
As we prepare to draw down troops from the disaster that was the war in Iraq, we may commit more troops to the quagmire that is the war in Afghanistan and the government may miss its deadline for closing the blight that is the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Obama pledged to stem the tide of job losses and foreclosures and to reform the culture of the financial sector. Well, the Dow just hit 10,000 again while the national unemployment rate is about to hit 10 percent. And the firms we propped up are set to dole out record bonuses while home foreclosures have hit record highs. Main Street is still drowning in crisis while Wall Street is awash in Champagne. When will this imbalance be corrected?
Candidate Obama pledged to make the rebuilding of New Orleans a priority, but President Obama whisked into the city on Thursday for a visit so brief that one Louisiana congressman dubbed it a “drive-through daiquiri summit.” The president spent more time on the failed Olympic bid in Copenhagen than he did in the Crescent City.
At the town hall in New Orleans, Obama appealed for patience. He said, “Change is hard, and big change is harder.” Is that the excuse? Now where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah. From George Bush.
OBAMA BANKSTER DONORS COULD NEVER HAVE KNOWN HOW MUCH ONE MAN COULD DO FOR THEM. THEY’VE PILLAGED A NATION, BROUGHT AN ECONOMY TO ITS KNEES, CONNED A MASSIVE WELFARE BAILOUT, NO REAL REGULATION, STAGGERING BONUSES, AND NOT ONE WENT TO PRISON!
LET’S CALL IT “FRIENDS IN HIGH WHITE HOUSE PLACES!”
*
Obama and Hollywood: The Honeymoon Is Over
Matt Damon is the Latest Among Hollywood's Liberal Elite to Break With the President
March 4, 2011
The honeymoon is apparently over.
Actor Matt Damon, one of the liberal elite's first
celebrity Obama backers, told CNN's Piers Morgan
Thursday that he has been disappointed in President
Obama's performance.
Asked if he was happy with the man he once so
vocally supported, the actor responded, "No. I really
think he misinterpreted his mandate. A friend of mine
said it the other day and I thought it was a great line:
'I no longer hope for audacity,'" a take on Obama's
"Audacity of Hope" book title.
On Afghanistan, Damon said he doesn't believe the
"mission there has been very well articulated. And I
think it would help to kind of reframe the way we're
thinking about being there and why we're there."
But Damon is not the first -- nor, surely, will he be
the last -- of Obama's high-profile Hollywood
supporters to express disappointment in the
president's accomplishments.
Barbra Streisand appeared on "Larry King Live" --
hosted by Morgan's predecessor -- in December
where she complained about both Obama specifically
and Democrats in general.
She conceded that Obama "has an open mind; he has
an open heart. And he's cool and he's very smart." But
Streisand said she was disappointed in him for not
having "used his executive privilege ... to get rid of
'don't ask, don't tell,'" the policy barring openly gay
Americans from military service.
Streisand said she went to Europe during last year's
midterm elections because she didn't want to be
around for a "bloodbath."
The substantial losses her party suffered were a result
of "a mistake on the Democrats' part that they have not
gotten their message across in communicating all that
they have done that is good," she said
Her take on the tax-cut compromise? "I mean, I'm one
of those people who are going to benefit," she
replied. "But it's not fair to working people in America.
It's just not fair."
Of course, Hollywood is hardly a monolith. And many
of the president's supporters continue to stand by
their man, among them George Clooney and Oprah
Winfrey.
Appearing on "Morning Joe" with Joe Scarborough last
month, Winfrey -- a longtime ardent supporter --
urged Obama's critics to show some level of respect"
for the president, even when they disagree with him.
"I believe that what he really wants is for this country
to be greater, stronger more innovative. Those
principles are what really enforces his beliefs," the
queen of daytime TV said, quipping that, "Everybody
complaining ought to try [being president] for a
week."
Damon, for his part, expressed a different sentiment
Thursday. On the president's State of the Union
address last month, Damon said, "He's doubled down
on a lot of things. ... He didn't even say the word
'poverty.' You've got millions of people languishing
in it."
Robert Redford complained last summer that Obama
was not taking enough action to clean up the BP gulf
oil spill.
"The voters sent Obama to Washington to be a bold
and visionary leader," the actor told Keith Olbermann,
the former host of MSNBC's "Countdown."
"We don't need a disaster-manager, we need a leader."
Director Spike Lee also blasted the president for his
oil-spill response, or lack thereof.
"I don't know why Obama ever trusted these BP guys.
They would lie to their mothers," Lee said to GQ in
August. "[Former BP president Tony] Hayward does
not give a [expletive]. The thing we don't talk about is
that 11 Americans lost their lives and it took seven
weeks to invite their families to the White House. I'm
not trying to bash my man, but that's a long time."
In an echo of many criticisms leveled at the Bush
administration for its response to the devastating
Katrina floods in New Orleans, Lee called Obama out
for "environmental racism."
"If this oil spill would have reached the Hamptons,
Martha's Vineyard [where Lee summers], Cape Cod,
that [expletive] would have been fixed," he said.
In an interview with the British paper Guardian
January 2010, "Glee" star Jane Lynch called Obama a
"huge disappointment" for not taking bolder action on
gay rights.
"Shouldn't there be safeguards against the majority
voting on the rights of a minority?" she asked. "If
people voted on civil rights in the '60s, it would have
never happened. It took somebody like [President]
Lyndon Johnson going, 'F*** all of you. I'm going to
do this.' Obama won't do it."
But it's not just Hollywood that has lost a lot of its
love. Obama's approval ratings fell by 11 percent
across the board in 2010, according to the most
recent Gallup poll.
Still, with all the flack the president has gotten from
the left wing of his party, one would think his
moderate bona fides should have earned him some
GOP respect by now.
One would be wrong. Newt Gingrich, the former
congressmen who spearheaded Capitol Hill's 1994
so-called Republican revolution, has announced he
may explore a 2012 bid for the presidency.
"The rule of law," Gingrich complained, "is being
replaced by the rule of Obama.
*
DO YOU THINK OBAMA PUNKED US?
IF SO, SINCE WHEN? THE FIRST DAY?
"There is a populist and conservative revolt against Wall Street and financial elites, Congress and government," Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg warned in an analysis this week. "Democrats and President Obama are seen as more interested in bailing out Wall Street than helping Main Street."
*
OBAMA’S CON JOB ON REGULATION WILL NOT IMPACT HIS LARGEST BANKSTER DONORS! WHO’D OF THOUGHT???
“Obama's rhetoric covered the whole financial industry, but the key changes will affect only a few high-profile players, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., while sparing investment banks like Goldman Sachs Group Inc.”
*
WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW ABOUT OUR ACTOR OBAMA THAT WE DIDN’T KNOW?
Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
The president's actions and tactics haven't matched his lofty language, breeding a cynicism that has doomed his cause.
Jonah Goldberg
December 22, 2009
On his own terms, President Obama is a failure.
During the presidential campaign, he fought hammer and tongs with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the best way to govern. Clinton, casting herself as a battle-scarred political veteran, argued that diligence, dedicated detail work and working the system were essential for success.
Obama, donning the mantle of a redeemer descending from divine heights, argued that his soaring rhetoric was more than "just words" but a way out of the poisonous, partisan gridlock of yesteryear. Early on in New Hampshire, he proclaimed that his "rival in this race is not other candidates. It's cynicism."
Occasionally the Obama-Clinton argument was explicit -- such as when they sparred over who was more important to the Civil Rights Act, Martin Luther King Jr. or Lyndon Johnson -- but it was always there, implicit in everything from their body language and stagecraft to position papers and platforms.
The great irony of it all is that it seems they were both wrong.
Obama's rhetoric in fact looks to be the best way to achieve a Clintonian agenda. But a Clintonian agenda is the worst possible way to live up to Obama's rhetoric.
From his 2004 keynote speech onward, Obama rejected the partisan divide. He earned points by insisting that invidious descriptions of political opponents were deleterious to civic health and distracted us from the fact that "we are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."
In a June primary victory speech, Obama said he was "absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children . . . this was the moment -- this was the time -- when we came together to remake this great nation."
So, does anyone feel like Americans are coming together?
Obama the outsider hasn't changed the way Washington works; he's worked Washington in a way that only an outsider with no respect for the place would dare.
Consider his signature domestic priority: healthcare reform. After a year of working on it, his progressive base is either profoundly disappointed with him or seethingly angry. His Republican and conservative opponents are not only furious, they are emboldened. And independents -- who've been deserting the Democrats in polls and off-year elections -- are simply disgusted with the whole spectacle. Most important, an administration that once preened over its people-power roots, can't even claim that Americans like what he's doing.
The bill does have its supporters: inside-the-Beltway pundits and Capitol Hill deal-makers, the pharmaceutical industry and the supposedly rapacious insurance companies (don't take my word for it, just ask Howard Dean -- or your stockbroker).
Under the Clintonian paradigm of governance, Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson's parlaying of his pro-life objections to the Senate bill into a windfall for his state and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' leveraging of his socialist principles for billions in special deals would be dramatic twists in a conventional story of LBJ-style arm-twisting.
But Clintonian means cannot further Obamaian ends. For the last year Obama's party has made a mockery of everything Obama was supposed to represent. The tone has gotten worse as his communications staff spent the year demonizing Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Fox News. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer called opponents of their health proposals "un-American." Just over the weekend, Rhode Island's Sheldon Whitehouse insisted that Senate opposition is being driven, in part, by "Aryan support groups."
Everywhere you look, the sizzle doesn't match the steak. He won the Nobel Peace Prize as he (rightly) sent even more men off to war. He promised the oceans would stop rising but delivered a nonbinding something-or-other in Copenhagen.
In his special healthcare address to Congress in September, he said, "I am not the first president to take up [the cause of healthcare reform], but I am determined to be the last." Those were just words, and everyone, including Obama, knew it. Indeed, the only grounds for supporting the bill, according to progressives, is that it is a "first step" or a "starter house" that they'll build on for years, even generations, to come. In other words, the healthcare debate is not only not going to end, it's going to get uglier for as far as the eye can see.
But here's the point: Obama's rhetorical audacity breeds cynicism, because utopianism always comes up short. Obama has many victories ahead of him, but his cause is already lost.
*
August 9, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Is Obama Punking Us?
By FRANK RICH
“AUGUST is a challenging time to be president,” said Andrew Card, the former Bush White House chief of staff, as he offered unsolicited advice to his successors in a television interview last week. “I think you have to expect the unexpected.”
He should know. Thursday was the eighth anniversary of “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” the President’s Daily Brief that his boss ignored while on vacation in Crawford. Aug. 29 marks the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s strike on the Louisiana coast, which his boss also ignored while on vacation in Crawford.
So do have a blast in Martha’s Vineyard, President Obama.
Even as we wait for some unexpected disaster to strike, Beltway omens for the current White House are grim. Obama’s poll numbers are approaching free fall, we are told. If he fails on health care, he’s toast. Indeed, many of the bloviators who spot a fatal swoon in the Obama presidency are the same doomsayers who in August 2008 were predicting his Election Day defeat because he couldn’t “close the deal” and clear the 50 percent mark in matchups with John McCain.
Here are two not very daring predictions: Obama will get some kind of health care reform done come fall. His poll numbers will not crater any time soon.
Yet there is real reason for longer-term worry in the form of a persistent, anecdotal drift toward disillusionment among some of the president’s supporters. And not merely those on the left. This concern was perhaps best articulated by an Obama voter, a real estate agent in Virginia, featured on the front page of The Washington Post last week. “Nothing’s changed for the common guy,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been punked.” She cited in particular the billions of dollars in bailouts given to banks that still “act like they’re broke.”
But this mood isn’t just about the banks, Public Enemy No. 1. What the Great Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged — that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few” who have “run Washington far too long.” He promised to smite them.
No president can do that alone, let alone in six months. To make Obama’s goal more quixotic, the ailment that he diagnosed is far bigger than Washington and often beyond politics’ domain. What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media.
As Democrats have pointed out, the angry hecklers disrupting town-hall meetings convened by members of Congress are not always ordinary citizens engaging in spontaneous grass-roots protests or even G.O.P. operatives, but proxies for corporate lobbyists. One group facilitating the screamers is FreedomWorks, which is run by the former Congressman Dick Armey, now a lobbyist at the DLA Piper law firm. Medicines Company, a global pharmaceutical business, has paid DLA Piper more than $6 million in lobbying fees in the five years Armey has worked there.
But the Democratic members of Congress those hecklers assailed can hardly claim the moral high ground. Their ties to health care interests are merely more discreet and insidious. As Congressional Quarterly reported last week, industry groups contributed almost $1.8 million in the first six months of 2009 alone to the 18 House members of both parties supervising health care reform, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer among them.
Then there are the 52 conservative Blue Dog Democrats, who have balked at the public option for health insurance. Their cash intake from insurers and drug companies outpaces their Democratic peers by an average of 25 percent, according to The Post. And let’s not forget the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, which has raked in nearly $500,000 from a single doctor-owned hospital in McAllen, Tex. — the very one that Obama has cited as a symbol of runaway medical costs ever since it was profiled in The New Yorker this spring.
In this maze of powerful moneyed interests, it’s not clear who any American in either party should or could root for. The bipartisan nature of the beast can be encapsulated by the remarkable progress of Billy Tauzin, the former Louisiana congressman. Tauzin was a founding member of the Blue Dog Democrats in 1994. A year later, he bolted to the Republicans. Now he is chief of PhRMA, the biggest pharmaceutical trade group. In the 2008 campaign, Obama ran a television ad pillorying Tauzin for his role in preventing Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices. Last week The Los Angeles Times reported — and The New York Times confirmed — that Tauzin, an active player in White House health care negotiations, had secured a behind-closed-doors flip-flop, enlisting the administration to push for continued protection of drug prices. Now we know why the president has ducked his campaign pledge to broadcast such negotiations on C-Span.
The making of legislative sausage is never pretty. The White House has to give to get. But the cynicism being whipped up among voters is justified. Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose chief presidential campaign strategist unapologetically did double duty as a high-powered corporate flack, Obama promised change we could actually believe in.
His first questionable post-victory step was to assemble an old boys’ club of Robert Rubin protégés and Goldman-Citi alumni as the White House economic team, including a Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who failed in his watchdog role at the New York Fed as Wall Street’s latest bubble first inflated and then burst. The questions about Geithner’s role in adjudicating the subsequent bailouts aren’t going away, and neither is the angry public sense that the fix is still in. We just learned that nine of those bailed-out banks — which in total received $175 billion of taxpayers’ money, but as yet have repaid only $50 billion — are awarding a total of $32.6 billion in bonuses for 2009.
It’s in this context that Obama can’t afford a defeat on health care. A bill will pass in a Democrat-controlled Congress. What matters is what’s in it. The final result will be a CAT scan of those powerful Washington interests he campaigned against, revealing which have been removed from the body politic (or at least reduced) and which continue to metastasize. The Wall Street regulatory reform package Obama pushes through, or doesn’t, may render even more of a verdict on his success in changing the system he sought the White House to reform.
The best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It’s a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy. If anything, the most unexpected — and challenging — event that could rock the White House this August would be if the opposition actually woke up.
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The Mexican occupation of 38 million illegals depress wages $200 - $300 billion per year for Americans. These same Americans are forced to pay the staggering welfare costs of the occupation as well. Welfare paid to illegals in Mexican occupied Los Angeles, is nearly $40 MILLION PER MONTH. In Los Angeles, 47% of those employed are ILLEGALS.
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Octoer 17, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Impatiently Waiting
By CHARLES M. BLOW
When, Mr. President? When will your deeds catch up to your words? The people who worked tirelessly to get you elected are getting tired of waiting. According to a Gallup poll released on Wednesday, Americans’ satisfaction with the way things are going in the country has hit a six-month low, and those decreases were led, in both percentage and percentage-point decreases, by Democrats and independents, not by Republicans.
The fierce urgency of now has melted into the maddening wait for whenever.
Take health care reform. Because of the president’s quixotic quest for bipartisanship, he refused to take a firm stand in favor of the public option. In that wake, Democrats gutted the Baucus bill to win the graces of Olympia Snowe — a Republican senator from a state with half the population of Brooklyn, a senator who is defying the will of her own constituents. A poll conducted earlier this month found that 57 percent of Maine residents support the public option and only 37 percent oppose it.
She is certainly living up to the state’s motto: Dirigo. That’s Latin for “I lead.” And the Democrats have followed. For shame.
When will the president take the risk of standing up for his convictions on health care instead of sacrificing good policies for good politics? (Or maybe not even good politics since a one-sided compromise is the same as a surrender.)
And health care is only one example.
On the same weekend that gay rights protesters marched past the White House, the president again said that his administration was “moving ahead on don’t ask don’t tell.” But when? This month? This year? This term?
As we prepare to draw down troops from the disaster that was the war in Iraq, we may commit more troops to the quagmire that is the war in Afghanistan and the government may miss its deadline for closing the blight that is the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Obama pledged to stem the tide of job losses and foreclosures and to reform the culture of the financial sector. Well, the Dow just hit 10,000 again while the national unemployment rate is about to hit 10 percent. And the firms we propped up are set to dole out record bonuses while home foreclosures have hit record highs. Main Street is still drowning in crisis while Wall Street is awash in Champagne. When will this imbalance be corrected?
Candidate Obama pledged to make the rebuilding of New Orleans a priority, but President Obama whisked into the city on Thursday for a visit so brief that one Louisiana congressman dubbed it a “drive-through daiquiri summit.” The president spent more time on the failed Olympic bid in Copenhagen than he did in the Crescent City.
At the town hall in New Orleans, Obama appealed for patience. He said, “Change is hard, and big change is harder.” Is that the excuse? Now where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah. From George Bush.
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