The Press, and Maybe the Left, Are Starting to Have Their Doubts

 

Op-ed piece at Politico here, my comments there are reprinted below.

This is what denial looks like, in print:

"Certain things are not his fault: the unprecedented truculence of the Republican Party, scared silly by right-wing ranters on cable television; the unholy economic and foreign-policy mess that he inherited; the fact that he never had, as so many liberal commentators asserted, the 60 (or 58 or 59) Senate votes that would enable him to get what he wanted from the Congress. It’s not his fault that unemployment rates remain stubbornly high following a traumatic recession."

The Republican truculence is due to the offering by the President of plans and programs that are so antithetical to basic common sense as to make normal people incredulous. Economy crashing? Let's have a stimulus program that in reality is standard political patronage for getting him elected. Jobs slow to recover? Let's pass a health care bill that heaps even more cost to hire someone onto businesses. Gotta make a decision on a war where Americans are fighting and dying? Do it in March and then dither about it for months. GM dying? Let's step in and abrogate centuries of bankruptcy law by pushing secured creditors to the back of the line. Make a public statement that he is open to any good ideas then meet with the opposition and tell them to pound sand because, "I won".  His trip to Copenhagen to try to secure the Olympics for Chicago is one of the dumbest, most openly provincial acts I've ever seen a President undertake. He had absolutely nothing to gain by doing that and much to lose.

And yes, it is his fault that unemployment rates remain so high. He has taken a minimalist, philosophical approach to a real world problem. We needed liquidity in the financial markets and his solution was to borrow more money and redistribute it to large banks. A better solution would have been to offer an immediate tax amnesty for companies and individuals that hold money overseas to avoid our confiscatory tax rates, estimated to be as much as $13 trillion. Offer amnesty and that money comes home and is rapidly injected into the economy. (This idea was proposed by a Texas congressman, whose name escapes me. It was ignored because he is a Republican and because it was a good idea.) Instead, he dithers, mulling over various ways to seize or tax any few dollars that are laying around. He seems to thing that leading consists of making a speech and then handing the details over to Congress to work out, essentially throwing a giant pile of money into a pack of ravening hobos to fight over.

So, Ms. Drew, go back to the Washington salons and dinner parties and tell the people there that they helped to elect the most popular professor on campus, a brittle personality with much hubris and little accomplishment, not a man who was even remotely qualified to be President of the United States.