Blunders?

Obama’s Big Mistake

Jonah Goldberg writes and interesting piece on the big blunder President Obama made at the beginning of his presidency which is plaguing him now.

“If there’s a single event for which Obama himself is to blame, one decision
that explains his predicament, it is his mishandling of the stimulus at the dawn
of his administration. Put aside the debate over whether it has “worked,” and
forget the White House’s absurd trick of talking about jobs “saved or created”
(for the record, I save or create 500 push-ups every morning). Obama made a
rookie mistake outsourcing his first major domestic policy decision to Harry
Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the Old Bulls of the Democratic Party, and that blunder
has done lasting damage to his presidency.”

Later on Goldberg brings in comments from Jay Cost who explains how Obama got a significant majority of the votes it was a limited victory.

“In fact, if you look at presidential elections going back 100 years, Obama’s is
the most geographically narrow of any victors except Carter, Kennedy, and Truman – none of whom had transformative presidencies. Even Bill Clinton in 1996, whose share of the two-party vote was comparable to Obama’s, still had a
geographically broader voting coalition. Ditto George H.W. Bush in 1988…….

Obama simply lacked the broad appeal to guide the House’s liberal
proposal through the Senate. So, the result of “going big” was an initially
liberal House product that then had to be watered down to win over red state
Senators like Landrieu, Lincoln, Nelson, and Pryor. The end result was a
compromise bill that, frankly, nobody really liked…..

Was there an alternative approach the President could have taken? I think so. Such a tactic would have acknowledged the sizeable McCain bloc. McCain won 22 states, making his coalition a politically potent minority. Obama should have governed in light of this.”

All of this is an interesting piece. Politics can be much more complex than many of us would make it.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/242720/obamas-blunder-jonah-goldberg

The 3B strategy you will be seeing in this midterm election

The Democrats have a problem. They aren’t popular and their record is even less so. So what will they run on.

I see them running on a 3 B strategy. The 3Bs stand for

• Bush
• Birthers
• Bigotry

Everything will be Bush’s fault. The problems with this is that the American people elected them to fix things that Bush messed up so by going this way they are admitting their failure.

Birthers as a campaign tactic is to try to relegate anyone who is against Obama to the status of a nut job. The Democrats will try to marginalize the Republicans and tear the independents away from them.

Bigotry is the most familiar of the Democrats canards that is the charge of racism. Since Obama is half black, the Democrats tend to charge any opposition to him or his policies is by definition because the person so disposed is a racist.

Will these work? It isn’t very likely.