Story #1 tells that the solutions Obama brought with him into
office doesn’t seem to be working. #2 Obama has held more fundraisers at this
point in his first term than the previous five presidents did all
together. It appears he’s having to work
a lot harder for money. #3 Dana Perino
thinks the Obama team is overplaying their hand. They had a perfectly good
positive ad about taking down bin Laden and couldn’t help but make it a
negative ad. Not smart. #4 is another look at Obama’s problem with
the Youth vote compared to 2008. #5 tells
us why we have progressives rather than liberals. #6 wonders about Elizabeth Warren’s status as
a minority. And finally #7 tells about a
great new book out from Jonah Goldberg.
Today’s thoughts
According to Jonah Goldberg, if the greatest trick the Devil ever
pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, the greatest trick liberals ever pulled was convincing themselves that
they’re not ideological.
Mitt
Romney is running against a different man than the Pied Piper of
"transformational change" who won the 2008 presidential election. Romney's opponent is that man's clone --
scaled down to one-eighth the size. He's a much smaller and distinctly meaner version of the Barack
Obama of four years ago.
It appears one of the points that
brought George H.W. Bush and Bill
Clinton together was a shared distain for Jimmy Carter according to the new
book “The President’s Club.”
If you look at what’s going on it appears the Obama campaign is sputtering. First Hilary Rosen attack Ann Romney and the backlash effectively makes her off
limits. Now the Obama ad on killing Bin Laden and questioning if Romney
would have ordered it seems to be taking his very real accomplishment off
the table for future ads.
1. Obama’s Economy
…Barack Obama’s original economic
team — Austan Goolsbee, Christina Romer, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag — have
long fled the administration, and have
proved mostly wrong in all their therapies and prognostications of 2009.
Despite the stimulus of borrowing over $5 trillion in less than four years,
near-zero interest rates, and chronic deficits, the U.S. economy is in the weakest recovery since the Great Depression
and mired in the longest streak of continuous unemployment of 8 percent or
higher — 38 months — since the 1930s. The
Mexican economy is growing more rapidly than is ours. Why did not massive annual $1 trillion–plus deficits spark
a recovery, as government claimed an ever larger percentage of GDP, and new
public-works projects were heralded by the administration?
Much of the answer is found in the
collective psyche of those Americans who traditionally hire, purchase, or
invest capital. An economy is simply the aggregate of millions of private
agendas, of people sensing and reacting to a commonly perceived landscape. Yet
since January 2009, that landscape has been bleak and foreboding.
Take the debt. The problem is not just that Obama has borrowed $5 trillion in less
than four years, but also that he has
offered few plans to reduce the ongoing borrowing and none at all to pay down
the debt. Instead, he has demonized
as heartless anyone who opposes his serial $1 trillion annual deficits….
Obama is going after the oil companies for $4 billion per
year when the deficit he’s running is $1.3 trillion per year. Other than more taxes what have you heard him
talk about?
2. Obama Has More Fundraisers Than The Previous
Five Presidents—Combined.
Barack Obama has already held more fundraising events to build cash
for his re-election bid than all five Presidents since Richard Nixon combined,
according to figures to be published in a new book.
Obama is also the only
president in the past 35 years to visit every electoral battleground state in
his first year of office.
The figures, contained a in a
new book called The Rise of the
President’s Permanent Campaign by Brendan J. Doherty, due to be
published by University Press of Kansas in July, give statistical backing to
the notion that Obama is more preoccupied with being re-elected than any other
commander-in-chief of modern times.
Doherty, who has compiled
statistics about presidential travel and fundraising going back to President
Jimmy Carter in 1977, found that Obama
had held 104 fundraisers by March 6th this year, compared to 94 held by
Presidents Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Snr, Bill Clinton and George W.
Bush combined.
Since then, Obama has held another 20 fundraisers, bringing his total
to 124. Carter held four re-election fundraisers in 1980, Reagan zero in 1984,
Bush Snr 19 in 1992, Clinton 14 in 1996 and Bush Jnr 57 in 2004.
Well,
this is a historic presidency. Stand by for the election ad blitz, because the
money is flowing on both sides.
3.
Dana Perino: Obama may be overplaying
hand
Former Bush White House Press
Secretary Dana Perino appeared on Fox & Friends
on Monday where she was asked to weigh in on the Obama
administration’s latest campaign push to put Osama bin Laden’s death in
the forefront of the President’s reelection effort. Perino said that Obama may be overplaying their advantage with the Osama bin Laden ad that claims Mitt Romney may not have made the decision to go after
OBL. Perino wondered why Obama’s team would “question what anybody else
would have done because how do they know?” …
Expect Obama’s campaign to do this over and over again. This was the one place they didn’t need to go negative, yet they did. Six months of this is going to diminish Obama in the eyes of the country and will help lead to a big loss in November for the President.
4.
Obama’s
Problem with the Youth Vote
They lapped up President Obama’s 2008 promise of “hope” and
“change,” but his inability to deliver
has turned younger voters cynical and disillusioned, according to a new
analysis of 18-29-year-olds who backed the president but are now skeptical of
him.
“It will take a decade before they believe in hope and change,” said GOP pollster Ed Goeas. Worse, he said, younger voters are “disillusioned” with Obama and have turned “cynical” of his rhetoric.
He recently traveled to Raleigh, N.C., and Columbus, Ohio, to conduct focus groups with voters aged 18-29 who backed Obama in 2008. He found them gravely concerned about unemployment, the economy and gas prices. “They are very decidedly unhappy,” he said.
Mostly, they are upset that the president didn’t make good on his promises.
“There is no belief that the economy is getting better,” he found….
“It will take a decade before they believe in hope and change,” said GOP pollster Ed Goeas. Worse, he said, younger voters are “disillusioned” with Obama and have turned “cynical” of his rhetoric.
He recently traveled to Raleigh, N.C., and Columbus, Ohio, to conduct focus groups with voters aged 18-29 who backed Obama in 2008. He found them gravely concerned about unemployment, the economy and gas prices. “They are very decidedly unhappy,” he said.
Mostly, they are upset that the president didn’t make good on his promises.
“There is no belief that the economy is getting better,” he found….
You are seeing
polls all over the place showing Obama way up or barely up with the under 30
crowd. The one thing that does seem to
be constant is that far fewer young people plan to vote than do the other age
groups.
5. The New Regressives
About fifteen years ago, many liberals began to self-identify as progressives—partly because of the implosion of the Great Society and the Reagan reaction that had tarnished the liberal brand and left it as something akin to “permissive” or “naïve,” partly because “progressive” was supposedly an ideological rather than a political identification, and had included some early twentieth-century Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover.
But twenty-first century progressivism is not aimed at political reform. There is no new effort at
racial unity. There is not much realization that we are in a globalized, rapidly changing, high-tech economy or that race and gender are not as they were fifty years ago. Instead, progressivism has become a reactionary return to the 1960s—or even well before….
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-new-reactionaries/
In the 1880s, liberalism quit looking at liberty as the answer and moved onto Progressivism. In the 1980s they shed their focus on progress and looked to simple control. They are now looking to go backwards with their ties to environmentalism.
6. Elizabeth Warren Minority?
Despite claiming she never used her Native American heritage when applying for a job, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign admitted last night the Democrat listed her minority status in professional directories for years when she taught at the University of Texas and the University of
Pennsylvania.
From 1986 to 1995, Warren’s name is included in the Association of American Law Schools’
annual directory of minority law teachers, according to records obtained by the Herald.
The campaign for GOP U.S. Sen. Scott Brown last night called for Warren to “come clean.”
“This story raises serious questions about Elizabeth Warren’s credibility. The record now shows Prof. Warren did claim to be a‘minority,’ and that she attempted to mislead the public about these facts whenshe was first asked about the issue last week,” said Brown spokesman Jim Barnett.
“Prof. Warren needs to come clean about her motivations for making these claims and explain the contradictions between her rhetoric and the record.”…
“Prof. Warren needs to come clean about her motivations for making these claims and explain the contradictions between her rhetoric and the record.”…
Kind of like Democrats who cheat on their taxes when they call for raising them on everyone else, Elizabeth Warren used special status designed to help actual minorities, not just pretend ones.
…But with "The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas", not only has Goldberg (editor-at-large for National Review Online) avoided the sophomore slump -- in
many ways he has an even bigger triumph on his hands.
many ways he has an even bigger triumph on his hands.
Everything conservatives will be looking for is on every page of "Tyranny."
Just as he did with "Liberal Fascism," Goldberg uses scholarly history, damning logic, pop culture, and laugh-out-loud humor to connect the dots that expose the Left as thevacuous, dishonest, State-addicted mercenaries they really are. But what sets "Tyranny" apart from its predecessor and, in my opinion, improves on it, is two things:
First, simply by its title alone, "Liberal Fascism" was red meat for the Right; a delicious, timely, page-turning balm in The Year Of Obama. As we were getting our electoral butts kicked in every corner of America -- as our worst political nightmares were impossibly coming true -- we could at least get under the covers and flick a flashlight onto Jonah's reassurance that we were right, dammit!
"Liberal Fascism" is ours and all ours, but to its credit, "Tyranny" is less so.
"Tyranny" isn't red meat as much as it's an argument. Yes, so was "Liberal Fascism," but that was a more pointed argument made from a somewhat belligerent posture (which I loved). "Tyranny," though, is something I would (and have) send to my Obama-loving, swing state-dwelling,
left-wing mother. For years now, the two of us have fired books at one another in the hopes of persuading the other to see the light, and because Goldberg's theme is less about partisan politics than it is about intellectual honesty, I'm convinced it's going to be one of my more persuasive missives.
"Tyranny" isn't about ideology. Don't get me wrong, Goldberg still takes
it to the Left, but liberalism (for very good reason) is merely the vehicle the
author drives to explore the much bigger theme of how and why the left and their allies in media and academia haveallowed political debate to devolve into cliché. The over-arching theme,
however, is even bigger and speaks to conservative and liberal alike:
Think…
Just in time.
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