Jobs picture no help for Obama

Best Quotes from DNC

"All women should have the right to birth control." Aspen, Colorado delegate Blanca O'Leary

“On every issue, the choice you face won’t be just between two candidates or two parties. “It will be a choice between two different paths for America. “--Barack Obama

BLS:  August 96000 jobs created

Unemployment rate down to 8.1% as 368,000 leave the workforce.  The 96,000 jobs created is below the estimates of between 125,000 and 200,000 and below last months 163,000.  Here is the three month moving average.

January 2012               207000

February 2012             230000

March 2012                 204000

April 2012                   146000

May 2012                      99000

June 2012                      67000

July 2012                       85000

August                           88000

These aren’t winning numbers if you are looking to be reelected.

Obama Administration:  Pay no attention to….

The answer is by warning Americans “not to read too much into any one monthly report.”  Perhaps the bad news is an anomaly, Council of Economic Advisers chairman Alan Krueger warned Friday.

Of course, Krueger said the same thing last month.  And the month before.  And the month before.  Noticing the depressing repetitiveness of the White House’s analysis, the Romney campaign last month dug through old reports and put together a list of 30 examples, going back to November, 2009, in which the administration warned Americans not to “read too much into” discouraging jobs numbers.  Now, there are 31. (That’s out of 43 months Mr. Obama has been President). 

Now tell us what you really think, Clint.

“President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” Eastwood told The Pine Cone. “Romney and Ryan would do a much better job running the country, and that’s what everybody needs to know. I may have irritated a lot of the lefties, but I was aiming for people in the middle.”

Obama:  It could have been worse

John Stewart skewers Obama.  “It’s better than cancer” perhaps can be the new Obama Campaign slogan.

Krauthammer Pans Obama’s Speech

“I was stunned. This is a man who gave one of the great speeches of our time in 2004. And he gave one of the emptiest speeches I’ve ever heard on a national stage… There was nothing in it… At least Romney had a 5 point plan… He pulls numbers out of a hat… He doesn’t say how he’s going to get from A to B. It’s a vision. I have a vision of America where there’s no disease and everybody owns a private airplane. But, unless I tell you how we get there I’ve said nothing.”  In short, Obama gave us an Edsel when he needed a T-bird.

Reelect Obama?  Why?

“The times have changed -- and so have I,” Obama said. “I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the president. . . . I’m far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, ‘I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.’ ”

His speech at the Convention has pretty well sealed it.  His “times have changed and so have I” reminds me of Jimmy Carter in the final weeks of the election of 1980 telling everyone he had learned so much.  If Obama has changed, how has he changed?  Romney wins big in November.

Kerry finds everyone is worse off

Kerry asks if bin Laden is better off than he was four years ago leaving himself open to the response, “No, he’s like everyone else.  Under Obama everyone is much worse off including UBL.”

Peggy Noonan looks at the DNC Convention

There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. It’s most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involves defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.

Perhaps they took God out of the platform because they don’t want competition for the government. 

The Specifics in Obama’s Speech

He offered more specific goals than did Mr. Romney, many of which he had previously set: doubling U.S. exports, training 2 million workers at community colleges, recruiting 100,000 math and science teachers. Those, and a few new goals — creating 1 million manufacturing jobs over four years, cutting oil imports in half by 2020, cutting in half the growth in college tuition — are laudable. But Mr. Obama did not explain how he would achieve them or prepare the country for the difficult choices they would demand.

Obama keeps asking if we want the failed policies of the past when we can have his failed policies of the present (although he doesn’t phrase it that way). 

Obama lies about how is mother died

Vice President Joe Biden, first lady Michelle Obama and President Barack Obama all told a story during the Democratic National Convention about battles the president’s mother waged with health care companies as she fought a terminal illness in 1995. But the version of events presented Thursday night differs dramatically from others, including those of at least two biographers and Obama’s own previous account.

Never let a good story be compromised by the truth.

Obama voters: it is understandable to be disappointed

Many of Obama’s 2008 voters are greatly disappointed with the results of his election.  Romney needs to make it okay for them to vote against Obama.  Says campaign pollster Neil Newhouse: “These voters are my mother-in-law. She’s a soft Republican and voted with pride for Barack Obama in terms of what it meant for the country. And now, every time she talks to me, she’s more than disappointed. She’s frustrated. She’s upset. She thought she was voting for a transformational leader and feels like we got just another politician.”

The Thrill is gone

While Obama and Mitt Romney remain locked in public polls, several Democratic officials are worried that three groups that pushed Obama over the finish line in 2008--younger voters, seniors and "Walmart" white women--are as frustrated as other groups about the economy and Obama's failure to change Washington and might stay home.

In other words, they say, the polls lie. Yes, when called by pollsters, the nation is split, but the GOP appears more eager and willing to follow through and vote than the Democrats.

During an event hosted by National Journal/Atlantic her this week, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake cited an "enthusiasm gap" with younger voters and unmarried women and seniors. Former Clinton aide Maria Echaveste said that "too many [Obama supporters] are not engaged." And micro-targeting expert Laura Quinn said younger voters especially are "not motivated as they need be."

We may be able to identify this lack of enthusiasm by group, but this is not unusual.  If you look at history you will see a bad economy translate into a failed run for reelection.  

Bill Clinton without a clue

Maybe the most galling thing Clinton said was, “Though I often disagree with Republicans, I never learned to hate them the way the far Right that now controls their party seems to hate President Obama and the Democrats.”

I saw the hatred — the almost animal hatred — that was directed at George W. Bush for eight years. (What a good and decent man he is.) I saw the hatred — the raw, snarling, truly animal hatred — that was directed at a woman named Sarah Palin. It had almost a physical effect on me, this hatred.

I’ll never forget a friend of mine, with whom I’d never discussed politics — “I hate her,” she said. And she had a look in her eye I had never seen before. My friend is a loving person. But she had a look of wild hatred in her eye. I had never heard my friend say she hated anything: al-Qaeda, Pol Pot, cancer — nothing. 

And let me add the TEA Party, Rush Limbaugh, the Koch Brothers, Tony Snow, and we did have that one delegate who said she wanted to kill Romney. 

Nancy Pelosi denies putting Obama on mute

In his new book, The Price of Politics, Bob Woodward writes that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sometimes hit the mute button when President Barack Obama would start giving “uplifting speeches” during conference calls. Pelosi denied the claim, saying that, during those calls, she always cleared the room, listened and took notes.

Took notes?  This sounds as if Debbie Wasserman Schultz wrote this statement for the former Speaker of the House.  But if she’d be willing to share those notes….