the boy is great alright, a great steaming pile of Bull0bama...
Posted on 10/31/2012 3:49:46 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I decided to support Barack Obama pretty early in the Democratic primary, around spring of 2007. But unlike so many of his supporters, I never experienced a kind of emotional response to his candidacy. I never felt his election would change everything about American politics or government, that it would lead us out of the darkness. Nothing Obama did or said ever made me well up with tears.
Possibly for that same reason, I have never felt even a bit of the crushing sense of disappointment that at various times has enveloped so many Obama voters. I supported Obama because I judged him to have a keen analytical mind, grasping both the possibilities and the limits of activist government, and possessed of excellent communicative talents. I thought he would nudge government policy in an incrementally better direction. I consider his presidency an overwhelming success.
I can understand why somebody who never shared Obama’s goals would vote against his reelection. If you think the tax code already punishes the rich too heavily, that it’s not government’s role to subsidize health insurance for those who can’t obtain it, that the military shouldn’t have to let gays serve openly, and so on, then Obama’s presidency has been a disaster, but you probably didn’t vote for him last time. For anybody who voted for Obama in 2008 and had even the vaguest sense of his platform, the notion that he has fallen short of some plausible performance threshold seems to me unfathomable.
Obama’s résumé of accomplishments is broad and deep, running the gamut from economic to social to foreign policy. The general thrust of his reforms, especially in economic policy, has been a combination of politically radical and ideologically-moderate. The combination has confused liberals into thinking of Obamaism as a series of sad half-measures...
(Excerpt) Read more at nymag.com ...
the boy is great alright, a great steaming pile of Bull0bama...
You know, that reminds me of something that I have always wondered about. How come so many liberal men sound like that?
Fact check..he has done nothing that benefits America...he has done much to benefit terrorists.
What a coincidence. I had one this morning and know what you mean. LOL!
There. Fixed.
LOL! What!? You didn’t show to the neeighborhood and brag about the way this Jonathan Chait would!??
If you have high blood pressure, don’t read the comments at the link!
Oh, I don’t know:
mhanro22
Mr. Obama’s single term will go down in history as a failed presidency. Any Democrat would have been elected in 2008. But not just any Democrat could have handed the House back to the Republicans 2 years later. Economic upturns and downturns come in 3-5 year waves but not under Obama. Q4 of 2009 GDP was 4% and then 2010 never got above 2.5%, hitting bottom Q1 of 2011 at .10% -thats POINT TEN PER CENT. Back to 4.1% in Q4 of 2011 and then dropping again to 1.3% in Q2 of 2012.
Washington insiders well know the truth - this was an insular WH very reminiscent of the Carter years. The politician who rode to national prominence on the soaring “There is no Red state...” rhetoric was not bipartisan. Hell, Mr. Obama was not even partisan. Kept to himself and his family most nights and weekends, did not return phone calls, and did not raise money for almost anyone but himself.
A narrow little man unprepared for the Illinois legislature coasting on the coattails of affirmative action. That now legendary first debate was the real Barak. Unprepared. Disinterested. Privileged. Small. Condescending. Every time his apologists suggest that he tried to be bipartisan, they will blame the Republicans and concede the case. he could not be bipartisan because he was not bipartisan. Nothing in Chicago politics or his background prepared him to help manage this great country.
Using the Gulf oil spill to shut down offshore drilling and then tooting an “all of the above” strategy. Why not brag to the environmental crowd - at least that would be honest. Executing political enemies in drone attacks in 3rd party countries. Where are those pesky civil libertarians so outraged by waterboarding? Vast numbers of Americans on unemployment, food stamps and disability - where are the “poverty” news reports? Stonewalling on Fast and Furious. A transparent administration.
If the election is D+3 as I expect, we have another 1980 brewing. Catch you early Tuesday night when the recriminations against this historical accident will really start rolling in from his brothers and sisters in the media
True! And I agree completely. I’m dealing with epa problems right now, and can’t really respond as I’d like to. Dealing with them is like dealing with the Devil!
Laura Ingraham: Jonathan Chait is a writer for New York magazine, and he is a former senior editor at the New Republic, and he's written for many years about politics, and he's an observer on all things political and sometimes cultural, and I'm delighted he joins us now. Hey Jonathan, how are you?Jonathan Chait: Good! Thanks.
LI: It's good to have you on, and - look - I'm... on Fridays, I like to be flexible, Jonathan... I call them "Flexible Fridays" OK, because I think we need to stretch ourselves on a Friday, get ready for the weekend, and to stretch our understanding of things, expand our horizons, and our thinking
JC: Yeah!
LI: So I decided to have you on, to ask you about how you think things are going for the country, because you're kind of more of a liberal writer, and...
JC: Yeah.
LI: ... and you look at things from a more of a liberal perspective...
JC: Yeah.
LI: ... and I think it's important to - you know - talk to liberals and find out how they believe all this is working out. And I'm just looking at polls, and these are not Fox News polls, these are polls from Rasmussen, or from AP, or Gallup, and the Washington Post...
JC: Yup.
LI: ... about the views of Americans who believe that this country is in a state of decline...
JC: Mm-hmm.
LI: ... ah, pessimism on the rise, consumer condfidence continues to ebb. Given all that, what do you grade president Obama.
JC: What do I grade president Obama? I think he's done a pretty good job. I think he's been a pretty successful president. There are real limitations to what a president can do, what kind of change you can implement, and it's extremely hard to govern during an economic crisis. Pretty much any leader who takes office when the economy is going off a cliff is going to become unpopular. Given all those constraints - but also given the fact of course that he had large majorities for his first two years - I think he accomplished quite a bit. Didn't accomplish as much as I would have liked him to have accomplished... I think the primary responsibility lies in Congress and the inability to do that. The Administration could have done a better job in some ways, but historically I think it's going to be viewed as a pretty successful presidency.
LI: So... none of the things that I said: the fact that America's declining influence around the world was even expressed by King Abdulla of Jordan, I think two days ago in the interview that Lally Weymouth did with him in the Washington Post - he said people aren't looking to the West, they're not looking to America - given the fact that you can turn around and find America on the side of your enemies... The fact that Americans now...
JC: Wait... America's on the side of who's enemies?
LI: King... I'm quoting King Abdullah's interview with Lally Weymouth...
JC: OK.
LI: ... and he cited, of course, the situation with Hosni Mubarak, and he said "look, people are very concerned, they're not necessarily - in the Middle East - looking to the West for answers, and he was alluding to leadership that was kind of all over the place. It wasn't clear that if you stuck up for the United States, you were also going to be defended, or at least not immediately thrown under the bus. He was expressing what I think a lot of people have been concerned about, which is America's waning influence in geopolitics...
JC: Right.
LI: ... um, given that...
JC: OK, well lets start with that narrow one, and we'll move on to the broader one. Umm... you're talking about a fellow autocrat in the Arab world, standing in solidarity with another autocrat, and you've got a generation of pro-American, pro-Western autocrats who want the United States to support them regardless of whether they govern well or have any legitimacy among their own people. So of course, he's going to be unhappy that the United States didn't stand with Hosni Mubarak as his regime crumbled. But I don't think we should take his word as a neutral observer, or...
LI: Has he been a friend of the United States? Has he been a reliable ally and friend of the United States of America, yes or no?
JC: Yes.
LI: Yes he has, and he's defended American interests in the middle east, consistantly. And I think that stands for something, and that that actually means something...
JC: (unintelligable)
LI: ... and I think that means something for Americans, I think it means something for Christians in the Middle East, it means something for Jews throughout the Middle East... both Jews and Christians have been either shoved out systematically from their ancestral homelands, or terrorized, or worse. And so before we celebrate the Arab Spring, I think we also have to see what's coming down the road, with the rise of "moderate islamism" to religious minorities who continue to be persecuted as everybody's celebrating the "twitter revolutions."
JC: I don't think our strategy in the Middle East can be based on propping up a series of dictators who have no legitimacy among the public. You can rule at gunpoint for a while, but this I think is something that the Bush administration was...
LI: So you think there's going to be more freedom in the Middle East after all this is done. This is actually going to redound well for religious minorities and other ethnic minorities in the Middle East, when this is all said and done. That's your prediction?
JC: Over the long run, yes. Over the long run, propping up autocrats is just not a viable strategy. You know, Hosni Mubarak's an old man, he's ineffectual...
LI: OK, let's move it off Hosni Mubarak. My point is a general one...
JC: Yeah.
LI: ... you Jonathan Chait, who is known to be... you're a stalwart liberal guy, you think liberalism today...
JC: Yeah.
LI: ... and liberal ideals, have been strengthened by the governance of Barack Obama. It actually is better for liberals today than it was two and a half years ago.
JC: Yes, I do.
LI: How... how do you say that when even today, the numbers on ObamaCare are plummeting? When the administration itself...
JC: Right.
LI: ... has to stand back and say "you know something, we didn't have money for this whole long-term care thing that we thought was actually going to fund a lot of ObamaCare," when the country is... when a majority of the country believes that ObamaCare should be overturned. I mean...
JC: (unintelligable)
LI: ... he promised that, and I think you promised, in one of your pieces, that history would see the health care bill as a masterfully crafted piece of legislation... "masterfully crafted" in what, twenty-eight hundred pages.
JC: Yes. Sometimes masterfully-crafted things are long. (chuckles) ... the Bible's pretty long too...
LI: So, you are not comparing the health care bill to the Bible.
JC: ... no, I'm saying the fact that... obviously you understand the difference between a comparison and an analogy...
LI: No, I guess my educational background isn't very strong, so...
JC: OK, no I'm pointing out that the claim that it's long means it's poorly-crafted is not a legitimate ...
LI: Yum. Just mentioning health care and the Bible is in and of itself hilarious.
JC: Why don't we pull back on the broad picture, and we can zero in on some of these items that you're getting into, cause it's a little bit...
LI: but Jonathan, Jonathan, the fact of the matter is Obama a year and three-quarters ago that when people saw the beauty of health care, they saw it in action, they would come around to health care reform.
JC: Right.
LI: That simply has not happened.
JC: Right.
LI: In fact more people are retreating from health care, including the Administration itself.
JC: It hasn't taken effect yet, either. And that was a huge mistake by the Democrats in Congress. The Democrats in Congress wanted to reduce the total cost, the "headline number" of the bill, they decided to phase it in slowly, more slowly than when they enacted Medicare in 1965. So you had this vulnerable period when the bill hasn't yet...
LI: Well, kids are on their parent's plan, right? I mean, some of my staff is on their parent's plan, still.
JC: That's one. There are a couple small parts of it that took effect early...
LI: That's pretty big, for all the kids out there, that's a pretty big part of it. Lot of the taxes come later on though, right?
JC: Umm... I don't think there are taxes associated with that provision. But yeah, there are taxes yeah. No, they raised taxes on high-income people, absolutely.
JC: Look, the big picture that I was trying to explain is that the economy started going off a cliff at the end of 2008. And if there's anything that political science research tells us is that if you're the leader of a country who's economy is going off a cliff, you are going to become unpopular. That's essentially an iron rule. If the economy is going down, you are going to become unpopular. That's a rule that stands up over time, it's a rule that stands up over countries...
LI: Well, then, don't want to become President, right? I mean, he knew where we were...
JC: It's essentially a law of gravity.
LI: ... right, but he made a series of pledges about his policies that simply haven't been borne out by the facts...
JC: Right.
LI: ... and I would submit that once again we have to learn the lesson that this top-down, heavy approach to governance, where we pick winners and losers, and the government comes in and says "OK, we spend a lot of money here..." and a lot of this money went overseas to foreign bank interests, this was all going to turn around and we're going to have jobs saved or created, and then a couple of years later we have the President joking about "well, I guess we don't have those jobs saved or created as I thought, they weren't so shovel-ready."
JC: What do you want him to do...
LI: How do you give this a "masterful" grade?
What you're referring to is an economic prediction that was made in January of '09, before the administration's economists - or private-sector economists - understood the depths of the recession.
JC: So what happened was that the economy contracted by a far greater amount, we now know, at the end of 2008, than they knew at the time. That unemployment, in 2009, at the start of the Obama administration, was already higher than they thought at the time. So they made a projection of what unemployment was going to be, without any kind of economic response, and then they made a projection off that of what unemployment would be otherwise, but both those numbers were wrong, because the baseline number was wrong. Unemployment was already worse...
LI: So, it's the expert's fault?
JC: ... to point out, and say "unemployment ended up higher than they thought it would be, therefore...
LI: Did it work?
JC: ... is completely invalid.
LI: Jonathan, in the end, we can say...
JC: Right.
LI: ... we can say, now look, Bush came in, and the economy was kind of... in trouble, he had some problems early on, and it's gonna be difficult for him, and it was early on, obviously 9-11 happened, that's fine. There are historical trends, that's fine...
JC: OK.
LI: ... I understand that. But in the end, you are judged on your policies, whether they worked, or they didn't work. In the end, I mean... whether you're a nice guy, you know... people like their President to be accessable and seem like he understands their views and their problems, yeah, that's all in the mix...
JC: Right.
LI: ... but in the end, you're judged on results, are you not?
JC: Well, you should be. I mean, that means two different things: you're judged on...
LI: Is the country better off than it was three years ago, yes or no?
JC: ... or whether your policies actually made things better or worse. I think you should be judged on whether your policies made things better or worse, in that case...
LI: Do you think the country is better off?
JC: ... you've done well. If you are going to judge him on whether things got better or worse, regardless of whether your policies contributed to it, then no, he's probably not going to be judged very well. But that's not the right way to judge people.
LI: But do you think more people today would identify themselves as "liberal" or "progressive" because of the policies of President Obama?
JC: No, I don't.
LI: So how's this been good for liberalism. I'm a little confused.
JC: Well, what do mean "good for liberalism?" I mean...
LI: OK, let me be very clear. What do I mean? Well, I think after the first Reagan term, I think you saw...
JC: Right.
LI: ... a whole new generation, I think I was one of them, these new Conservatives, there was a really new movement for Conservatism, Conservative ideals, Conservative writers, Conservative commentators, there was a really... I think, jump-started a whole new way of thinking about politics. And I would ask you the same thing... so far, at least, do we see that happening with liberalism, under the leadership of President Obama?
JC: No, I mean, I mean... I don't think so. That's a phenomenon that's a direct result of what I just mentioned. Any leader who's in charge of a country when the economy is contracting, or going down, is going to become less popular. And that aspect's going to play itself out over...
LI: So he has no control over any... he has no ability to turn that around.
JC: Oh, I didn't say he has no ability. He has some ability, but he doesn't have total ability.
LI: But, we understand that, because we have a system of government...
JC: He did affect it...
LI: ... I mean, we have three branches of government... but he did say he was gonna part the seas, the sun was going to shine...
JC: He did not say he was going to part the seas...
LI: Well, you know, come on... I mean, and even he makes fun of that, now, I mean, we all get carried away, and say...
JC: OK.
LI: ... by the way, do you still hate President George W. Bush, I'm reading your piece from 2004, March 15th, that was an awesome piece, by the way.
JC: Thanks.
LI: I hate George W. Bush, there I said it...
JC: Saved me... (unintelligable) ... friends to write.
LI: Yeah, I know. I just think... the Bush-hatred thing is... I mean, as a Conservative...
JC: Yeah.
LI: ... I basically revolted against Bush in the last two-and-a-half years of his Presidency, and I think he almost destroyed the Republican party, but I don't hate Obama.
JC: A lot of Conservatives started doing that, but only in the last two-and-a-half years of his Presidency. The liberals started doing it a lot sooner, before Obama ran for President...
LI: Right, but I don't have a visceral hatred...
JC: ... stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Bush until he was up for re-election, and then it was time to throw him overboard.
LI: OK, well, that's fine, that's fair. But I just think there must be something you can take to get over that hatred thing. That eats you up. I don't hate the Obamas, I think they're fun.
JC: I do like Mitt Romney. I actually like him as a human being.
LI: Oh, OK. Well... Romney's campaign is over. Chait...
JC: (laughs)
LI: ... I'm just kidding you. Jonathan Chait, it's great to have you on, thanks for joining us.
JC: All right. Thank you.
LI: Jonathan Chait, writer for New York magazine, former senior editor at The New Republic.
He doesn't come across that badly in this interview. He's willing to laugh at himself when Laura pokes fun at him. Maybe he likes her.
That said, he is absolutely a total true believer. At least he appears to be one. I always wonder when I hear people like him... does he take these positions just for professional reasons?
Obama will go down in history as the worst president of all time. He makes Carter look good! Authors like this one have brains gone soft from drinking the cool aid and will completely self destruct on November 7th when their hero/savior is on the losing side of a landslide election.
Obama will go down in history as the worst president of all time. He makes Carter look good! Authors like this one have brains gone soft from drinking the cool aid and will completely self destruct on November 7th when their hero/savior is on the losing side of a landslide election.
Jonathan is full of Chait, pure bullchait.
No doubt he bet on the Yankees to sweep the Tigers
before betting on the Tigers to sweep the Giants.
Jonathan is full of Chait, pure bullchait.
No doubt he bet on the Yankees to sweep the Tigers
before betting on the Tigers to sweep the Giants.
I am trying to see this from your point of view, but I cannot get my head that far up my ass!
Another argument against drugs.
I bet the author sleeps with Obama.
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