June 14, 2010
Last week, I highlighted some criticism of Barack Obama’s presidency, which came from such unlikely sources as Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich of The New York Times, as well as Tony Norman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The man whom I described as the “Disappointer-in-Chief” during his third month in office, has continued to draw harsh criticism from unlikely sources. At this point, the subject pondered by many commentators concerns whether any of this dissatisfaction will stick long enough to have an impact on the mid-term elections and beyond.
If the President read Tim Dickenson’s recent essay for Rolling Stone, “The Spill, The Scandal and the President”, it must have been painful. Mr. Dickenson didn’t pull any punches while explaining Mr. Obama’s role in the Deepwater Horizon disaster:
Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings – yet the administration had ignored them. Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency’s culture of corruption. He permitted it to rubber-stamp dangerous drilling operations by BP – a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company – with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years. He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP – and then deployed his top aides to lowball the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez.
At the Naked Capitalism website, Yves Smith summed up a good number of the Obama Administration’s shortcomings in the first paragraph of her June 11 piece about the BP mess:
As readers may know, I’ve been consistently disappointed by the Obama Administration: its faux progressive packaging versus its corporatist posture, its half-hearted, halting reforms which are noisily trumpeted as the real thing, its deep seated belief that public antipathy to its initiatives means it needs to work harder on selling its message, when it really needs a new strategy.
But the escalating disaster of the Gulf oil spill, and the unique constellation it presents, namely, a big, rich, isolated, foreign perp, which is largely if not solely responsible for the mess, in close proximity to contested mid-term elections, might actually rouse Obama to do something uncharacteristic, namely get tough.
This is by no means a likely outcome, but we are seeing some novel behaviors. First is that Obama finally may have succeeded in getting someone important afraid of him. This is a critically important lesson; Machiavelli told his prince it was much more important to be feared than loved. Mere anger is often negotiation posturing or a manifestation of CEO Derangement Syndrome; fear is much harder to fake. And BP is finally starting to get rattled.
In case you are wondering whether the President is still popular in Hollywood, The Hill recently turned to a couple of southern California bloggers to provide some insight as to whether Mr. Obama has begun to lose his sparkle in Tinsel Town. John Nolte of Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog expressed the belief that the President’s supporters in Hollywood have been keeping the faith:
If anything, Hollywood is worried about and for Obama. Worried about the upcoming mid-terms, his re-election chances, his sliding poll numbers, and his gilded ship sailing off course and landing in Carter-ita-ville instead of Mt. Rushmore.
From the more left-leaning perspective, Deborah White of The Liberal OC blog gave us the impression that the President’s Hollywood supporters are becoming increasingly disappointed, although not yet disgruntled:
As of now, President Obama has not lost the support of most Hollywood liberals. But Democrats in Hollywood are also no longer lavishing praise on Obama as they did in hopeful droves before his triumphant election.
Hollywood liberals no longer view Barack Obama as someone they blindly “want to follow… somewhere, anywhere” as pal George Clooney famously told Charlie Rose in early 2008.
Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd has continued with her unrestrained criticism of the President. Her June 11 column must have irritated more than a few people on Pennsylvania Avenue:
The press traveling with Obama on the campaign never had a lovey-dovey relationship with him. He treated us with aloof correctness, and occasional spurts of irritation. Like many Democrats, he thinks the press is supposed to be on his side.
The patrician George Bush senior was always gracious with reporters while conveying the sense that what we do for a living was rude.
The former constitutional lawyer now in the White House understands that the press has a role in the democracy. But he is an elitist, too, as well as thin-skinned and controlling. So he ends up regarding scribes as intrusive, conveying a distaste for what he sees as the fundamental unseriousness of a press driven by blog-around-the-clock deadlines.
During the Presidential election campaign, Mr. Obama was often described as a “Rorschach test” — people saw in him whatever they imagined. Now that the President has been able to disappoint his supporters, the criticism is gradually becoming increasingly harsh. As frustration over the BP crisis, unemployment and the economy continues to build — the criticism voiced by those who voted for him is likely to become more caustic.
Bogus Editorial Gets Exposed
August 16, 2010
One of my favorite commentators, Bill Fleckenstein, wrote an interesting piece calling attention to the fact that the Patent Office is underfunded to the tune of about $1 billion. The good news is that fixing this problem might create as many as 2.5 million new jobs over the next three years. Fleck based his article on a New York Times essay by Paul Michel (former Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit) and Henry Nothhaft, co-author of the upcoming book, Great Again.
Bill Fleckenstein began his discussion by noting another letdown by our Disappointer-In-Chief:
Unfortunately, Fleck decided to support his perspective with an editorial from the August 9 Wall Street Journal entitled, “Why I’m Not Hiring” by Michael Fleischer. Fleischer whined about how President Obama has made things difficult for his “little company in New Jersey, where we provide audio systems for use in educational, commercial and industrial settings.” Fleischer concluded the piece with this lament:
Bill Fleckenstein was not the only commentator who was apparently “taken in” by this editorial. It has been getting re-blogged all over the Web.
What most people don’t realize is that the author of the Wall Street Journal editorial, Michael Fleischer, is the brother of Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary to President George W. Bush.
Kevin Drum wrote a piece for Mother Jones, which began with his criticism of the Journal for not admitting that the aforementioned editorial was written by Ari Fleischer’s brother. Beyond that, Mr. Drum provided us with a little more information about Michael Fleischer’s background:
Drum then quoted this reader’s comment, posted at the Outside The Beltway blog, concerning the Fleischer editorial:
Another blogger had some fun digging into the truth about Fleischer’s Bogen Communications and hanging out the dirty laundry on the Internet:
It’s always funny when a political hatchet job gets exposed. It’s even funnier when the perpetrators are too dumb to realize that — in what Marshall McLuhan used to call “the electronic information environment” (back in the 1960s) — it’s pretty easy to dig up the truth.
Anyone trying to ascertain the truth about why companies aren’t hiring would be better served to peruse websites such as MarketWatch or Bloomberg, rather than the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. Bill Fleckenstein should have known better.