With the Republican Convention set to begin on August 27, we are heading toward the final phase of the GOP Veepstakes. Currently, the mainstream media mania is focused on the belief that Romney will play the Rice Card. It won’t happen. The excitement concerns the possibility that playing the Rice Card will enhance support from African-American and female voters. Unfortunately, Condoleezza Rice lacks the degree of charisma one would expect in a Vice-Presidential candidate. Worse yet, the baggage she brings from her testimony before the 9/11 Commission, particularly in response to the questions posed by Richard Ben-Veniste concerning the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing is the most important reason she will not be picked. Her failure to seriously heed the warning, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States” would become a big issue – once again. Her response to Ben-Veniste’s interrogation was asinine:
Commissioner, this was not a warning. This was a historic memo — historical memo prepared by the agency because the president was asking questions about what we knew about the inside.
We often hear pundits recite the Cardinal Rule for Presidential candidates, in selecting their Vice-Presidential nominee, as: “Do No Harm”. In other words: Don’t screw up your campaign by choosing a controversial running mate. If Romney were to play the Rice card, he would append to his own campaign the Bush administration’s failure to heed the warnings about the September 11 attacks. It won’t happen.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan – who considered the choice of Sarah Palin as “cynical” – recently endorsed Rice as the best candidate:
Consider: A public figure of obvious and nameable accomplishment whose attainments can’t be taken away from her. Washington experience – she wouldn’t be learning on the job. Never ran for office but no political novice. An academic, but not ethereal or abstract. A woman in a year when Republicans aren’t supposed to choose a woman because of what is now called the 2008 experience – so the choice would have a certain boldness. A black woman in a campaign that always threatens to take on a painful racial overlay. A foreign-policy professional acquainted with everyone who’s reigned or been rising the past 20 years.
What is really happening here is that potential candidates from minority groups are being paraded before the public, purely for optics. Last month, it was Marco Rubio and now it’s Condoleezza Rice. It has been important for the Romney camp to convince the voters that it seriously considered putting a minority group member on the ticket before finally deciding on a white man.
At this point, the smart money is on Ohio Senator Rob Portman. Portman is from a battleground state and Romney can be confident that Portman won’t make any stupid moves or inappropriate remarks which could damage the campaign. Romney needs to play it safe and Portman is a safe choice.
Actually, the Rice Card is being played right now. You won’t see it again after August.
The criticisms voiced by many of us during President Obama’s first year in office are finally beginning to register with the general public. Here’s an observation I made on December 14, 2009:
As we approach the conclusion of Obama’s first year in the White House, it has become apparent that the Disappointer-in-Chief has not only alienated the Democratic Party’s liberal base, but he has also let down a demographic he thought he could take for granted: the African-American voters. At this point, Obama has “transcended race” with his ability to dishearten loyal black voters just as deftly as he has chagrined loyal supporters from all ethnic groups.
On June 11 2010, Maureen Dowd gave us some insight as to what it was like on Obama’s campaign plane in 2008:
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.
The voting public is just beginning to digest the sordid facts of the Solyndra scandal. Rest assured that the Republican Party will educate even the most intellectually challenged of those “low information voters” as to every detail of that rotten deal. The timing of the Solyndra exposé couldn’t be worse for Team Obama.
On August 15, the Gallup Organization reported that during the week of August 8-14, Obama’s job approval rating dropped to 40% – the lowest it had been since he assumed office. Another Gallup poll, conducted with USA Today during August 15-18 revealed that, for the first time, a majority of Americans – 53% – blame Obama for the nation’s economic problems. Forty-seven percent still say he is “not much” (27%) or “not at all” (20%) to blame.
A new McClatchy-Marist poll, taken on September 14-15, revealed that Obama’s sinking popularity has placed him just 5 points ahead of non-candidate Sarah Palin (49-44 percent). The Miami Herald noted that the poll results show the President just 2 points ahead of Mitt Romney (46-44):
Overall, the gains among Republicans “speak to Obama’s decline among independents generally, and how the middle is not his right now,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the national survey.
“This will require him to find ways to either win back the middle or energize his base in ways that hasn’t happened so far,” Miringoff said.
By a margin of 49 percent to 36 percent, voters said they definitely plan to vote against Obama, according to the poll. Independents by 53 percent to 28 percent said they definitely plan to vote against him.
With that sentiment permeating the electorate a little more than a year before the general election, most Americans think Obama won’t win a second term.
By 52 percent to 38 percent, voters think he’ll lose to the Republican nominee, whoever that is. Even among Democrats, 31 percent think the Republican nominee will win.
The most devastating development for Obama has been the public reaction to Ron Suskind’s new book about the President’s handling of the economy, Confidence Men. Berkeley economics professor, Brad DeLong has been posting and discussing excerpts of the book at his own website, Grasping Reality With Both Hands. On September 19, Professor DeLong posted a passage from Suskind’s book, which revealed Obama’s expressed belief (in November of 2009) that high unemployment was a result of productivity gains in the economy. Both Larry Summers (Chair of the National Economic Council) and Christina Romer (Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers) were shocked and puzzled by Obama’s ignorance on this subject:
“What was driving unemployment was clearly deficient aggregate demand,” Romer said. “We wondered where this could be coming from. We both tried to convince him otherwise. He wouldn’t budge.”
Because of Obama’s willful refusal to heed the advice of his own economic team, our nation’s unemployment problem has persisted at levels of 9% and above (with worse to come). As Ron Suskind remarked in that passage:
The implications were significant. If Obama felt that 10 percent unemployment was the product of sound, productivity-driven decisions by American business, then short-term government measures to spur hiring were not only futile but unwise.
There you have it. Despite the efforts of Obama’s apologists to blame Larry Summers or others on the President’s economic team for persistent unemployment, it wasn’t simply a matter of “the buck stopping” on the President’s desk. Obama himself has been the villain, hypocritically advocating a strategy of “trickle-down economics” – in breach of his campaign promise to do the exact opposite.
Reactions to the foregoing passage from Confidence Men – appearing as comments to Brad DeLong’s September 19 blog entry – provide a taste of how the majority of Obama’s former supporters will react when they learn the truth about this phony politician. Here are a few samples:
moron said…
. . . This disgraceful shill for global capital has destroyed the Democratic party for a generation.
kris said…
The President sure does come across as awfully arrogant, dogmatic and not very smart from this excerpt (and as someone who does not like to listen to his advisors- especially the female ones.).
mike said…
Wow. Romer was oh so right. And Obama was oh, so so wrong… What a pathetic display of arrogance and bad leadership. . . .
Th said…
And I was always joking about Obama as the “Manchurian Candidate” from the U of Chicago. Productivity? Really?
Dave said…
I’ve lost any last shred of respect for Mr. O.
Now that Confidence Men and the Solyndra scandal are getting increased publicity, we can expect that large numbers of voters will be losing their “last shred of respect” for Mr. Obama. It’s past time for the Democratic Party to face reality: If they seriously want to retain control of the Executive branch – someone will have to ask Obama to step aside. DNC Chair, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is obviously not up to this task.
Donald Trump has enjoyed a good deal of publicity during the past few weeks, since he jumped on the “birther” bandwagon, voicing skepticism as to whether Barack Obama was really born in the United States. Many of Trump’s critics insist that The Donald is not a serious Presidential candidate and that his newfound “birther” agenda demonstrates that his Presidential campaign is nothing more than a flimflam publicity stunt.
I have a different theory. I believe that Trump is running a “decoy” campaign. Keep in mind that Trump is currently the #2 contender for the Republican nomination. Remember also that the Republican Presidential primaries for 11 states (and the District of Columbia) are conducted on a “winner-take-all” basis – meaning that when a candidate wins a state primary, that candidate wins all of the delegates who will represent that state at the Republican National Convention. If Trump can win a few of those states, he could amass an impressive amount of “pledged” delegates. I suspect that Trump’s goal is to win the support from the extreme right wing of the Republican Party and “hijack” those delegates who would have been otherwise pledged to candidates acceptable to the Tea Party. Bill O’Reilly’s intervention to defuse the “birther” controversy (at which point he insisted that Trump has not been seriously seeking the nomination) was apparently motivated by the fact that the candidates most likely to be eliminated from contention because of Trump’s presence – Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin – are both darlings of Fox News. In fact, Palin is a Fox News contributor.
At the 2012 Republican Convention in Tampa, Trump could step aside and support Willard Romney, who is despised my many Tea Party activists for having created what is now known as “Obamacare”. Trump’s elimination of the Tea Party favorites before the convention would solve Romney’s problem with that voting bloc. Romney can be expected to have an equally difficult time winning the support of dog lovers, as a result of his decision to strap the family dog, Seamus, to the car roof for a 12-hour family vacation drive to Ontario. Despite his “Presidential” appearance, this Homer Simpson-esque episode from Romney’s life has already impaired efforts to portray him as a potentially effective Commander-In-Chief.
Meanwhile, President Obama is busy trumpeting his newly-minted, false campaign promises. Gallup reported that on April 15, Obama’s approval rating had tied its all-time low of 41%. More interestingly, his approval rating among African-American and Hispanic voters is beginning to slip from its enormously-high levels:
Though majorities of blacks (85%) and Hispanics (54%) continue to approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as president, his ratings among these groups slipped in March and have set or tied new lows.
* * *
Obama, elected to office with strong support from minority voters, has averaged better than 90% approval among blacks, and 65% among Hispanics, during his term. Prior to March, Obama’s lowest monthly average among blacks was 88% in July 2010 and December 2010. The president’s 54% March job approval rating among Hispanics ties the low from July and August 2010.
Despite the efforts of Republican commentators, such as Peggy Noonan, to create a narrative to the effect that Obama’s waning popularity – as well as the losses sustained by the Democrats in the 2010 elections – resulted from voter concern about government spending and the deficit, I suspect that Americans have simply become alienated by the failure of Obama and his party to deliver on their 2008 promises. Worse yet, the capitulation to the interests of Wall Street by Democrats who promised “reform” has reinforced voter apathy – the real factor in the 2010 Democratic setbacks.
Cord Jefferson of Good provided this graphic of what Congress would look like if it truly represented America. The failure of Democrats to win the support of Independent and centrist voters is readily apparent. You can blame gerrymandering all you want, but as long as the Democrats fail to provide alternatives to Republican policies, they will continue to lose. I believe it was William Black who said:
Under America’s two-party system, we have one party that is owned by big business and another party that sells out to big business.
I was pleased to see my own sentiments shared and articulated quite well by Mike Kimel of the Presimetrics Blog, in his recent posting entitled, “Why I Will Not be Voting for Obama in 2012”. Although Mr. Kimel doesn’t have an alternative candidate in mind, the very reason for his disillusionment with Obama is that – with respect to the nation’s most significant problems – our current President has proposed no alternative policies to those of his predecessor:
And yes, there are a handful of things Obama did that GW might not do, but let’s be realistic – this has looked from the very beginning like GW’s third term.
Which leaves just one question – if the policies of the Republicans are even worse than Obama’s – and they tend to support anti-growth tax policies (calling them pro-growth doesn’t change the data), what should a rational person do? I don’t know. But I think if I’m going to see Republican policies enacted, I’d prefer to see them run under a Republican label. See, Democratic policies may not be very good, but historically they have tended to produce better results than Republican policies. (BTW – Michael Kanell and I have an entire book called Presimetrics looking at how Presidents performed on a wide range of topics.) Another four years spent bringing the feeble Democratic brand down to the levels of the even more feeble Republican brand will cause lasting damage.
Obama will never re-ignite the enthusiasm of 2008 by presenting himself to the voters as “the devil you know” or “the lesser of two evils”. What America’s middle class really needs is an honest, Independent candidate to make a run for The White House in 2012.
Comments Off on No Free Pass For The Disappointer-In-Chief
December 14, 2009
The election of Barack Obama to the Presidency was hailed by many as an event that “transcended race”. Ever since Obama’s primary election victory in lily-white Iowa, the pundits couldn’t stop talking about the candidate’s unique ability to vault the racial barrier before Hillary Clinton could break through the glass ceiling. As we approach the conclusion of Obama’s first year in the White House, it has become apparent that the Disappointer-in-Chief has not only alienated the Democratic Party’s liberal base, but he has also let down a demographic he thought he could take for granted: the African-American voters. At this point, Obama has “transcended race” with his ability to dishearten loyal black voters just as deftly as he has chagrined loyal supporters from all ethnic groups.
Charles Blow’s recent opinion piece for the December 4 edition of The New York Times, entitled: “Black in the Age of Obama” shed some light on the racist backlash against the black population as a result of the election of our nation’s first African-American President. Mr. Blow then focused on Obama’s approach to his sinking poll numbers:
This means that Obama can get away with doing almost nothing to specifically address issues important to African-Americans and instead focus on the white voters he’s losing in droves. This has not gone unnoticed. In the Nov. 9 Gallup poll, the number of blacks who felt that Obama would not go far enough in promoting efforts to aid the black community jumped 60 percent from last summer to now.
* * *
The Age of Obama, so far at least, seems less about Obama as a black community game-changer than as a White House gamesman. It’s unclear if there will be a positive Obama Effect, but an Obama Backlash is increasingly apparent. Meanwhile, black people are also living a tale of two actions: grin and bear it.
As Silla Brush reported for The Hill on December 2, ten members of the Congressional Black Caucus had threatened to withhold their votes on the financial reform bill, because the President had not been “doing enough to help African-Americans through the bleak economy”.
It has been easy to understand the dissatisfaction with Obama expressed by the Democratic Party’s liberal base. In a piece entitled “The Winter of Liberal Discontent”, Louis Proyect incorporated the umbrage expressed by such notables as Tom Hayden and Michael Moore, while providing a thorough assessment of Obama’s abandonment of the Left. He concluded the piece with a quoted passage from an essay written for The Huffington Post by Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional TARP Oversight Panel. Mr. Proyect quoted Ms. Warren’s reference to some brutally unpleasant statistics, raising the question of whether America will continue to have a middle class. The theme of Mr. Proyect’s discussion was based on this point:
The chorus of disapproval is louder than any I have heard from liberal quarters since 1967 when another very popular Democrat did an about-face once he was in office. When LBJ ran as a peace candidate, very few people — except unrepentant Marxists — would have anticipated a massive escalation in Vietnam. It was well understood a year ago that Obama was committed to escalating the war in Afghanistan, but the liberal base of the Democratic Party was too mesmerized by the mantras of “hope” and “change” to believe that their candidate would actually carry out his promise.
There is a tendency to regard right-wing Republican presidents being replaced by idealistic-appearing Democrats who betray their supporters, thus enabling a new Republican candidate to take over the White House, as a kind of Western version of karma. We are compelled by universal law in some way to undergo an endless cycle of suffering without hope of redemption short of Enlightenment.
The criticism of Obama expressed by African-American commentators underscores the President’s unique ability to alienate those who might support him on the basis of ethnic solidarity, just as thoroughly as he can antagonize the melanin-deficient “limousine liberals” of Park Avenue. On December 11, Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns made a point of letting us know that the complete text of Matt Taibbi’s recent Rolling Stone article, “Obama’s Big Sellout” is now available online. Before quoting some of the discussion in Matt Taibbi’s essay, Mr. Harrison provided some hard-hitting criticism of the Obama administration’s financial and economic policy shortcomings. You may note that the administration’s abandonment of the African-American base was not discussed. It wouldn’t do justice to Mr. Harrison’s great work to quote a snippet of this because it’s too good. I have to give you the whole thing:
As you probably know, I have been quite disappointed with this Administration’s leadership on financial reform. While I think they ‘get it,’ it is plain they lack either the courage or conviction to put forward a set of ideas that gets at the heart of what caused this crisis.
It was clear to many by this time last year that the President may not have been serious about reform when he picked Tim Geithner and Larry Summers as the leaders of his economic team. As smart and qualified as these two are, they are rightfully seen as allied with Wall Street and the anti-regulatory movement.
At a minimum, the picks of Geithner and Summers were a signal to Wall Street that the Obama Administration would be friendly to their interests. It is sort of like Ronald Reagan going to Philadelphia, Mississippi as a first stop in the 1980 election campaign to let southerners know that he was friendly to their interests.
I reserved judgment because one has to judge based on actions. But last November I did ask Is Obama really “Change we can believe in?” because his Administration was being stacked with Washington insiders and agents of the status quo.
Since that time it is obvious that two things have occurred as a result of this ‘Washington insider’ bias. First, there has been no real reform. Insiders are likely to defend the status quo for the simple reason that they and those with whom they associate are the ones who represent the status quo in the first place. What happens when a company is nationalized or declared bankrupt is instructive; here, new management must be installed to prevent the old management from covering up past mistakes or perpetuating errors that led to the firm’s demise. The same is true in government.
That no ‘real’ reform was coming was obvious, even by June when I wrote a brief note on the fake reform agenda. It is even more obvious with the passage of time and the lack of any substantive reform in health care.
Second, Obama’s stacking his administration with insiders has been very detrimental to his party. I imagine he did this as a way to overcome any worries about his own inexperience and to break with what was seen as a major factor in Bill Clinton’s initial failings. While I am an independent, I still have enough political antennae to know that taking established politicians out of incumbent positions (Joe Biden, Janet Napolitano, Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, Kathleen Sebelius or Tim Kaine) jeopardizes their seat. So, the strategy of stacking his administration has not only created a status quo bias, but it has also weakened his party.
The magic of the Obama candidacy has vanished with the disappointments of the Obama Presidency. His supporters have learned, the hard way, that talk is cheap. The President’s actions during the next three years will not only impact the viability of his administration — they could undermine the careers of his fellow Democrats.
The long-awaited 2008 Elections are finally underway. According to the Early Voting Information Center website, 32 States allow in-person early voting. As the voting proceeds, we are seeing an enormous number of people opting to cast their votes before November 4. On Tuesday, October 28, Gary Langer (polling director for ABC News) reported that as of that morning, 9 percent of “likely voters” had already voted. As reported in the October 30 Washington Post, Michael McDonald, an associate professor at George Mason University who compiles early-voting statistics, observed that his running total of early voters now tops 16.5 million. USA Today reports that approximately 25 percent of Georgia’s registered voters have already cast their ballots. In Florida, Governor Charlie Crist extended the hours for early voting. Prior to Crist’s executive order, Florida law allowed for early voting 8 hours per weekday and a total of 8 hours over the weekend. The polls in Florida will now be open 12 hours per day, through Sunday, the last day for early voting. The Miami Herald reported that prior to Christ’s signing of the order, the long, winding lines at the polling stations resulted in waits of as long as four hours to get to a voting machine. The Herald reported that as of Tuesday morning, 10 percent of the state’s registered voters had already voted. On Wednesday, October 29, Susan Saulny reported in The New York Times that there have been rumors circulating in Jacksonville, Florida’s African-American community that early voting could not be trusted because the votes cast early would be discarded.
By this point, there are already reports of voting machine problems and irregularities. Martina Stewart reported for CNN that in Jefferson County, Texas, the County Clerk admitted to receiving “about half a dozen calls” that touch-screen voting machines were recording votes inaccurately. Apparently, the candidates’ names are so close to each other on the screen that there is a possibility of pressing the wrong name when making the selection. The machines have a “summary screen” where the voter can verify that the correct candidates were selected before finally hitting the button to actually cast the votes. Similar problems were discussed by a reporter named Bill Murray at WSAZ in West Virginia. Murray’s report pointed out that long fingernails and contact with the screen by bracelets could result in erroneous votes.
On Monday October 27, The New Mexico Independent reported that in Albuquerque, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against a Republican state lawmaker, alleging violations of the Voting Rights Act and disclosure of confidential information about voters, including Social Security numbers. The article discussed the efforts of a Republican State Representative, Justine Fox-Young (a defendant in the suit) to support claims of voter fraud in the state’s June election. The Independent had previously reported that Republican Party attorney Pat Rogers had hired a private investigator named Al Romero to make contact with voters whose registrations were under scrutiny by Republican activists. The article discussed allegations by two legally-registered Hispanic voters, that they had been intimidated by Romero. Pat Rogers had been cited in the U.S. Department of Justice report about the firing of U.S. attorneys and was described as one of the New Mexico GOP activists who complained to the Department of Justice about then-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. Iglesias was one of the U.S. Attorneys fired by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for political reasons. The firing of Iglesias was a result of his failure to pursue a politically-motivated, bogus “voter fraud” investigation.
If Barack Obama defeats John McCain by a narrow margin, we can expect protracted recounts and microscopic inspections of voter registration documents. My concern about this was reinforced when I read a quote from McCain speechwriter, Mark Salter, in a Washington Post article by Michael Leahy, on Thursday. Speaking about John McCain, Salter said:
“And he’s not going to go down without a fight. Some people mistake that for something else. Some people believe in being gracious losers just so other people will look at them kindly. He isn’t like that. … He’s going to fight hard, and if other people don’t think he’s being gracious, well, that’s the way it will be. But he’s not alone in that. And I’ll remind people of that, if I have to.”
So, don’t expect McCain to be a “gracious loser”. Unless there is a landslide on Tuesday, there could be a long, ugly fight, reminiscent of the election fiasco of 2000.
TheCenterLane.com offers opinion, news and commentary on politics, the economy, finance and other random events that either find their way into the news or are ignored by the news reporting business. As the name suggests, our focus will be on what seems to be happening in The Center Lane of American politics and what the view from the Center reveals about the events in the left and right lanes. Your Host, John T. Burke, Jr., earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College with a double major in Speech Communications and Philosophy. He earned his law degree (Juris Doctor) from the Illinois Institute of Technology / Chicago-Kent College of Law.