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Come after me on Benghazi says Obama [video]

November 14, 2012 by Leave a Comment

In a press conference today, President Obama said that people should “come after me,” not his Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, who has taken a much of the heat for the Obama Administration’s response on Benghazi.

Reacting to rumors that Rice was the favorite to replace Secretary Hillary Clinton when she steps down at the State Department next year, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday expressed dismay because of Rice’s handling of the Benghazi debacle.

“I’m not entertaining promoting anybody that I think was involved with the Benghazi debacle. We need to get to the bottom of it,” Graham said on Sunday. “The president has a lot of leeway with me and others when it comes to making appointments, but I’m not going to promote somebody who I think has misled the country or is either incompetent. That’s my view of Susan Rice.”

President Obama was deft in his response.

“If Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me,” Obama said in the East Room of the White House during his first news conference since winning re-election, according to Politico.  By calling on critics to come after him, Obama has the optics of taking responsibility but also gives cover to Administration officials–especially Rice–who are more easily criticized and expected to respond to Congressional oversight. It’s politically adept, if full of hot air, and with the election victory fresh, Obama has political capital to spend.

Further, Obama acknowledged that Rice had responded on the talk show circuit at his request:

“As I said before, she made an appearance at the request of the White House in which she gave her best understanding of the intelligence that had been provided to her,” Obama said.

In response, Graham promised to hold Obama to account.

“Mr. President, don’t think for one minute I don’t hold you ultimately responsible for Benghazi.  I think you failed as Commander in Chief before, during, and after the attack,” he said in a paper statement soon after the President’s press conference.  “We owe it to the American people and the victims of this attack to have full, fair hearings and accountability be assigned where appropriate. Given what I know now, I have no intention of promoting anyone who is up to their eyeballs in the Benghazi debacle.”

In other news, Obama doesn’t have any evidence that the Petraeus scandal has resulted in any classified information being disclosed in a way that would hurt national security. And yet, it could be argued that we have learned more about the Petraeus affair in the last five days than we have learned about what happened with Benghazi in the last two months.

Meanwhile, right-wing pundits are skeptical.
[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/268803568444792832"]

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Questions on Benghazi remain

October 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment

As President Obama goes on the Daily Show to explain what happened in Libya, it’s clear that a lot of questions remain, the least of which is: why doesn’t he go on a real news show to explain?

Is it possible that he’s afraid that real journalists might actually hold him accountable?

(And all the credit for the following questions go to my friend John English who laid them all out on his blog, which you should follow):

“it’s staggering to me how the Obama Administration is re-writing history on this in real-time,” English says. “It’s such a sloppy cover-up and yet why?”

  • Why did they blame it on the video?
  • Why did they insist it was spontaneous?
  • Why did they throw the intelligence community under the bus?
  • Why did Obama not call it a terrorist attack at the U.N.?
  • Why did Ambassador Rice go on all the Sunday talk shows and blame the video?
  • Why did Hillary “take responsibility” for it last night, and why did Obama wait until today to do the same?

If clarity and responsibility is what we are looking for, I doubt we’ll hear it before the election, or from the President. If his oblique answer during the debate and subsequent off-camera  follow-up answer directly to the questioner and after the debate  isn’t proof of that, I don’t know what is.

 “After the debate, the president came over to me and spent about two minutes with me privately,” says the 61-year-old Ladka, who works at Global Telecom Supply in Mineola, N.Y. According to Ladka, Obama gave him ”more information about why he delayed calling the attack a terrorist attack.”

Obama’s retail politics left an impression on Ladka:”I appreciate his private answer more than his public answer,” he says.

Newsflash to Ladka: America didn’t really like his answer, either, and the cascade is coming.

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Financially, we’re not better off, says the US Census. Especially young workers.

September 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment

According to data in the US Census released today, most Americans are not better off financially after Barack Obama’s first term as President of the United States. Whether this will translate at the polls in November remains to be seen.

The median household income for families dropped 1.7 percent from 2010 to 2011 to $62,273. That’s 8.1 percent lower than in 2007, the year before a collapse in the housing market led to what has been the longest recession in a generation. According to the report, income rates among all race groups have not recovered from highs experienced previous to the 2001 recession caused by the collapse of the dot-com bubble.

Hardest hit by the slow growth are families led by women, with 31.2 percent of families with a female householder living under the poverty line while only 16.1 of families with a male householder living in poverty. Nationwide 46.2 million people, or 1 in 6 Americans, remain in poverty, the highest in the half century that records have been kept and at 15 percent at about the same rate as it was in 1993.

The effect of the recession has been felt in Utah, as well, despite weathering the recession better than most states.

“We compare favorably to other states,” said Utah state demographer Juliette Tennert in an article in the Salt Lake Tribune. “But compared to our history, our poverty rate is up.” Tennert noted that while Utah had lost 80,000 jobs since the beginning of the recession, 60,000 of those have returned.

However, warns Pam Perlich a senior research economist at the University of Utah, those jobs have not all been at the same wages as those lost.

“There have been tremendous job losses, and many of the new jobs that are being created are not at as high of a wage level as the jobs that were lost,” Perlich told the Salt Lake Tribune. “It’s more than a recession, it’s an economic restructuring.”

In a blog post, the White House noted there is more work to be done.

“While we have made progress digging our way out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, too many families are still struggling and Congress must act on the policies President Obama has put forward to strengthen the middle class and those trying to get into it,” the White House post said.

How America’s continuing economic struggle will play out politically remains to be seen. After a slight bump in the polls after the Democratic National Convention, Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney are polling neck and neck.

With 53 percent of 18-24 year olds living back at home with their parents, it should come as no surprise that support among the young for Obama has fallen. Young voters between ages 18 and 29 have been among the groups hit hardest by the recession, with 12.7 percent unemployed and nearly a third underemployed. Support for Obama in this group has fallen from 49 percent to just 41%, a blow to a group that was important to the President’s 2008 win.

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Welcome to Obamaland

September 6, 2012 by Leave a Comment

“Once you vote black, you never go back: Obama 2012″ says the pin being worn on the Democratic Convention floor.

Welcome to Obama Land, where Bill Clinton is more popular than the Commander in Chief and it’s ok to sell racist buttons.

I came home last night from visiting with some neighbors to find Bill Clinton on my television. He was in prime form, and the crowd was eating from his hand. Unfortunately, my four-year old was still awake, so I made my way to her room to tell a story or two. We both dozed off, and twenty minutes passed before I could sneak out…but never fear: Clinton was still speaking.

I’ll spare you the details, except to say this: more than one Democrat found themselves wishing that Clinton was on the ticket this election. In fact, I wonder if Clinton himself isn’t wishing he was on the ticket, too(thank heavens for the Twenty Second Amendment). Not only did Clinton stand before Democrats as a master speaker, a circus ring leader, an orator of epic proportions, he is the most successful Democrat  in a generation. In spite of winning the White House without wining a majority of the country (thank you, Ross Perot), he learned to work with a Republican controlled Congress to keep the country moving, saw a budget surplus, and even reformed welfare to require more of welfare recipients.

Obama, even with control of both Houses of Congress, couldn’t even pass a budget, let alone move the country from recession to growth, to say nothing of the boom that Clinton saw during his years (and the bust that he left just in time to avoid). There is that Affordable Care Act thing that he’s got to his name, but all that has boiled down to for him is loathing from the right and begrudging gratitude from the left, because who really wants a tax increase?

Which is what it is.

And so, with the cheers for 42  ringing through the auditorium, the pièce de résistance will be when President Obama takes the stage (right after the Gaff in Chief) to tell America why, with 8.3% unemployment, $16 trillion in debt, and nearly 23 million Americans unemployed or underemployed, he should be awarded a second term.

See, it’s all about the economy, and we aren’t stupid.

With that in mind, here are a few quick hits that you should be aware of going into tonight’s DNC speeches:

_____

President Obama isn’t just competitive. He vastly overestimates his ability…says the New York Times:

But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. The cloistered nature of the White House amplifies those tendencies, said Matthew Dowd, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, adding that the same thing happened to his former boss. “There’s a reinforcing quality,” he said, a tendency for presidents to think, I’m the best at this.

His scope of competition includes important things, like golf and bowling:

Image representing New York Times as depicted ...

Image via CrunchBase

For someone dealing with the world’s weightiest matters, Mr. Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits. He has played golf 104 times since becoming president, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who monitors his outings, and he asks superior players for tips that have helped lower his scores. He decompresses with card games on Air Force One, but players who do not concentrate risk a reprimand (“You’re not playing, you’re just gambling,” he once told Arun Chaudhary, his former videographer).

His idea of birthday relaxation is competing in an Olympic-style athletic tournament with friends, keeping close score. The 2009 version ended with a bowling event. Guess who won, despite his history of embarrassingly low scores? The president, it turned out, had been practicing in the White House alley.

That’s why, says Forbes, Eastwood may have been right: “Obama is a lousy CEO.”

 _____

Barack Obama

Barack Obama (Photo credit: jamesomalley)

In 2008, candidate Obama won with a coalition of groups, including the young. Today, with more college graduates than ever living at home (and perhaps staring at “faded Obama posters“) with parents, Obama’s popularity among young voters has dropped. Unemployment for ages 18 to 29 is at 12.7%, higher than the national average and a level that has depressed 1.7 million of them to stop looking for jobs.  Says Karl Rove:

Then there are voters ages 18 to 29, among Mr. Obama’s most important supporters in 2008. The roughly 23.7 million “millennials” who voted in 2008 were 18% of the electorate, up 2.9 million voters over the previous presidential race. They gave Mr. Obama 66% to Sen. John McCain‘s 32%, according to exit polls. This margin of roughly eight million votes was a major chunk of Mr. Obama’s overall edge of 9.6 million.

But youthful enthusiasm for Mr. Obama has waned. In October 2008, 78% of voters 18-29 told Gallup they would definitely vote that year. Now it’s 58%.

There’s also evidence that fewer younger people are registered. A November 2011 study from Tufts University found that 43% of the decline in Nevada’s voter rolls since 2008 came from voters ages 18-24. Similarly, while North Carolina’s rolls rose by 93,709 over that period, more than 48,000 younger voters were dropped from the rolls, 80% of them Democrats.

Mr. Obama’s lead over Mr. Romney in the latest JZ Analytics poll among voters ages 18-29 is 49% to 41%. If young voters turn out this fall in the same numbers as in 2008 and give Mr. Obama this eight-point margin, it will take 2.8 million votes from Mr. Obama’s total and add more than 3.3 million to Mr. Romney’s tally.

Ouch. With 53% of all 18-24 year-olds back home with mom and dad, robust growth will be needed to get them back, but the 2.2.% of growth we’ve seen since 2009 just isn’t cutting it.

_____

 What do you do when your narrative doesn’t fit the facts? Explain them? Take responsibility for them? Change plans to compensate?

Silly me. Obviously, you ignore all that and just plow forward with the narrative. Duh.  Leave fact checking to the fact checkers.

Among other problems in the Democratic narrative over the last couple nights is the jobs situation. We’ve been hearing a lot about 4.5 million new jobs. If that were true, the question would be, what was all that from the Republicans last week about “are you better off?” Clearly, with 4.5 million new jobs, we are.

However, if it’s not clear to you, let FactCheck.org clarify: there has not been 4.5 million new jobs.

  • The keynote speaker, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, also said there have been 4.5 million “new jobs” under Obama. The fact is the economy has regained only 4 million of the 4.3 million jobs lost since Obama took office.

And that’s just one of many.

What else can we expect tonight? And how will the spin doctors tell it tomorrow.

[New York Times][Forbes][WSJ][FactCheck.org]

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Dems remove God from platform. Will God remove Dems from the White House?

September 4, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m fully behind Thomas Jefferson’s construction of a wall between church and state. In the liberal democracy of a healthy republic, there is no place for the state to condone one religion over another.

That doesn’t mean that we ought to discard any reference to God.  It’s bigger than any political elephant in the room with, as of last summer, polling showing that nine in ten Americans still believe in God.  The Gallup poll I just cited notes that belief in God is lower among younger people, easterners, and liberals. Where 96% of the South and 92% of the West believe in God, the number drops to 86% in the East. Among conservatives the number is up at 98%, while it drops over 13% for liberals to 85%.

With belief being lower for liberals, then, we probably should not be surprised that the Democratic National Convention is removing reference to God from the party platform.

 This is the paragraph that was in the 2008 platform:

“We need a government that stands up for the hopes, values, and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential.”

Now the words “God-given” have been removed. The paragraph has been restructured to say this:

“We gather to reclaim the basic bargain that built the largest middle class and the most prosperous nation on Earth – the simple principle that in America, hard work should pay off, responsibility should be rewarded, and each one of us should be able to go as far as our talent and drive take us.”

It’s not unlike a the scrawl on the wall in 1964: “Nietzsche said ‘God is dead.’ God said ‘Nietzsche is dead.’” You can try to talk around God, but his presence is there. In politics, you ignore faith at your peril (just ask candidate Obama who had to answer questions about his pastor Jeremiah Wright in 2008).

Does it matter? Maybe not. This is a political platform, after all. It’s is designed to state the beliefs and philosophy for governing, not the faith and worship of its members.  However, I know a few Democrats, and many of them are people of great faith, not only professing belief in God but doing a lot to prove it.  That’s why I can’t help but wonder: why remove reference to God from the platform? With a large part of America professing a belief in God, why remove a statement of meek acknowledgement of a greater power in blessing us with potential?

Could it be that Democrats are looking elsewhere for the source of American success?

[Gallup][CBN]

Filed Under: Democratic Politics, First Amendment Tagged With: , , , , ,

Round-up: Newsweek turns on Obama, and Romney’s Mormonism to play in the Convention?

August 20, 2012 by 1 Comment

This is a bird’s eye view of the race for the White House in the week before the Republican convention. First off, polling:

Today’s update matches the president’s lowest level of support since May. Yesterday was the lowest level of support for Romney since March. On a combined basis, today shows the lowest level of combined support for the two major party candidates since January 27.

In other words, enthusiasm might be dragging, and people are a little weary of the negative campaign ads running in swing states, and polling in swing states (Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, etc) is going to matter more than nationwide polling (which the Rasmussen poll is).  With conventions coming next week for the GOP and the week there after for the Dems, both are hoping for a bump (though perhaps more to Romney than Obama).

In his inaugural address, Obama promised “not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” He promised to “build the roads and bridges, the electric grids, and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” And he promised to “transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.” Unfortunately the president’s scorecard on every single one of those bold pledges is pitiful.

What’s striking is not so much that Ferguson (who was a McCain adviser four years ago) is making the call,  but that the article is in Newsweek. Four years ago, Newsweek was squarely in favor of the hope and change that Obama was selling.

This year, the cover is clear: the GOP is America’s Obi Wan Kanobi:

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/Newsweek/statuses/237343836936994817"]

Don’t miss the reply comments to that posting. They’re priceless (and oh, so articulate). (Also, don’t miss my review of Ferguson’s book “Civilization: The West and the Rest.”)

  • “I’m surrounded by idiots“:  While Missouri Republican Senate candidate Congressman Todd Akin is taking heat (and justifiably so) for suggesting that a “female body has ways to try to shut” down a pregnancy in the case of rape, Peggy Noonan notes that if Vice-President Bidenhad been a Republican, people would be asking if he was stupid.Really. That’s what she said:

Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, Noonan said, “If it had been a Republican vice presidential candidate who had made those gaffes…the subject today of the panel would be how stupid is this person, can this person possibly govern?”

Apparently, no party has the corner on idiots and dumb comments. However, I’d take Paul Ryan as VP over Joe Biden every day. Biden’s White House would be an exercise in keeping the President away from an open mic or anyone with a Twitter account.

Also, in case you were wondering, the Romney camp condemned Akin’s comments soundly.

  • “That’s so five minutes ago.” Obama 2012 prefers Rep. Paul Ryan circa 2011. So much so, that the campaign is still criticizing Ryan’s now out-of-date budget on terms that have been accounted for in the Ryan’s 2012 budget.
The president’s accusations largely refer to Ryan’s 2011 plan, ignoring the fact that the House Budget Committee chairman rolled out a different version in 2012 — taking into account Democratic critiques. Though the 2012 plan is more moderate, Obama and his surrogates have all but ignored the newer version as they amp up their accusations against the Romney-Ryan ticket.
  • Competitive, much? A new e-book reveals that, typical of a lot of campaigns, there are a lot of egos involved in the Obama campaign. Also typical of many campaigns, there is a lot of internal conflict as those egos jostle for position and media appearances.  Will it result in a one-term presidency?
  • Also, the President has no problem with negative attacks on his opponents and surrogates:

Obama’s trash-talking competitiveness, a trait that has defined him since his days on the court as a basketball-obsessed teenager in Hawaii, was on display one night last February, when the president spotted a woman he knew was close to Sen. Marco Rubio in a Florida hotel lobby. “Is your boy going to go for [vice president]?” the president asked her. Maybe, she replied.

“Well,” he said, chuckling, according to a person who witnessed the encounter. “Tell your boy to watch it. He might get his ass kicked.”

Obama really doesn’t like, admire or even grudgingly respect Romney. It’s a level of contempt, say aides, he doesn’t even feel for the conservative, combative House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Hill Republican he disliked the most. “There was a baseline of respect for John McCain. The president always thought he was an honorable man and a war hero,” a longtime Obama adviser said. “That doesn’t hold true for Romney. He was no goddamned war hero.”

Time and again Obama has told the people around him that Romney stood for “nothing.” The word he would use to describe Romney was “weak,” too weak to stand up to his own moneymen, too weak to defend his own moderate record as the man who signed into law the first health insurance mandate as Massachusetts governor in 2006, too weak to admit Obama had done a single thing right as president.

  • Last from the ebook: Obama’s quite afraid of losing. He won on a wave of young support, and just last week polls show that the under-40 crowd is starting to swing for Romney:

During secret Sunday Roosevelt Room meetings with his top political and White House advisers, Obama has expressed concerns that the enthusiasm gap between his 2008 and 2012 support could cost him the election. He often peppers participants with pointed questions about campaign metrics — he’s especially interested in gauges of base enthusiasm, including the latest reports on volunteer enrollment in swing states and college campuses.

  • “Like a fire is burning…” Meanwhile, keep your eyes open for further review of Romney’s Mormon faith in the coming weeks.  The New York Times is reporting that a Mormon will give the invocation at the Republican Convention next week and McKay Coppins, a Mormon himself, went to church with Romney as part of the rotating press pool.  He gives an account of what sounds like, at least to other Mormons, a pretty average and routine Sunday service, complete with fidgeting kids and a desperate choir director trying to wrest members of the congregation into singing with the choir. Also, is that J. Willard Marriott walking in with Romney?
  • The focus on Romney’s faith at the convention is likely to turn much of the attention to the role of his faith in building him, including Romney’s time as a lay bishop in the LDS Church. The Telegraph, out of the UK, relates one experience (among others) from this period: 

Sandy Catalano had a very different experience, however. A former Roman Catholic, she converted to Mormonism in the early 1980s, but her husband Ron viewed her new faith as a cult and the strain almost destroyed their marriage. Then she fell ill, and as Mr Catalano struggled to care for their two children, Mr Romney took time off work and arranged for Church members to help the couple.

“Ronnie started to realise that the Church was full of kind people, although he was still sceptical about some of the tenets,” she said.

“Then he lost his photography business and Mitt came up with maintenance jobs for him do around the church. He went out of his way to help Ronnie find work and maintain his integrity.”

What’s your take on the race this week? Is there a story you think should have been posted here?

[Politico][Rasmussen][Washington Examiner][News Busters][The Hill][Fox News][The Daily Beast][Buzzfeed][The Telegraph]

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Losing sight of the forest for the trees

August 1, 2012 by 2 Comments

It’s August. While we’re still a month away from the full swing of election season, traditionally beginning after Labor Day, there’s enough politics in the news that the rhetoric is already starting to wear thin.

And maybe that’s the problem: too much rhetoric. Too much empty rhetoric.

If it’s not clear to the legions of consultants advising the Romney and Obama campaigns, yet, the economy, and the lack of recovery thereof, is center ring issue of this election.  Instead of an honest and forthright discussion about the role of government with regards to the economy, though, we’ve been treated to a series of sideshows,  a parade of misfits and sideshows that distract from that discussion.

Whether it is Obama’s “evolving” stance on gay marriage (he’s for it, now), attacks on Bain, calling for Mitt Romney to give up more tax returns, or Romney’s gaffe in London, voters have been treated to more tit for tat than substantive discussion.  Even the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) seemed to reveal that neither side was willing to grapple with the effect the law will have on the economy in the form of new taxes. Obama seemed more interested in reiterating that “we won” and Romney’s team seemed afraid to attack, unless it’s something so glaringly obvious as Obama’s telling  entrepreneurs and business people that “you didn’t build that.”

Why is unemployment still high? Why has the Obama plan failed? Unless we want to constantly fight a battle of trying to win the least educated and most volatile voters–and continue to see the selection of inexperienced politicians who will say anything to get elected–we need to see a clear exposition of why it is important to vote Republican in November.

In other words, where’s the vision?  The candidates are clearly different individuals with a different view of the role of government, but are voters hearing that difference?  ”Both men’s positions have been contorted by each other’s attack ads,” as a piece in The Economist recently described,

 But there is a real left-right division, personified by the two candidates. Mr Obama, who has spent most of his life in the public sector, academia or community work, plainly thinks the state has a bigger role to play—in galvanising the economy when demand collapses (as in 2008) and in moderating inequality. By contrast, Mr Romney, who made $200m or so in private equity, believes that the best thing that government can do is to get out of the way—by cutting taxes, reducing regulations and leaving people to build their businesses.

And what will the winner face?

The winner of the November election will immediately be faced with the problem of the “fiscal cliff”—a preset $400 billion tax increase, with the expiry of various tax cuts, and a $100-billion-a-year cut in spending—which could push the economy back into recession. Looming over that is the gaping deficit. And over that, America’s schizophrenia: it taxes itself like a small-government country, but spends like a big-government one.

The state of the debate, says the Economist, is poor, though. On the right, taxes can never balance the deficit (even though the Economist cites Milton Friedman just a sentence before) and expansive spending is justified for prisons, national security, and big business subsidies. On the left, reform is impossible, with Obama methodically “unpicking welfare reform” passed over the last twenty years, including under President Clinton‘s administration. Further, “Mr Obama seems to think the public sector is inherently more moral than the private one. Companies are at best cows to be milked, at worst prey to be hunted.”

Read the full article here.

[The Economist]

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