The president has three principal problems. He is well to the left of the public and of what he promised the voters in 2008, and it is an old, passe leftism, that is authoritarian, deviously presented and was discredited in this country decades ago; the sort of nostrums that caused Bill Clinton and others to become 'New Democrats.' He is increasingly perceived as having credibility problems and of being cold, cocksure, narcissistic and intoxicated by what he modestly called 'the gift' of his own articulation. And as president, he has been quite, and quite surprisingly, incompetent.
The second of these problems seems to prevent the president from appreciating the last. The only serious domestic initiative to show for the last year is an obscene stimulus bill that has had to be defended by the spurious supposition of 'jobs saved' since, contrary to promises, unemployment has risen by over five million after it was enacted. That target could have been attained without squandering 787 billion borrowed dollars...
Current economic projections call for massive debt increases of $1 trillion a year for a decade, with huge money supply increases that will make history not only by their size but, according to forecasts, by their non-inflationary nature, accompanied by tax increases that will, also miraculously, not retard recovery from the recession. No audible sane person believes this arithmetical fairy tale, including, one dares to hope, the president himself. It is a recipe for guaranteed stagflation and currency devaluation.
President Obama rose with astonishing speed from a more improbable sociological provenance than any of his 42 predecessors, an alumnus both of the genteel finishing school of Harvard Law and of the Chicago boiler room for hardball politicians. Neither his radical nor sleazy connections stuck to him. He deftly made an unspoken arrangement to liberate white liberal America from its guilt complex over historic treatment of African-Americans, and to banish the down-market Al Sharptons, Jesse Jacksons and Charlie Rangels as black spokesmen, in exchange for a one-way ticket to the White House.
Lots more here on environmental policies, foreign policy, Guantanamo, the Olympics, and other stuff that we already know (but it's nice to read it all in one condensed place).
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