An on-point evaluation of President Obama

There used to be a newspaper published in Washington, D. C., The Washington Examiner, which I enjoyed reading. Some time ago, the paper ceased publication, except for an online presence that still continues. Recently I saw a column by Noemie Emery on the Examiner's site, which I found quite interesting. Her columns in the Examiner when it was in print often reflected my own thought, and I think this column also shows a great insight, so I would like to reprint it.

President Obama, wrote the Washington Post's Greg Jaffe in a recent story about the president's view of his country, articulates “his vision of a nation that can acknowledge and, learn from, its mistakes.” Would that this vision applied to himself.

Now comes the main point, one that I think characterizes this President above all things that have been written about him:

Not only does Obama never learn from mistakes, he doesn't think that he makes them, and he denies that they even exist. Any regrets for the way he passed healthcare? Not that you'd notice. Any regrets about leaving Iraq? Nope — he still thinks he “ended two wars,” which the other side keeps on fighting.

The conventional view of what has gone wrong — that Obama lacked experience, and that first-term senators should be viewed with suspicion — is undercut by the fact that he has had six years of experience, and failed to learn from it. At home and abroad, Obama makes mistakes over and over, with the same result, and takes nothing from them. He disses his friends, placates aggressors and seems surprised that aggressors advance and whole regions catch fire.

He refuses to bargain with Congress, insults opponents, imposes unpopular policies by fiat and seems surprised when his measures result in court challenges, when polarization increases, opposition solidifies, divisions harden and gridlock prevails. Deal-making is the essence of politics, but Obama finds it demeaning, so he resorts to brute force when he has the means to (as in the still-festering matter of healthcare). Alternatively, as with immigration, Obama resorts to executive actions that stir angry resistance and are frequently halted by courts.

This has gone on since 2009, but Dana Milbank noticed only when Obama began slighting Democrats, whereupon he began taking offense. “Rather than accept that they have a legitimate beef, he shows public contempt for them,” the Washington Post columnist complains, writing that Obama dissed fellow Democrats to friendly reporters as being short-sighted and dense. (Of course, he's done that for years to Republicans, but they seem not to matter.) If Franklin Roosevelt was described as having a commonplace intellect but a brilliantly tempered political character, Obama seems to be his ultimate opposite: A man with an intellect that delights the elite but a temperament that is counterproductive in matters of government. This combination seems to work much less well.

A comparison with his predecessors is instructive.

Presidents can sometimes repair their mistakes, but only after they realize they've made them, which is something Obama can't do. George W. Bush stayed with his failed Iraq strategy until a bloody year followed by a political bloodbath in the 2006 midterms forced him to change course dramatically. John Kennedy failed in the Bay of Pigs and then in his first face-to-face meeting with Nikita S. Khrushchev, when he compounded his first bad impression by seeming irresolute.

Sensing at once that he had made a grave error — “He savaged me,” Kennedy said later of the Russian leader — he doubled the draft, increased defense spending and took Dwight Eisenhower's advice to have his councilors argue their cases before him and each other (instead of one at a time and in isolation), which led to the peaceful solution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

But admitting mistakes — and taking advice — are not the skill set of the current incumbent, who finds them demeaning. The learning curve of the 35^th president between l961-63 had been exponential, while, as Josef Joffe recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “the 44^th president's learning curve has been flat for six years.”

It's not lack of experience that hampers Obama; it's his refusal to learn a thing from it. That's the trait we can't have in the 45^th president — and the one we must strive to avoid.

A valuable observation, and one with which I heartily concur.

A pathetic reason Obama says people should vote for him

Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard, wrote a column (dated September 17, 2012, but it’s already appeared online) entitled “Despair and Change: There’s no excuse for the Obama record.” It makes a telling point, and I will quote it in its entirety.

President Obama has had four years to fix the economy, and it’s not his fault he’s failed so far. He’s tried very hard, and he’s made some headway. But the task is so great that no one, not even FDR or Bill Clinton, could have done any better than he has. Thus, on effort and good intentions alone, Obama has earned four more years.

That’s a pathetically weak argument for reelection. But aside from attacking Mitt Romney, it’s the best Obama, Clinton, and Vice President Joe Biden could come up with at last week’s Democratic convention to defend a president bent on imposing policies that have produced consistently poor results. Yet there’s a bigger problem with this tale—or narrative, in the political vernacular—of a determined president unfairly criticized. It’s simply a message that doesn’t fit the moment. Millions of voters—especially disillusioned backers of Obama in 2008—fear that neither Obama nor Romney nor anyone else can revive the economy and halt America’s decline. And their pessimism is deepening.

Just before the two conventions, a Fox News poll asked this question: “Do you think the United States is on the rise as a civilization or is it on the decline?” The response was decline 57 percent, rise 31 percent. To me, this reflects despair—well, near-despair, anyway—not just fleeting unhappiness with today’s stagnant economy and high joblessness.

Other polls buttress this. In August, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found that 63 percent of adults are “not confident that life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us.” This view is almost unanimous among unhappy 2008 Obama voters questioned in recent focus groups.

On top of all that, the federal government’s ability to solve problems has worsened, according to a Resurgent Republic poll last month of 1,000 likely voters. Only 16 percent said it has increased since Obama took office in January 2009, while 54 percent said it’s gotten worse.

Given this situation, the excuses for Obama are, as a political matter, inadequate. Take Clinton. “No president, not me, not any of my predecessors, no one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years,” he said.

No president? I doubt Clinton believes this. With 227,000 new jobs, last February was one of Obama’s best months. But in February 1996, when Clinton was in the White House, 434,000 jobs were created. Franklin Roosevelt did better too. By 1936, the economy was growing at a 13 percent clip, while Obama presided over 1.9 percent growth in the first half of 2012. In June 1984, the Reagan economy created 363,000 jobs. The Obama economy last June? Only 80,000.

Nor was Obama encouraging in his bland convention speech. “You elected me to tell you the truth,” he said. “And the truth is it will take more than a few years for us to solve the challenges that have built up over decades.”

He invoked FDR and “the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that [he] pursued during the only crisis worse than this one.” But Obama isn’t following the FDR formula. Rather than a course correction, he’s relying on government programs as the sole stimulus and job creator, precisely what failed to stir a strong recovery in his first term. Offering incentives to private sector growth and job creation—now that would be an experiment for Obama.

“Our problems can be solved,” Obama said. True, but does anyone but Keynesian economists and partisan Democrats believe he’s likely to be the problem solver? Swing voters, the pivotal bloc in the election, don’t.

Biden wasn’t reassuring either in a speech both awful in content and poor in delivery. “America is not in decline,” he said. Why not? “Because it’s never a good bet to bet against the American people.” But it’s not the people that distressed Americans are betting against. It’s our leaders, Obama in particular.

Give Republicans credit for understanding the situation, while not responding to it satisfactorily. Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan has stressed that fixing the economy and averting (or reversing) national decline is doable. Five times in his acceptance speech, he declared, “We can do this.” The idea that the economy can be revived is the finishing kick in his stump speeches. He hammers it. “We can do this,” he said in Greenville, North Carolina, last week. “The point I want to make to you is it is in our control. We are Americans. We control our own destiny. We put the right policies in place, we can do this. This is something we can get done… Let’s get this done because we can do this.”

Hard to miss the message there. But it’s not sufficient. It leaves a big question unanswered: How? This is a job for Romney, but he hasn’t provided an answer yet. At the GOP convention, he first had to introduce himself to the country, since most Americans had never heard a Romney speech. “He couldn’t do everything at once,” an adviser told me.

Romney did lay out a five-step “plan” for creating 12 million jobs. The steps were more ends than means: exploit oil and gas resources, expand job training and school choice, sign trade agreements, reduce the deficit and lower taxes, streamline regulations, and reduce health care costs. And that was as specific as Romney got.

“Voters wonder whether anyone can turn the economy around, partly because they believe D.C. is so hopelessly broken,” the Romney adviser says. “Democrats are saying we have to be patient, but voters have run out of patience. They are frustrated with the pandering and the rhetoric and instead want results.”

Romney knows this, I’m told. He knows he has to explain how he will achieve his jobs agenda. He intends to do so. For what it’s worth, my advice is, the sooner the better.

The main thing is that (as I’ve already said or implied in previous posts) Barack Obama has been in office for 3½ years, and most presidents, given 3½ years to work on a problem, would have made a dent in it even if they might not have solved it. Unemployment now is higher than when Obama took over the Presidency. Probably, even if Obama had done nothing at all, the economy would have gotten better than what it was, so his presidency has been a disaster. So in fact, as Barnes says, Obama’s claim (reinforced by Bill Clinton) that he could not have fixed the problem in 3½ years is an admission of incompetence.

For Harry Reid, is it 1974 all over again?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is trying to shift the debate in this election from “who is more likely to improve this nation's economy” to Mitt Romney's keeping his tax returns private — a red herring if ever there was one. But apparently this is not the first time he's used tax return privacy as an excuse to make points in an election campaign. It's how Reid got into the Senate in 1974. A posting by Carl M. Cannon that I read yeasterday on the Real Clear Politics site states:

Reid first ran for the U.S. Senate 38 years ago against Paul Laxalt, a former Nevada governor. Laxalt was popular, but 1974 was a terrible year for Republican candidates. Tied in the polls, Reid concocted an October surprise: He handed out to the press a packet of financial statements and tax returns from him and his three brothers — and called on Laxalt, who owned an interest in a casino — and his family — to do likewise.

“Any man or woman who will not be completely candid about his or her finances does not deserve to be in public office," Reid said, according to a contemporaneous wire service account. And he foreshadowed his recent attack on Romney by asserting that Laxalt had paid no income taxes in some years.

This claim turned out to be true, but that was because Laxalt had suffered business losses the previous two years. But Laxalt took Reid up on his gambit, disclosing financial information that not only showed his net worth had decreased while in the governor’s office, but that his family was clean.

“I made a real stink about it, insisting that Laxalt’s whole family disclose their finances,” Reid recalled in his 2008 autobiography. “To my embarrassment, Laxalt complied. Why yes, he said, my sister the nun who had taken a vow of poverty would be more than happy to inventory her meager finances.”

Reid’s self-assessment about leading with your chin when it comes to an opponent’s taxes: “It made me look bad,” he said then.

Nevertheless, nearly four decades later he’s doing it again on behalf of the president of the United States.

Well, let's keep our mind on what is important — our nation's economy and who is best qualified to fix it — not how many tax returns Mitt Romney has made public.

The best summary of what this 2012 election about is what Mitt Romney said this past Sunday on CNN:

The great majority of small businesses pay taxes at the individual rate so as he raises these taxes “on the wealthy” he is raising taxes on small business. That kills jobs.

If your priority in this country is to punish success vote for President Obama; if you priority is to create more success and more jobs vote for me.

Nothing else is more important this year. Nobody cared how much John F. Kennedy or Franklin Delano Roosevelt paid in taxes. They also were rich — and, just as Mitt Romney, or any other rich man, did, I am sure they made use of every quirk in the tax laws that they could use to reduce their tax liability. Even Warren Buffett, whose comments President Obama has used to justify his tax hikes, was not forced to take all the deductions he did. Let's get back to what really matters.

Mitt Romney is rich. Very rich. So what?

Some people point to Mitt Romney's comments about his wife's two Cadillacs or his mentioning that he “didn't make much” from speaker's fees (which exceeded most people's total income last year) as something to be counted against him as a Presidential candidate. Of course, those people would never say a negative thing about John F. Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt, both of whom were certainly fabulously rich by the standards of their day. Some of these people probably even voted for John Kerry, whose fortune certainly was nothing to sneeze at. (And at least Romney earned his fortune. Kerry just married into his.)

So Mitt Romney is rich. Very rich. But I do not see why this should be a disqualification. The real question is, would his ideas for the direction of our government be better than those of the current occupant of the White House? And it is clear to me that the answer is a very strong yes.

And tomorrow it is South Carolina

Tomorrow, it is South Carolina's turn to hold its primary — one of the few cases in this country where any election, primary or general, is held on anything other than a Tuesday. The polls in the most recent days are mixed; they show Newt Gingrich ahead in some and Mitt Romney in others. (Rick Santorum, who was ahead of Gingrich just a short while ago, seems to be fading; the latest polls show him fighting Ron Paul for third place, a long way behind the top two.) The polls are so indecisive that it looks as though we will have to await the actual results tomorrow night or Sunday.

And this is closer to what I might have thought — Gingrich should be very popular in South Carolina, given that his political career was made in neighboring Georgia, and his Southern type of conservatism should resonate there. Of all the non-Romney candidates, he has the best qualifications — but yet, so much controversy surrounds him that I cannot see him winning in November; and, of course, the puropse of these primaries is to pick a nominee who has the best chance to win, against President Barack Obama, in November. So I still feel the party has to pick Mitt Romney.

Some people are using Romney's wealth as a reason not to support him. Surprisingly, nobody seems to think that John F. Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt could not do right by the “little man,” yet they cannot visualize Mitt Romney as understanding people who don't have a lot of money. I don't think that the fact that someone is rich should be held against him, but apparently some people do. But fortunately, this argument is coming out now, in January, so that President Obama cannot suddenly spring it in the heat of a general election campaign. It will, by the time of the conventions, be old hat.

So, as I said, now we need to wait till South Carolina's votes come in.

An interesting development

In the Civil War, a political alignment was established that lasted for many years. Since the party of Abraham Lincoln was the Republican Party, white Southerners universally became Democrats, even as the party became rather liberal elsewhere in the country and they stayed conservative. For the same reason, African Americans became Republicans, to the extent they were able to vote at all. (In the South, after Reconstruction, they generally were not, because of major obstacles placed by the white population, which led to the South being firmly Democratic.) This alignment remained the case until the Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he put into place a number of economic changes that most people considered beneficial to the poor, and as most African Americans were poor, they moved into the Democratic Party. (White Southerners remained Democrats, so there was the odd phenomenon that the African Americans and their greatest opponents were both in the Democratic Party.) But even then, the African Americans were not solidly Democratic; Republicans received perhaps 1/3 of the vote of those who were able to cast ballots.

The big change took place in 1964, because Barry M. Goldwater voted against a civil rights bill. Goldwater was not a racist, but simply believed in limited government and felt this was too much of an incursion of Government into people's lives. (To me that was a misguided attitude, but I'm only stating Goldwater's feelings here, not agreeing with them.) As a result, almost all African Americans moved into the Democratic Party, and white Southerners became Republicans, though more gradually; they continued voting for local Southern Democrats for a couple of decades, though supporting Republicans nationally. A few African American leaders were Republicans, such as Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, and more recently Justice Clarence Thomas, General Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice, but the African American voters generally split approximately 90-10 Democratic, and almost all of their politicians were Democrats as well.

But this week, two African American Republicans were elected to Congress. There were a few others in the past, but both of these were from the old South, and it's the first time in more than a decade that two African American Republicans will be serving at the same time. This will be an interesting development. Will the Black Congressional Caucus treat them as traitors to their race? It's going to be interesting to see.

Campaign finance reform and term limits: two cures worse than the disease?

Some people (including John McCain, a man with whom I agree on a lot of things, and was willing to give the Presidency to, though this does not mean I think he's always right!) have thought it desirable to put various limits on campaign funding — on who can contribute, or how much, for example. This is, to me, an interference with freedom of speech, and I prize the First Amendment enough that I think it's not a good idea. It seems to be based on the premise that if you have enough money, you can buy an office. But when was Ross Perot our President? Or Steve Forbes? I think we can handle the influx of money without limiting it. There are better approaches.

Another proposal that has been made is term limits. I really dislike this, because it means that the most qualified people for an office, the people who have actually held it, are barred from the job. I know of no field outside politics where a person with no experience is preferred to an experienced one in seeking any job. And we have a perfect mechanism for ending the term of office of someone who is doing an unsatisfactory job: the next election.

In fact, when the 22^nd Amendment was put into the Constitution, it was by Republicans who resented Franklin Delano Roosevelt's flouting of the two-term limit tradition, and it immediately came back to haunt them — the first President who was barred from running for a third term was Dwight Eisenhower, who just might have won a third term if he had been allowed to run!

I don't see any good case for either of these reforms; in fact term limits are an extremely bad idea, because I believe that experienced professionals are usually better than amateurs at almost anything, so I cn only see negatives to that idea.