Too late for Obama to turn it around?

[alienlovechild 75]

But this tonic dose of truth-telling may be too little too late. As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration's strategic missteps this year. I suspect there had been private grumbling all along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should have -- from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama's plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)

By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done. At this point, Democrats' main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate. Given the GOP's facility for shooting itself in the foot, that may well happen.

This column has been calling for heads to roll at the White House from the get-go. Thankfully, they do seem to be falling faster -- as witness the middle-of-the-night bum's rush given to "green jobs" czar Van Jones last week -- but there's a long way to go. An example of the provincial amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president's innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to "help" the president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp national healthcare?

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web -- both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy -- I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled.

Throughout this fractious summer, I was dismayed not just at the self-defeating silence of Democrats at the gaping holes or evasions in the healthcare bills but also at the fogginess or insipidity of articles and Op-Eds about the controversy emanating from liberal mainstream media and Web sources. By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers. There was a glaring inability in most Democratic commentary to think ahead and forecast what would or could be the actual snarled consequences -- in terms of delays, denial of services, errors, miscommunications and gross invasions of privacy -- of a massive single-payer overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as large and populous as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management.

Having said all that about the failures of my own party, I am not about to let Republicans off the hook. What a backbiting mess the GOP is! It lacks even one credible voice of traditional moral values on the national stage and is addicted to sonorous pieties of pharisaical emptiness. Republican politicians sermonize about the sanctity of marriage while racking up divorces and sexual escapades by the truckload. They assail government overreach and yet support interference in women's control of their own bodies. Advanced whack-a-mole is clearly needed for that yammering smarty-pants Newt Gingrich, who is always so very, very pleased with himself but has yet to produce a single enduring thought. The still inexplicably revered George W. Bush ballooned our national deficits like a drunken sailor and clumsily exacerbated the illegal immigration debate. And bizarrely, the hallucinatory ####### Cheney, a fake-testosterone addict who spooked Bush into a pointless war, continues to be lauded as presidential material.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2009/0...are/index1.html

[nowhereman 1]

The VJ Right was ready to impeach Obama before he took office, so it really doesn't matter what he does according to the VJ moral majority. However in the real world his approval ratings have slipped from the mid 60's to I believe just below 50%, which is not surprising given the very polarized political environment. Can he turn it around? Of course... every single President in modern history has endured turmoil. Some have prevailed & others have faultered. Obama could go in either direction.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

(Who is naive enough to believe that ... major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)

These folks, for example.

Joseph Antos, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

John Bertko, The Brookings Institution

Michael Chernew, Harvard Medical School

David Cutler, Harvard University

Dana Goldman, University of Southern California, RAND Corporation

Mark B. McClellan, Director, Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform

Elizabeth McGlynn, RAND Corporation

Mark Pauly, University of Pennsylvania

Leonard Schaeffer, University of Southern California

Stephen Shortell, University of California, Berkeley

Bending the Curve: Effective Steps to Address Long-Term Health Care Spending Growth

Oh, and me.

You see, it's naive to believe that a system that wastes about a third of the resources it uses cannot be reformed to deliver more for less. Cutting waste is not impossible. In fact, it's inevitable.

[Pooky 3,809]

But this tonic dose of truth-telling may be too little too late. As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration's strategic missteps this year. I suspect there had been private grumbling all along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should have -- from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama's plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)

By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done. At this point, Democrats' main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate. Given the GOP's facility for shooting itself in the foot, that may well happen.

This column has been calling for heads to roll at the White House from the get-go. Thankfully, they do seem to be falling faster -- as witness the middle-of-the-night bum's rush given to "green jobs" czar Van Jones last week -- but there's a long way to go. An example of the provincial amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president's innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to "help" the president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp national healthcare?

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web -- both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy -- I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled.

Throughout this fractious summer, I was dismayed not just at the self-defeating silence of Democrats at the gaping holes or evasions in the healthcare bills but also at the fogginess or insipidity of articles and Op-Eds about the controversy emanating from liberal mainstream media and Web sources. By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers. There was a glaring inability in most Democratic commentary to think ahead and forecast what would or could be the actual snarled consequences -- in terms of delays, denial of services, errors, miscommunications and gross invasions of privacy -- of a massive single-payer overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as large and populous as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management.

Having said all that about the failures of my own party, I am not about to let Republicans off the hook. What a backbiting mess the GOP is! It lacks even one credible voice of traditional moral values on the national stage and is addicted to sonorous pieties of pharisaical emptiness. Republican politicians sermonize about the sanctity of marriage while racking up divorces and sexual escapades by the truckload. They assail government overreach and yet support interference in women's control of their own bodies. Advanced whack-a-mole is clearly needed for that yammering smarty-pants Newt Gingrich, who is always so very, very pleased with himself but has yet to produce a single enduring thought. The still inexplicably revered George W. Bush ballooned our national deficits like a drunken sailor and clumsily exacerbated the illegal immigration debate. And bizarrely, the hallucinatory ####### Cheney, a fake-testosterone addict who spooked Bush into a pointless war, continues to be lauded as presidential material.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2009/0...are/index1.html

Does the fact that I agree with this red part of the Salon.com article mean I have to subscribe now? Dang!

Still, it wouldn't be Salon without its trademark equivocation. They seem to be completely incapable of criticising the Dimocrats, without, in a completely disingenuous manner, finishing up having a go at the Republican'ts. So they will be forever mired in the "carp journalism" file. Shame, really.

Edited September 10, 2009 by Pooky

[Danno 1,228]

Obama is a likable guy and a great speaker (especially when on telepromter), there is no reason to believe he will not turn things around.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

I think he made a great start tonight when he addressed the joint session of Congress. Of course, this was a non-event for the local FOX station who chose to air "So You Think You Can Dance" instead. Considering that there were only 15 such addresses in the past five decades (aside from the annual State of the Union address) one would think this is important enough to bring to the people. But apparently not in the fair and balanced world of FOX.

Edited September 10, 2009 by Mr. Big Dog

[Dan J 277]

I think he made a great start tonight when he addressed the joint session of Congress. Of course, this was a non-event for the local FOX station who chose to air "So You Think You Can Dance" instead. Considering that there were only 15 such addresses in the past five decades (aside from the annual State of the Union address) one would think this is important enough to bring to the people. But apparently not in the fair and balanced world of FOX.

Fox viewers want to know if Obama can dance while they keep hurling rotten fruit.

[Pooky 3,809]

I think he made a great start tonight when he addressed the joint session of Congress. Of course, this was a non-event for the local FOX station who chose to air "So You Think You Can Dance" instead. Considering that there were only 15 such addresses in the past five decades (aside from the annual State of the Union address) one would think this is important enough to bring to the people. But apparently not in the fair and balanced world of FOX.

If Fox News carried it, what's the point of Fox itself carrying it? They're both cable channel, so you're unlikely to get one in a package without the other.

I don't really see the point here

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

I think he made a great start tonight when he addressed the joint session of Congress. Of course, this was a non-event for the local FOX station who chose to air "So You Think You Can Dance" instead. Considering that there were only 15 such addresses in the past five decades (aside from the annual State of the Union address) one would think this is important enough to bring to the people. But apparently not in the fair and balanced world of FOX.

If Fox News carried it, what's the point of Fox itself carrying it? They're both cable channel, so you're unlikely to get one in a package without the other.

I don't really see the point here

You don't understand that the local stations can be received without cable? Folks over at FOX probably don't realize that either while at ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS it is understood quite clearly that broadcast signals are used to reach that part of the population that doesn't have cable. And it is understood there that those people might just have an interest to hear the President address a joint session of Congress. In the "fair and balanced" world of FOX, it isn't.

[HAL 9000 96]

I think he made a great start tonight when he addressed the joint session of Congress. Of course, this was a non-event for the local FOX station who chose to air "So You Think You Can Dance" instead. Considering that there were only 15 such addresses in the past five decades (aside from the annual State of the Union address) one would think this is important enough to bring to the people. But apparently not in the fair and balanced world of FOX.

People gotta have priorities yo!

[Pooky 3,809]

I think he made a great start tonight when he addressed the joint session of Congress. Of course, this was a non-event for the local FOX station who chose to air "So You Think You Can Dance" instead. Considering that there were only 15 such addresses in the past five decades (aside from the annual State of the Union address) one would think this is important enough to bring to the people. But apparently not in the fair and balanced world of FOX.

If Fox News carried it, what's the point of Fox itself carrying it? They're both cable channel, so you're unlikely to get one in a package without the other.

I don't really see the point here

You don't understand that the local stations can be received without cable? Folks over at FOX probably don't realize that either while at ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS it is understood quite clearly that broadcast signals are used to reach that part of the population that doesn't have cable. And it is understood there that those people might just have an interest to hear the President address a joint session of Congress. In the "fair and balanced" world of FOX, it isn't.

Do understand, just don't get Fox without cable here. Sowwy.

[HAL 9000 96]

FNC vs regular ole Fox broadcasting... understandable. Most places I've been to in the US have a local station.

[alienlovechild 75]

A thread on Obama's performance and outlook quickly turns into a another discussion on Fox News. A single network is more important than our dazzling President and all the other networks combined.

Edited September 10, 2009 by alienlovechild

[Sofiyya 1,687]

A thread on Obama's performance and outlook quickly turns into a another discussion on Fox News. A single network is more important than our dazzling President and all the other networks combined.

I've always wondered why there is such a preoccupation with Fox rather than a celebration of the multitude of liberal media outlets that they have to cloud their minds and obfuscate the news to suit their purposes. With such an advantage in numbers, it's amazing that Fox is such a fly in their ointment.