Fred Barnes, "What Obama Accomplished in Asia" - from the article: Obama struck out on his entire agenda in China and he acquiesced as the Chinese subjected him to the humiliation of a choreographed town hall meeting with student members of the Young Communist League. And he suffered through a 30-minute news conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao in which no questions from the media were allowed. Presidents normally come away on visits to foreign countries with "deliverables"--that is, tangible signs of progress like a treaty signing. All Obama got was a list of things the United States and China would do in the future. There's a name for this: diplomatic boilerplate.
As disgraceful as the President's inexperience is, there may be no way to get the American people - on both the Right and the Left - to admit that politics is a skill which requires practice and involves making hard decisions better than most people can. Our culture of individualism means that we think ourselves automatically self-governing and independent, and to a degree, we are. But many of us on the Right complaining about Obama's inexperience would vote someone in who had absolutely no clue how to govern if they said the right things, and sometimes not even that. I like Sarah Palin as a person, but she's got a long way to go in terms of being articulate and less shrill, her record in Alaska is solid but very limited, and the fact that she pretty much is the face of the opposition is a serious problem for those of us who know that the future can made or broken by politics. I know for myself, I've only got one aspect of the solution: don't let things get dumbed down, don't let news analysis degenerate into conspiracy theory. But I don't know how to express the more positive aspect of what political discourse has to become, except that to say if I wanted to run for President, I'd be spending a ton of time studying problems and talking to experts, asking how people get things done given the bureaucracy, trying to meet the right people who would help and instruct, trying to understand how Congress and the judiciary work and what concessions need to be made to them on any given issue. In short: I wouldn't run for Senator and then immediately run for President. Nor would I surround myself with a fan base that only told me what I wanted to hear, not what I needed.
Off-topic, at my blog - Rant: The Banality of Conservatism
Jay Cost, "Another Look at Obama's Job Approval" - from the article: The polls generally find Obama's overall job approval higher than his approval on various issues....One can't help but wonder if a legislative success on the health care package will result in a further decline in the President's job approval rating.
Lots more discussion at the link, all of it fairly thoughtful - it's hard to be dismissive of polls if they can consistently yield this sort of information. I haven't linked to this at my blog because it's not something I can comment responsibly on; electoral politics is not my field. There is a recent entry that might be of interest to TIN readers; "Re: Some Open Questions for Conservatives" - a friend has a survey-type post asking what exactly makes a conservative. The essential part of her prompt is quoted, as well as my response. Helping her out with responses is welcome.
Over at my blog, Links, "Critical of President Obama Edition" - it's a terrible title, I know. There's a link or two I've shared here (i.e. the one on health care "reform"), but a few things on the debt, the terror trial in NYC, and Afghanistan that you probably want to check out.
I don't have much more to add. I don't worry about what's happening in DC as much as I worry about the ability of the electorate to grapple with issues, and while the President's poll numbers are tanking, I'm definitely not seeing that disgust turn into anything productive. People know they don't like where the Democrats are going, but seem to be unable to articulate an agenda which addresses problems. We're gonna need more of the latter if the GOP is to become a serious party again. For all the complaining about the GOP, they've done an admirable job even while being battered by both the extreme Right and the whole of the Left; look up the much-maligned Lindsey Graham's skewering of Eric Holder if you don't believe me.
Robert Samuelson in The Washington Post (h/t Karl Rove) hits health care "reform" as advocated by the Democratic Party hard:
There is an air of absurdity to what is mistakenly called "health-care reform." Everyone knows that the United States faces massive governmental budget deficits as far as calculators can project, driven heavily by an aging population and uncontrolled health costs. As we recover slowly from a devastating recession, it's widely agreed that, though deficits should not be cut abruptly (lest the economy resume its slump), a prudent society would embark on long-term policies to control health costs, reduce government spending and curb massive future deficits. The administration estimates these at $9 trillion from 2010 to 2019. The president and all his top economic advisers proclaim the same cautionary message.
So what do they do? Just the opposite. Their far-reaching overhaul of the health-care system -- which Congress is halfway toward enacting -- would almost certainly make matters worse. It would create new, open-ended medical entitlements that threaten higher deficits and would do little to suppress surging health costs. The disconnect between what President Obama says and what he's doing is so glaring that most people could not abide it. The president, his advisers and allies have no trouble. But reconciling blatantly contradictory objectives requires them to engage in willful self-deception, public dishonesty, or both.
There's more at the link - it deserves to be read. It looks like many Democrats are actually believing the self-serving arguments they advance as the truth; it's not hard to see how this happens, it happens to all of us everyday in other ways. One starts by distorting one issue ever so slightly, making other distortions in other issues to compensate, and starts believing the whole system one has set up as exactly. After all, when one believes one is entirely just - shouldn't the richest country in the history of the world procure health care for as many as possible - mere mortal matters like budgets and numbers that add-up tend to be thought irrelevant.
Off-topic, from my blog: Thoughts on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
From Dan Gerstein at Forbes, "All Campaign Hacks:" ...the Obama White House's biggest weakness: The president's top advisers are not just overly political, they are almost totally political. Indeed, this West Wing is stacked with "hacks"--campaign professionals who are acculturated to think, act and win in the hothouse environments of elections, not to govern a bitterly divided country in extremely difficult times.
The whole article is very good, esp. as it does something I wish the right-wing blogosphere would do more of: offer criteria for what would make better governance. One problem with going to conspiracy theory to attack the White House is that if the White House does something right, it can't be given any credit. As of this writing, it is hoped President Obama will do the right thing regarding Afghanistan - there is an example of stunning success in governance and accountability there, though not widespread. It is also hoped he will stop pandering to the most rabid portions of the Leftist base and stop making cap-and-trade and health care reform a priority, and instead do his job and keep us safe; show trials of terrorists captured during the Bush administration are PR gimmicks, not serious policy. I can't conceive of him lowering taxes or cutting spending, but it would be nice to see him back away from spending that dwarfs the Bush years. I know that last wish is actually realistic, far more realistic than you would expect given the ranting right and left that occurs nowadays. All that has to happen is for the President to realize that his fellow Democrats in Congress are a bunch of losers, and stop giving them blanket support for pork. A quick look at how they handled the tea parties, the health care debate and these past elections goes a long way to proving that.
Off-topic: from my blog - Does Power Corrupt?
Breitbart Wires
