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The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks)

You are here: Home / Archives for The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks)

Memewatch: Obama is really a poor communicator

by DougJ|  March 25, 200910:49 am| 200 Comments

This post is in: Assholes, The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks)

It’s not an accident that so many righties settled on the “Obama is boring” meme this morning. The idea of attacking what is perceived to be Obama’s greatest strength — his ability as a communicator — has been brewing for a while. It’s what all the yammering about the teleprompter is about. It’s what all the hand-wringing about Obama’s jokes is about. And they’ve already phrased it in the convenient Slate/TNR contrarian “myth-busting” form that media types love so much (Ben Smith gushed over this piece):

2. Obama is a great communicator. Cut away the soaring rhetoric in his speeches, and the resulting policy statements are often vague, lawyerly and confusing. He is not plain-spoken: He parses his language so much that a casual listener will miss important caveats. That’s in part why he uses teleprompters for routine policy statements: He chooses his words carefully, relying heavily on ill-defined terms like “deficit reduction” (which means tax increases, rather than actual “savings”) and “combat troops” (as opposed to “all troops in harm’s way”).

[…..]

4. Obama is smooth. Despite being deliberate, Obama is surprisingly gaffe-prone. Reporters on my e-mail lists last year know he consistently mispronounced, misnamed or altogether forgot where he was. (In one typical gaffe in Sioux Falls, S.D., he started his speech with an enthusiastic “Thank you, Sioux City!”) His geographic gaffes are not just at routine rallies but at major events, including the Democratic National Convention and his first address to Congress. Any politician occasionally misspeaks, but the frequency of Obama’s flubs is notable.

This is a classic Rovean technique — attacking your opponent where he is strongest. I happen to think it is a smart technique in many cases. I’m skeptical whether “Obama is teh boring” will work right now, because the public is more focused on the next paycheck than on whether or not they find Obama’s pressers entertaining.

But make no mistake: right-wing media types will be pushing this hard over the next few months. And when even a pretty good reporter like Ben Smith is eating it up, you can bet we’ll be hearing a lot about it in the media.

(By the way, while Michael Wolff probably doesn’t qualify as a right-wing hack (although he certainly does enjoy fellating Rupert Murdoch), this piece is pretty remarkable.)

Update. This weirds me out a little:  Michael Scherer of all people nails the teleprompter “issue”.

I don’t really get all this gabbing about Obama and his teleprompter. Does anyone really doubt Obama’s ability to speak cogently and in detail without notes, after winning three presidential debates and slaying just about every press availability he gets? So he likes reading from a screen and not a piece of paper. But this whole line of attack, promoted widely by conservative blogs, sort of baffles me. And does anyone stop to think about how all this back and forth is effecting the feelings of the computer that powers Obama’s teleprompter? Well, I have, but that’s only because I have been reading the teleprompter’s blog and Twitter feed.

Memewatch: Obama is really a poor communicatorPost + Comments (200)

How Is This Possible?

by John Cole|  March 8, 200911:20 am| 130 Comments

This post is in: Media, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right, The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks)

I don’t understand:

Factory jobs disappeared. Inflation soared. Unemployment climbed to alarming levels. The hungry lined up at soup kitchens.

It wasn’t the Great Depression. It was the 1981-82 recession, widely considered America’s worst since the depression.

That painful time during Ronald Reagan’s presidency is a grim marker of how bad things can get. Yet the current recession could slice deeper into the U.S. economy.

If it lasts into April — as it almost surely will — this one will go on record as the longest in the postwar era. The 1981-82 and 1973-75 recessions each lasted 16 months.

Unemployment hasn’t reached 1982 levels and the gross domestic product hasn’t fallen quite as far. But the hurt from this recession is spread more widely and uncertainty about the country’s economic health is worse today than it was in 1982.

I don’t get it. The Republicans and some in the media are calling this the Obama recession and the Obama bear market and the Obama economy, but this says it will be the longest recession on record. Yet Obama has only been President for a few weeks. The math just doesn’t seem to work.

Sometimes I think the media and the Republicans are just making shit up.

On a serious note, the last few years have been really eye opening for me. I was never one of the Republicans who thought the media was liberally biased. I always felt they were just lazy and superficial (and MoDo is a fine example) and on issues outside their safety zone (faith and religion, for example), and they just were not equipped to discuss them. However, it becomes more and more clear every day that the media is not biased towards liberal or conservatives, but rather, it is simply in the business of defending the status quo for the wealthier members of society. The reason social conservatives and progressives both hate the media is because they really don’t care about either group or their issues. This is about protecting the amassed wealth of the few.

The past couple of weeks we have faced nothing but story after story about how the market (translation, the folks who created this mess) are nervous about the Obama plans, when no one will admit that the “markets” will only react positively to bail out after bail out with no pain for the people at fault. The same people who created this mess are now bitching about the attempts to fix it, and upset because it might not continue to reward them. The MSM is providing no critical analysis but serves merely as a platform for people kvetching about reverting to the tax rates that were in place just a few years ago. The fact that the same people whose buddies are receiving trillions in taxpayer dollars to fix their mistakes are allowed to go on television and chant socialism is mind-numbing.

It really is breathtaking (especially since most families in the country just got a tax cut from the Obama administration). Can anyone give me any reason why Jim Cramer is asked for advice on anything, let alone given a broad forum to savage the attempts to fix the mess he helped to create?

***
[poll id = 8]

Pick up to three.

How Is This Possible?Post + Comments (130)

Making Things Up, One Day At A Time

by John Cole|  February 17, 20092:07 pm| 178 Comments

This post is in: Clown Shoes, The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks)

Malkin has quite a doozy up at memeorandum right now:

On Nov. 4, after Barack Obama clinched the White House, the market closed at 9,625.28.

In mid-morning trading today, the day President Obama signs his massive Generational Theft Act into law and a day before he unveils a massive new mortgage entitlement, the Dow dropped to to 7,606.53.

Now, imagine if President Bush had presided over a 2,000-point stock market tumble in the same time period — during the first few months of his presidency.

Great start, O.

A couple things make things make this post wingnuttier than normal. Put aside the fact that George Bush presided over a market crash from 14,000 to 8000, this is the the same Michelle Malkin who spent the last few months ranting about the Office of the President Elect:

Okay, it’s one thing to take your campaign website, transfer it to a dot-gov domain, and invent an “Office of the President-Elect” out of whole cloth.

But now we’ve got Sen. Obama standing in front of a podium, in front of the world, for his first transitional press conference with an official-looking sign that reads “Office of the President-Elect.” Is that the official seal of the U.S. on the sign? Do they have authority to use it? What other make-believe offices are they going to invent between now and Inauguration Day? I can’t ever recall in my lifetime any mention of such an office. Can you?

Now, apparently, Malkin suddenly believes that the Office of President Elect holds real power, much more so than the actual Presidency, because she wants to credit the market decline from November 4th until now to… Barack Obama.

The simple fact of the matter is that when George Bush took office in 2001, the market was at around 10,500. During his administration, it rose to around 14k at the peak. When he left office, it was at around 8000. I am not making this up, so if you do not trust me, you can check the data for yourself. Slide the graph around and do your own thing. Check any date you want.

In fact, the market has only fallen a couple hundred points from when Obama took office, Malkin knows it, and now she is just flat out making things up and hoping you are stupid enough to not notice. Everyone knew they would attempt to blame the Bush administration’s failings on the Democrats and the Obama administration, and the facts really are stacked against them so they have a tough job, but quite honestly, I thought they would be a little bit better at it than this. The crazy people ranting about black helicopters have more credibility, and at least try to make a coherent argument. The nut of her argument is “If you pretend Obama was President two months and a few weeks before he took office, he is to blame for the market declines during that time period.” Really, it is that stupid.

This is just silly, and they are really just phoning it in.

*** Update ***

It occurred to me that this is quite possibly stupid enough that it can be the centerpiece of the discussion of Meet the Press with David Gregory this weekend.

And while we are at it, as silly as it is to say that the market has dropped several thousand for Obama when he was not even President, I see a lot of harrumphing that everything is the Republican’s fault (and I am at times am guilty of this). That isn’t entirely accurate, either, as many people have noted repeatedly during Obama’s selection of his economic and financial team. There is, to an extent, a broadly bi-partisan base to blame this whole ponzi scheme on. Rubin and Clinton played a role in the deregulation, and let’s not forget who re-appointed Greenspan. And when you read stories about this global meltdown, it makes it even more obvious that it is simplistic to simply blame this mess on one political party. The Republicans should get their fair share of it, and I think they should shoulder much of the blame simply because they were in charge the last eight years and have pushed an agenda of tax cuts and higher spending on top of a platform of widespread deregulation, but a lot of people are guilty for this mess.

More here from Steve Taylor.

Making Things Up, One Day At A TimePost + Comments (178)

What real bipartisanship means

by DougJ|  February 14, 20093:34 pm| 46 Comments

This post is in: Media, The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks)

I had forgotten how bipartisan George W. Bush was (from today’s Washington Post):

Bush made an early gesture to encourage bipartisanship: inviting members of the Kennedy family to the White House to see the movie “Thirteen Days.”

While we’re on this topic, just for the heck of it:

Joe Klein: The thing that Gore has to worry about is this—Bush is legitimately a decent, kind, sweet guy…I don’t think George W. Bush actually is a conservative. I really think that, you know, when he campaigned for governor, he campaigned in a bus that said “Opportunity” on one side and “Responsibility” on the other side. (via)

What real bipartisanship meansPost + Comments (46)

How many Washington wise men does it take to screw an administration?

by DougJ|  February 12, 20095:39 pm| 83 Comments

This post is in: Assholes, The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks)

More on the Gregg withdrawl from Politico:

Republican Sen. Judd Gregg abruptly withdrew his nomination as President Barack Obama’s commerce secretary Thursday, telling Politico that he “couldn’t be Judd Gregg” and serve in the Cabinet.

The harsh response from a White House caught off guard: Gregg was the one who asked for the job – and he repeatedly promised that, “despite past disagreements about policies, he would support, embrace, and move forward with the president’s agenda.”

White House aides described themselves as “blindsided” by what White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs described as Gregg’s change of heart.”

Broder last week:

…in months to come, Gregg will be worth celebrating. He is one of the smart guys on Capitol Hill, especially when it comes to fiscal policy. And he provides Obama with a third strong Republican Cabinet member, joining Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Ray LaHood at Transportation.

Gregg and North Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad, the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, respectively, have been pushing for the creation of a bipartisan commission that would tackle the looming bankruptcy of the three big entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Conrad told me that he deeply regrets the departure of his partner and does not know where to find a substitute.

But help may be on the way. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the No. 3 man in the Senate Republican leadership, quietly joined the Budget Committee last month. When I asked him why, he said it was to “help move the Gregg-Conrad commission proposal forward.”

Moreover, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader of the Senate, told the National Press Club that a bipartisan deal on entitlements is something he thinks can and should happen in this Congress.

Obama said the same thing when he visited The Post just before his inauguration, and now he has in Gregg someone who can help him lobby Congress to move the project forward.

Ha ha.

The parable of the frog turtle and the scorpion:

A scorpion, being a very poor swimmer, asked a turtle to carry him on his back across a river. “Are you mad?” exclaimed the turtle. “You’ll sting me while I’m swimming and I’ll drown.”

“My dear turtle,” laughed the scorpion, “if I were to sting you, you would drown and I would go down with you. Now where is the logic in that?”

“You’re right!” cried the turtle. “Hop on!” The scorpion climbed aboard and halfway across the river gave the turtle a mighty sting. As they both sank to the bottom, the turtle resignedly said:

“Do you mind if I ask you something? You said there’d be no logic in your stinging me. Why did you do it?”

“It has nothing to do with logic,” the drowning scorpion sadly replied. “It’s just my character.”

Obviously, this is a huge setback for the struggling Obama administration. The only way to rectify it would be to appoint Mitt Romeny as auto czar.

Update: A Democratic staffer writes TPM:

It’s hard not to think that Gregg’s withdrawal, with the grumbling about the census and the stimulus, was not timed to cause the most damage possible to the Obama administration. Releasing the statement just as Obama took the stage in Peoria was clearly designed to undermine the President’s event. The fact he scheduled a presser only seems to confirm it. The classy exit would have been to wait til tomorrow afternoon to quietly bow out. Basically Gregg decided not just to politely decline, but rather to blow shit up and burn the bridge behind him. Do not think this portends good things for the wider political climate.

How many Washington wise men does it take to screw an administration?Post + Comments (83)

And Said Without a Trace of Humor or Irony

by John Cole|  February 11, 20094:30 pm| 77 Comments

This post is in: The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks)

Via Sullivan:

This stimulus bill is huge, so disastrous, and so harmful to our country that even though Obama has been in office for less than a month, I think it’s already fair to label him as one of the worst Presidents in American history. – John Hawkins, Right Wing News

I would hate to hear what he thinks about a President who started two wars he couldn’t finish, doubled the national debt, listlessly presided over numerous crises foreign and domestic, left a deficit of a trillion dollars, presided over an economic crash, and left office with the lowest approval ratings ever. I bet he just savages someone like that.

Oh, wait. Nevermind.

*** Update ***

By way of comparison, the “huge” and “disastrous” stimulus bill is now set at $789 billion dollars. If you take out the tax cuts, which I am presuming the Republicans will approve of, that means that basically the bill is about $400 billion in spending. So $400 billion to try to pad the fall in a crashing economy, as compared to this:

The White House released budget figures yesterday indicating that the new Medicare prescription drug benefit will cost more than $1.2 trillion in the coming decade, a much higher price tag than President Bush suggested when he narrowly won passage of the law in late 2003.

Perspective- Right Wing News ain’t got it. Of all the wars the Republicans have launched, the War on Irony is the only one they have a clear shot at winning.

And Said Without a Trace of Humor or IronyPost + Comments (77)

Unspoofable

by John Cole|  February 6, 20094:58 pm| 153 Comments

This post is in: Clown Shoes, The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks)

Via Sullivan, this:

“We are in the early stages of the Reid/Obama/Pelosi recession and nothing they are even talking about doing will help.”– Grover Norquist, writing in the National Review Online, 6 February 2009, three weeks after the inauguration

You. Can’t. Spoof. These. People.

They have no shame. None.

*** Update ***

Just so we are clear how brazen and shameless and amazing this is, the NBER has determined that the recession started in December 2007, thirteen months before the Obama inauguration. As I write this, there have been sixteen posts, and none of the other authors there have corrected them, although Ramesh Ponneru took issue with a different aspect of his post.

The whole Republican barrel of apples is rotten.

UnspoofablePost + Comments (153)

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