WHAT CHANGE LOOKS LIKE UNDER OBAMA
Peter Wehner
Contentions, November 16, 2011
Speaking to a crowd in Hawaii, President Obama contrasted his uplifting, high-minded campaign with the “narrow, cramped vision of an America where everybody is left to fend for themselves.” (That would be the Republican vision). Obama went on to say this: “That was what the campaign was about—the belief that the more Americans succeed, the more America succeeds. We knew it wouldn’t come easy, we knew it wasn’t going to come quickly, but three years later, because of what you did in 2008, we’ve already started to see what change looks like.”
Since the president raised the issue himself, why don’t we sketch out what “change looks like” under the stewardship of Obama. Some of the highlights:
–A misery index that is at a 28-year high.
–America’s credit rating downgraded for the first time in American history.
–A standard of living for Americans that has fallen further and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the government began recording it five decades ago.
–An unemployment rate that now stands at 9.0 percent. October marks the 33rd consecutive month in which the unemployment rate was above the 8 percent level that the Obama administration said it would not exceed as a result of his stimulus program. And 28 out of the last 30 months has seen unemployment at 9.0 percent or above—the longest stretch of high unemployment since the Great Depression.
–Obama is now on track to have the worst jobs record of any president in the modern era. The share of the eligible population holding a job has reached its lowest level since July 1983. Chronic unemployment is worse than the Great Depression. Almost 26 million are either unemployed, marginally attached to the labor force, or involuntarily working part-time—a number experts say is unprecedented. A smaller share of 16-19 year-olds are working than at any time since records began to be kept in 1948. Black unemployment is at its highest level in 27 years, with black youth unemployment now closing in on 50 percent.
–The rate of economic growth under Obama has been only slightly higher than the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression.
–Federal spending as a percent of GDP, the budget deficit as a percent of GDP, and the federal debt as a percent of GDP have all reached their highest level since World War II.
–Confidence among U.S. consumers has plunged to the lowest level in more than 30 years.
–The housing market has recently entered a double dip and the crisis is now worse than the Great Depression. Home values are worth one-third less than they were five years ago. And the home ownership rate is the lowest since 1965.
–The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty has seen a record increase on President Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels.… A record number of Americans now rely on the federal government’s food stamps program. Government dependency, defined as the percentage of persons receiving one or more federal benefit payments, is the highest in American history.…
One merely needs to hold Obama to his own standards. It was the Obama administration, after all, not Mitt Romney, which said unemployment would not exceed 8 percent under its watch if the stimulus program was passed. (Based on the administration’s own projections, unemployment should be around 6.5 percent at this stage.) It was Obama who said, in the early days of his presidency, “I will be held accountable. I’ve got four years.… If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.” And it was Obama who said on the night of his election, “This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids, to restore prosperity.”
This was their moment. This was their time. And they’ve had their chance. The Obama record is one of almost undiluted failures.… Obama has offered a vision of America where everybody is left to fend for themselves. Ineptitude has a high human cost.
THE GREAT PIPELINE SELLOUT
Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post, November 17, 2011
In 2008, the slogan was “Yes We Can.” For 2011-12, it’s “We Can’t Wait.” What happened in between? Candidate Obama, the vessel into which myriad dreams were poured, met the reality of governance.
His near-$1 trillion stimulus begat a stagnant economy with 9 percent unemployment. His attempt at Wall Street reform left in place a still-too-big-to-fail financial system, as vulnerable today as when he came into office. His green-energy fantasies yielded Solyndra cronyism and a cap-and-trade regime not even a Democratic Congress would pass. And now his signature achievement, Obamacare, is headed to the Supreme Court, where it could very well be struck down. This comes just a week after its central element was overwhelmingly repudiated (by a 2-to-1 margin) by the good burghers of Ohio.
So what do you do when you say you can, but, it turns out, you can’t? Blame the other guy. Charge the Republicans with making governing impossible. Never mind that you had control of Congress for two-thirds of your current tenure. It’s all the fault of Republican rejectionism.
Hence: “We Can’t Wait.” We can’t wait while they obstruct. We can’t wait while they dither with my jobs bill. Write Congress today! Vote Democratic tomorrow!
We can’t wait. Except for certain exceptions, such as the 1,700-mile trans-USA Keystone XL pipeline, carrying Alberta oil to Texas refineries, that would have created thousands of American jobs and increased our energy independence. For that, we can wait, it seems. President Obama decreed that any decision must wait 12 to 18 months—postponed, by amazing coincidence, until after next year’s election.
Why? Because the pipeline angered Obama’s environmental constituency. But their complaints are risible. Global warming from the extraction of the Alberta tar sands? Canada will extract the oil anyway. If it doesn’t go to us, it will go to China. Net effect on the climate if we don’t take that oil? Zero. Danger to a major aquifer, which the pipeline traverses? It is already crisscrossed by 25,000 miles of pipeline, enough to circle the Earth. Moreover, the State Department had subjected Keystone to three years of review—the most exhaustive study of any oil pipeline in U.S. history—and twice concluded in voluminous studies that there would be no significant environmental harm.…
Obama’s decision was meant to appease his environmentalists. It’s already working. The president of the National Wildlife Federation told The [Washington] Post (online edition, Nov. 10) that thousands of environmentalists who were galvanized to protest the pipeline would now support Obama in 2012.… Sure, the pipeline would have produced thousands of truly shovel-ready jobs. Sure, delay could forfeit to China a supremely important strategic asset—a nearby, highly reliable source of energy. But approval was calculated to be a political loss for the president. Easy choice.…
This [is not] the first time Obama’s election calendar trumped the national interest:
–Obama’s decision to wind down the Afghan surge in September 2012 is militarily inexplicable. It comes during the fighting season. It was recommended by none of his military commanders. It is explicable only as a talking point for the final days of his reelection campaign.
–At the height of the debt-ceiling debate last July, Obama pledged to veto any agreement that was not long-term. Definition of long term? By another amazing coincidence, any deal large enough to get him past Election Day (and thus avoid another such crisis next year).
–[Last week] it was revealed that last year the administration pressured Solyndra, as it was failing, to delay its planned Oct. 28 announcement of layoffs until Nov. 3, the day after the midterm election.
A contemporaneous e-mail from a Solyndra investor noted: “Oddly they didn’t give a reason for that date.” The writer was obviously born yesterday. The American electorate was not—and it soon gets to decide who really puts party over nation and reelection above all. We can’t wait.
A BLOW TO OBAMA’S RUSSIA ‘RESET’
James Kirchick
Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2011
[The recent] International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iranian nuclear activities has understandably ruffled feathers in American and European foreign-policy circles. Among other damning conclusions, the report finds that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device” and “had been provided with nuclear explosive design information.” Governments in the U.S. and Europe have cited the IAEA report as evidence of Iran’s continued defiance of international law.
A Russian government statement, by contrast, ridiculed it as “a compilation of well-known facts that have intentionally been given a politicized intonation.” The Russian statement, which could be mistaken for something produced by the Iranian regime, alleged that the report’s authors “resort to assumptions and suspicions, and juggle information with the purpose of creating the impression that the Iranian nuclear program has a military component.”
Moscow’s reaction serves as a stunning rebuke to U.S. President Barack Obama, whose administration has staked much on obtaining greater Russian cooperation on Iran’s nuclear program. When President Obama was selling the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New Start, to the U.S. Senate last year, he promised that a major benefit would be that it would put Russia on America’s side in preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons.…
New Start, which mandates reductions in U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles, is the centerpiece of the administration’s “reset” policy with Russia, aimed at repairing relations in the aftermath of the 2008 war in Georgia. Russian cooperation on Iran, Americans were assured, would be a significant benefit of the rapprochement. In a U.S. congressional hearing in June 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that “our close cooperation with Russia on negotiating this New Start treaty added significantly to our ability to work with them regarding Iran.…”
While Russia’s reaction to the IAEA report should serve as an embarrassment to those in Washington who touted the reset, more serious is the effect that continued Russian intransigence will have on preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear-weapons capability. In response to the report, Russia has said it would block any new sanctions by wielding its veto power at the United Nations Security Council.…
The Russian response shouldn’t have come as a shock to the White House and State Department. Russia has never been serious about halting Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In January, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that there was no evidence that Iran was seeking a bomb. That same month, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that sanctions had run their course and should be lifted.… In May, Russia sent a shipment of nuclear fuel to the Bushehr nuclear power plant, which it constructed for Iran nearly two decades ago. The IAEA report itself found that a “foreign expert,” later identified by the Washington Post as Russian nuclear scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko, has assisted the Iranian program.
The hope that a revanchist Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, will support a tougher stance against Tehran assumes that Moscow shares the West’s view that a nuclear Iran is against its interests. Judging by their reaction to the IAEA report, the Russians don’t see things this way.… Indeed, if forestalling a nuclear Iran were so plainly in Russia’s interest, Moscow would have sided with the U.S. and its allies long ago, and would not have to be haggled into taking a tougher line.…
It’s important to recall what Washington sacrificed in holding up its end of the Russian “reset.” In 2009, it canceled missile defense sites planned for Poland and the Czech Republic, two of America’s strongest and most reliable European allies. The U.S. has desisted in selling weapons to Georgia, 20% of whose territory Russia continues to occupy three years after a war that left tens of thousands displaced. And [this month], Russia was allowed to join the World Trade Organization after an 18-year process.
Meanwhile, Moscow has regressed on nearly every issue on which the administration promised improved behavior, from human rights to joining the Western consensus on Iran. [The recent] rebuke is but the latest and most devastating blow to Mr. Obama’s “reset” policy.
BARACK OBAMA’S SNUBMARINE
David Solway
FrontPage, November 16, 2011
It should be clear by this time that Barack Obama is not good for America, not good for Israel and the Middle East, and, on the larger scale, not good for the world. The disaster of his presidency will ramify for years to come whether he is re-elected or not. And the so-called “free world” will be the worse for his administration’s policy blunders and its abdication of America’s historic and “exceptional” role as liberty’s guarantor.
The damage he has inflicted on the nation he was elected to lead has been rehearsed at great length by many observers and in many different places. Here we might briefly note his broken campaign promises (Gitmo, network transparency, crossing the aisle, renditions, predator strikes, etc.); his cold- shouldering of Congress in the Libyan adventure, a violation of American law; the implication of his administration in the Gunwalker scandal, which makes Watergate look like small potatoes; the illegitimate switch in the order of creditors in the Chrysler meltdown; his astronomical inflation of the American debt and deficit and the consequent downgrading of the country’s credit rating; his patronage of the public sector unions, the outrage of crony capitalism (Siga), and favoring the bogus Green industry at taxpayer’s expense (Solyndra, Beacon Power Corp.); his refusal to drill for oil domestically and his deferral of the Canadian Keystone Pipeline project, which would have fostered significant employment and helped free the United States from dependence on Middle Eastern and Latin American tyrannies; his support for the anarchic and disreputable Occupy Wall Street movement—this is only an abridged list. That he has enfeebled the United States, perhaps more than any other president in its history, including the lamentable Jimmy Carter, cannot be doubted by anyone who retains a modicum of political and fiscal sanity.
His inept meddling in the Middle East is only more of the same, shunted offshore. Obama has endorsed Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly fundamentalist Justice and Development Party in Turkey, which is manifestly hostile to the U.S. An Islamist government has been installed in Tunisia in a revolution heralded by Obama as a beacon of Maghrebian liberty. Obama’s complicity in deposing Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, an American ally, has had the effect of empowering the anti-American Muslim Brotherhood and jeopardizing the peace treaty with Israel. The region is now ready to erupt. Similarly, his part in ousting Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who posed no threat to American interests, created a radical, Sharia-inspired government in Tripoli and, additionally, has released a flood of looted weaponry into Gaza, where it will be used by Hamas’s terrorist regime. It is evident that, like a reversal of the Midas story, whatever Obama touches turns into lead—or in the case of his reluctance to seriously challenge the Iranian ayatollahs, into uranium.
With respect to Israel, one of America’s staunchest allies and crucial technological and intelligence partners, Obama’s disdain and bad faith are obvious to all except those who are themselves anti-Israel or who are intent on deceiving themselves because unwilling to admit that their electoral support was egregiously misplaced. Obama’s response to French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent diplomatic gaffe in calling Benjamin Netanyahu a “liar” speaks volumes: “You may be sick of [or “fed up with”] him, but me, I have to deal with him every day.” The administration’s attempt via Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, to soften and deflect the plain connotation of the statement is frankly disingenuous.
We recall that this is a president who bowed from the waist to the Saudi monarch but insolently snubbed the Israeli prime minister during the latter’s now infamous White House visit. We recall, too, that Obama has delivered effusive orations in Cairo and Ankara but has yet to address the Knesset in Jerusalem. His insistence on Israel’s return to the indefensible pre-1967 borders reveals his strong anti-Israel bias; it is no exaggeration to suggest that Obama will not rest content until Israel’s mortgage on the future, like America’s housing sector, is underwater.…
Obama has humiliated his country’s allies, thereby weakening a liberal West already on the point of foundering and rendering conflict and upheaval ever more likely. He has privileged the United Nations over Congress, dismissing America’s legislators with supercilious unconcern. Indeed, to cite the words of John Fonte in Sovereignty or Submission, he is likely aiming for “the subordination of U.S. constitutional law to transnational law.” Obama has left his southwestern border unprotected, sued the state of Arizona for applying the law, and championed an “amnesty” program that would open the door to millions of illegal immigrants. He has snarled American industry in red tape. He has snubbed the owl of Minerva, casting prudence and wisdom to the winds in pursuit of a furtive—but not clandestine—purpose, namely, to Europeanize the United States and transform it into what it was never intended to be: an unexceptional, neo-socialist, debtor nation on the brink of insolvency and progressively vulnerable to the incursion of its enemies.
Flouting common sense and sound principles, this scornful president has torpedoed his nation’s interests and well-being. In short, with a mixture of sectarian determination and ineffable contempt, he has breached the hull of the ship of state.
