Getbig Bodybuilding, Figure and Fitness Forums
Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Fury on September 02, 2010, 07:47:43 AM
-
How Barack Obama Became Mr. Unpopular
By MICHAEL SCHERER – 1 hr 21 mins ago
The Barack Obama that most Hoosiers remember voting for can still be found on YouTube. He stands before a cheering Elkhart high school gymnasium in August 2008, tireless, aspirational, promising a new America of jobs and hope. "We can choose another future," says the newcomer with the funny name. "So I ask you to join me."
Today that view of Obama is harder to find in Indiana. A couple of weeks back and a dozen miles west of Elkhart, hundreds gathered in another school gym - except this time it was for a job fair. With the local unemployment rate above 12% and rising again this summer, about a third of the employer display tables stood empty. Julie Griffin, who voted for Obama in '08, sat down at the room's edge, well dressed and discouraged. After 23 years as a payroll administrator at a local RV plant, she got laid off 18 months ago. "Really, what has he been doing?" she said when I asked about Obama's efforts to help people like her. "I guess I don't know what he is doing."
Across the gym floor, Joe Donnelly, Elkhart's pro-life, pro-gun Democratic Congressman, worked the crowd. He was part of the moderate wave that won Congress for Nancy Pelosi in '06, and he was re-elected with 67% of the vote while campaigning for Obama in '08. The President has since returned to the region three times, but Donnelly is nonetheless fighting for his political life. In a recent television ad, an unflattering photo of Obama and Pelosi flashes while Donnelly condemns "the Washington crowd." This is basically a Democratic campaign slogan now: Don't blame me for Obama and Pelosi. "I'm not one of them," Donnelly told me when I caught up with him. "I'm one of us."
This shift in perception - from Obama as political savior to Obama as creature of Washington - can be seen elsewhere. When Obama arrived in office in January '09, his Gallup approval rating stood at 68%, a high for a newly elected leader not seen since John Kennedy in 1961. Today Obama's job approval has been hovering in the mid-40s, which means that at least 1 in 4 Americans has changed his or her mind. The plunge has been particularly dramatic among independents, whites and those under age 30. With midterm elections just nine weeks off, instead of the generational transformation some Democrats predicted after 2008, the President's party teeters on the brink of a broad setback in November, including the possible loss of both houses of Congress. By a 10-point margin, people say they will vote for Republicans over Democrats in Congress, the largest such gap ever recorded by Gallup. (See pictures of Barack Obama behind the scenes on Inauguration Day.)
White House aides explain this change as a largely inevitable reflection of the cycles of history. Midterms are almost always bad for first-term Presidents, and worse in hard times. "The public is rightly frustrated and angry with the economy," says Dan Pfeiffer, Obama's communications director, explaining the White House line. "There is no small tactical shift we could have made at any point that would have solved that problem." In more confiding moments, aides admit that the peak of Obama's popularity may have been inflated, a fleeting result of elation at the prospect of change and national pride in electing the first African-American President. As one White House aide puts it, "It was sort of fake."
But while these explanations may be valid, they are also incomplete. A sense of disappointment, bordering on betrayal, has been growing across the country, especially in moderate states like Indiana, where people now openly say they didn't quite understand the President they voted for in 2008. The fear most often expressed is that Obama is taking the country somewhere they don't want to go. "We bought what he said. He offered a lot of hope," says Fred Ferlic, an Obama voter and orthopedic surgeon in South Bend who has since soured on his choice. Ferlic talks about the messy compromises in health care reform, his sense of an inhospitable business climate and the growth of government spending under Obama. "He's trying to Europeanize us, and the Europeans are going the other way," continues Ferlic, a former Democratic campaign donor who plans to vote Republican this year. "The entire American spirit is being broken."
One explanation for Obama's steep decline is that his presidency rests on what Gallup's Frank Newport calls a "paradox" between Obama and the electorate. In 2008, Newport notes, trust in the federal government was at a historic low, dropping to around 25%, where it still remains. Yet Obama has offered government as the primary solution to most of the nation's woes, calling for big new investments in health care, education, infrastructure and energy. Some voters bucked at the incongruity, repeatedly telling pollsters that even programs that have clearly helped the economy, like the $787 billion stimulus, did no such thing. Meanwhile, the resulting spike in deficits, which has been greatly magnified by tax revenue lost to the economic downturn, has spooked a broad sweep of the country, which simply does not trust Washington to responsibly handle such a massive liability.
The Overreach
Rather than address these concerns as the economic crisis grew, Obama made a conscious choice to go big with government reforms of health care and energy. The bailouts of the auto companies, the rescue of Wall Street and the new regulation of banks and the financial industry only deepened the public's skepticism, especially among independent voters. Rather than dwell on the political problems, the President pushed his team forward, believing, in the words of top adviser David Axelrod, that "ultimately the best politics was to do that which he thought was right."
It wasn't long before deep cracks in Obama's coalition began to appear. This past June, Peter Brodnitz of the Benenson Strategy Group, a firm that also polls for the White House, asked voters which they preferred: "new government investments" or "cutting taxes for business" as the better approach to jump-start job creation. Even among those who voted for Obama, nearly 38% preferred tax cuts. When Brodnitz offered a choice between tax cuts to reduce the deficit and investments in "research, innovation and new technologies," one-third of Obama voters chose the cuts. The evidence throughout the poll, commissioned by the think tank Third Way, was unmistakable: roughly 1 in 3 of the President's 2008 supporters had serious questions about government spending solutions for the economy. In Nevada, a state Obama won with 55% of the vote, only 29% of likely voters this year think the President's actions have helped the economy, according to a recent poll by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research. "A lot of this was really inevitable, or at least pretty predictable," says Indiana Senator and former governor Evan Bayh, a Democratic expert at getting elected in the Rust Belt. "We have a lot of government activism at a time when skepticism of government efficiency is at an all-time high."
It's not as if the White House didn't see this coming. After a meeting in December 2008 about the severity of the economic crisis, Axelrod pulled Obama aside. He recalls saying, "Enjoy these great poll numbers you have, because two years from now, they are not going to look anything like this." But even as Obama aides were aware of a growing disconnect, it didn't seem to worry their boss. Instead, the ambitious legislative goals usually trumped other priorities. Both in the original stimulus package and then in the health care and energy measures, the White House ceded most of its clout to the liberal lions who controlled the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. That maneuver helped assure passage of reforms, but it also confirmed some of the worst fears about how Washington works. "I'd rather be a one-term President and do big things than a two-term President and just do small things," he told his team after Republican Scott Brown was elected Senator in liberal Massachusetts and some in the Administration suggested pulling back on health reform.
For Democrats in conservative districts, like Representative Jason Altmire in western Pennsylvania, the President's approach always spelled trouble. "Even though the leaders in Congress understood that a lot of these things are not going to be popular, they were at a point in their careers where they realized that this is what they have been waiting for," says Altmire, who is favored to win this year, in part because he voted against most of the President's agenda, including health reform. "It was true overreach."
For someone who so carefully read the political mood as a candidate, Obama has been unexpectedly passive at moments as President. Whereas other Democrats had hoped to spend the late summer talking about two things - jobs and the unpopularity of many Republican policies - the White House has been distracted by a string of unrelated issues, from immigration reform to a mishandled dismissal of a longtime USDA official to the furor over the proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque near Ground Zero. On Aug. 31, Obama gave a prime-time speech about the partial troop pullout from Iraq, touching on jobs only tangentially, before spending the following day in an intensive effort to restart the Middle East peace process. "It is inconceivable that a team so disciplined during the presidential campaign can't carry a message with the bully pulpit of the White House," says one Democratic strategist working on the midterm elections. "It's politically irresponsible, and Americans have little patience for it."
As his poll numbers fell, Obama responded with his perpetual cool. His appeals to the grass-roots army that he started, through online videos for Organizing for America, took on a formal, emotionless tone. He acted less like an action-oriented President than a Prime Minister overseeing some vast but balky legislative machinery. When challenged about his declining popularity, the President tended to deflect the blame - to the state of the economy, the ferocity of the news cycle and right-wing misinformation campaigns. Aides treated the problem as a communications concern more than a policy matter. They increased his travel schedule to key states and limited his prime-time addresses. They struggled to explain large, unpopular legislative packages to the American people, who opposed the measures despite supporting many of the component parts, like extending health insurance to patients with pre-existing conditions or preventing teacher layoffs. "When you package it all together, it can be too big to succeed as a public-relations matter," says Axelrod.
Instead of shifting course, Obama spoke dismissively about Republican efforts to play "short-term politics." He continued the near weekly visits to new green energy manufacturing plants, repeating promises of an economic rebirth that remains, for many, months or years away. And he missed opportunities to strengthen his connections with his supporters: local political capos complained privately that Obama had a tendency to touch down in their backyards, give a speech and scoot after less than an hour. By the end of the summer, the disconnect had grown so severe that only 1 in 3 Americans in a Pew poll accurately identified him as a Christian, down from 51% in October 2008. At the same time, the base voters Obama had energized so well in '08 went back into hibernation. They were nowhere to be found in the '09 gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, tracking instead with pre-Obama historical patterns. While liberals attacked him from the left on cable television, many of his core supporters weren't paying attention. In a rich irony, many of the same groups Obama turned out for the first time in record numbers had suffered the most from the recession and were the most likely to tune politics out. "One of the challenges on the Democratic side is, it's been very hard for [voters] to make connections between what is happening in Washington and what is happening in their lives," says Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster.
Can He Rebalance?
At the White House, advisers take comfort in the fact that at this point in their presidencies, both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton scored slightly lower approval ratings than Obama. And the dominant analogy for the past few months has focused not on 1994, when Clinton lost a Democratic Congress in a huge Republican wave, but on '82, when Reagan lost just 26 seats in the House. Like Obama, Reagan was facing rising discontent at the midterm, driven by huge unemployment numbers that peaked at 10.8% at year's end. But as the economy rebounded, Reagan's governing philosophy, "Stay the course," was vindicated. He won re-election by an enormous margin.
Outside the White House, only a few of the President's Democratic allies take much solace in this history, in part because the current economic slump appears far more lasting than the one Reagan faced. Most experts from both parties say Obama will have to rebalance his politics in 2011 to be re-elected in '12. That's partly because of the growing belief that the Republicans will win the House in November and, if their stars align, have a good shot at taking the Senate as well. Elsewhere, in state houses and in governors' races, Republicans are poised for a broad comeback. Regardless of the exact outcome, it is clear that Obama's brief window of one-party rule has closed. That outcome alone may vindicate Obama's decision to make the massive reforms while he still had the votes. It will never be known for certain just how much a more centrist legislative strategy would have improved the Democrats' midterm outlook.
But two years is the equivalent of multiple lifetimes in politics, and there are signs that Obama is already pivoting away from plans to engineer massive reforms in energy policy, global-warming response and immigration law to less-stirring, more-popular challenges like reducing the deficit and reforming taxation and entitlements. What little margins Obama does have to push major reforms through are sure to shrink away in the coming months. "I think the next couple of years, we've got to focus on debt and deficits," Obama told NBC News after his summer vacation. "We've got to focus on making sure that we make the recovery stronger. And a lot of that is attracting private investment."
Back in Indiana, the evidence of Obama's political failure is particularly glaring. During his early, heady days in office, the President decided to make Elkhart a personal cause. A once thriving manufacturing center of 50,000 on the Michigan-Indiana border, famous for its musical instruments and recreational vehicles, the Elkhart region saw the steepest jump in unemployment of any metropolitan area in the nation during the economic crisis. That helped Obama win Donnelly's district by 9 points, nearly George W. Bush's margin in 2004, and Obama returned to Elkhart just weeks after taking office. "I promised you back then that if elected President, I would do everything I could to help this community recover," he announced. "And that's why I've come back today."
Since then, he has been back twice more, once to speak at Notre Dame and once to herald a new electric-vehicle plant that would be built with federal support. In the southern end of the district, thousands of jobs at parts plants were saved when Obama decided to bail out the auto companies.
Yet all of Obama's personal and financial appeals have been swamped by the depth of the recession and have had little visible effect. Donnelly, who flies home every weekend to work in his district, felt obliged to run against Obama to save his job. And his Republican opponent, Jackie Walorski, says she is often approached by Obama voters who want to vent. "This has burned people," she says. "Their words, not mine: 'Betrayed by the health care vote.' 'What are they thinking when it comes to spending?' 'Broken promises when it comes to jobs.'" At one recent Walorski house party, held at dusk beside a cornfield, two attendees, Matthew and Frances Napieralski, identified themselves as former supporters of the President. "He's not what I voted for," said Matthew, who runs a plastic-injection-molding shop in town. "It's a shame that they led us to
believe one thing," said Frances, "and then everything changes."
For now, Obama's aides hope that the controversial reforms in health care and financial rules will produce benefits felt by voters, if not by November 2010, then two years later. That would vindicate the President's vision of government as a solution and not just a problem. Even in Indiana, the disappointment is matched by a real yearning for a leader who can make a difference. "I think he's trying," says Griffin, the laid-off payroll administrator who said she didn't know what Obama had done for her. "Nobody can turn it around overnight."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100902/us_time/08599201562900
Massive damage control going on by the leftists. They're trying to spin this as best they can but it's still failing.
-
I read this article too.
I don't know what to say. I have loathed Obama since the day i heard of him and he has never done anything to change my opinion of him.
-
I read this article too.
I don't know what to say. I have loathed Obama since the day i heard of him and he has never done anything to change my opinion of him.
My disapproval of him took place over a 15 month period of time.
-
The day i looked into the Cap & Trade bill and who was behind that was the day i went from dislike to utter hatred of this pofs.
-
The day i looked into the Cap & Trade bill and who was behind that was the day i went from dislike to utter hatred of this pofs.
Looks like his balls crawled up into his body and he's not going to mess around with trying to pass that shit anytime soon.
-
Looks like his balls crawled up into his body and he's not going to mess around with trying to pass that shit anytime soon.
Another thing - they spent a year and a half on the the Health Care bill ignoring the economy and ignoring the economy and people see a double dip upon us and are pissed off. And rightfully so!
we have the worse of both worlds now - a horrible health care bill and a horrible economy.
-
Jack explains why:
[/youtube]
-
DeMint may be right - HealthCare was Obama's Waterloo and may be what breaks him, just that it took place in the mid-term elections, not that the thing didnt pass.
Most people i know are LLIIIVVVIIDD over ObamaCare since their rates are skyrocketing and the economy has only gotten worse.
-
DeMint may be right - HealthCare was Obama's Waterloo and may be what breaks him, just that it took place in the mid-term elections, not that the thing didnt pass.
Most people i know are LLIIIVVVIIDD over ObamaCare since their rates are skyrocketing and the economy has only gotten worse.
And the most damaging (costly) parts of the Bill don't take affect until 2012.
Is anyone unclear as to why after 2012?
-
And the most damaging (costly) parts of the Bill don't take affect until 2012.
Is anyone unclear as to why after 2012?
same reason the bush tax cuts were written to expire 5 minutes before the 2010 midterms... politics baby!
-
same reason the bush tax cuts were written to expire 5 minutes before the 2010 midterms... politics baby!
Wrong fool. the tax cuts passed by a budget measure to where they were only allowed to have a ten year life span. It had nothing to diw ith what you claim.
Again - why do you keep bringing up Bush?
-
The reason the Tax Cuts expire is that was the only way to get some democrats to vote for it, which they needed in order to pass it.
-
same reason the bush tax cuts were written to expire 5 minutes before the 2010 midterms... politics baby!
Simple solution.Extend them.
-
Oh how the mighty have fallen.
-
Wrong fool. the tax cuts passed by a budget measure to where they were only allowed to have a ten year life span. It had nothing to diw ith what you claim.
Again - why do you keep bringing up Bush?
I see. What date did Bush pass them? This 10-year number is intriguing, since Clinton was still in office exactly 10 years ago.
-
I see. What date did Bush pass them? This 10-year number is intriguing, since Clinton was still in office exactly 10 years ago.
Do some research 240 - I have posted about this many times.
-
Do some research 240 - I have posted about this many times.
Hey,off topic,but are you listening to Mark Stein in for Rush?That guy is the funniest guy on radio.He needs his own syndicated show,I like him as much as Rush.
-
Hey,off topic,but are you listening to Mark Stein in for Rush?That guy is the funniest guy on radio.He needs his own syndicated show,I like him as much as Rush.
Yeah, he is good.
About to blow up the mosque nonsense, no pun intended.
-
From now on, whenever 240 says something stupid, I'm going to defend him by saying- "At least he's not as stupid as SAMSON", "give him a break-- when he came to getbig it was a mess, give 240 some time, he'll smarten up and things around here will change."
-
Great article
________________________
Liberalism’s Existential Crisis
Peter Wehner - 09.02.2010 - 11:39 AM
As the Obama presidency and the Democratic Party continue their journey into the Slough of Despond, it’s interesting to watch Obama’ supporters try to process the unfolding events.
Some blame it on a failure to communicate. E.J. Dionne, Jr., for example, ascribes the Democrats’ problems to the fact that Obama “has chosen not to engage the nation in an extended dialogue about what holds all his achievements together.” Joe Klein offers this explanation: “If Obama is not reelected, it will be because he comes across as disdaining what he does for a living.” And John Judis points to the Obama administration’s “aversion to populism.”
Others are aiming their sound and fury at the American people. According to Maureen Dowd, “Obama is the head of the dysfunctional family of America — a rational man running a most irrational nation, a high-minded man in a low-minded age. The country is having some weird mass nervous breakdown.” Jonathan Alter argues that the American people “aren’t rationally aligning belief and action; they’re tempted to lose their spleens in the polling place without fully grasping the consequences.” And Slate’s Jacob Weisberg has written that “the biggest culprit in our current predicament” is the “childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.”
For still others, Obama’s failures can be traced to James Madison. George Packer complains that Obama’s failures are in part institutional. He lists a slew of items on the liberal agenda items “the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing.” Paul Krugman warns that the Senate is “ominously dysfunctional” and insists that the way it works is “no longer consistent with a functioning government.” For Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum, “The evidence that Washington cannot function — that it’s ‘broken,’ as Vice President Joe Biden has said — is all around.” The modern presidency “has become a job of such gargantuan size, speed, and complexity as to be all but unrecognizable to most of the previous chief executives.”
Commentators such as the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein place responsibility on “powerful structural forces in American politics that seem to drag down first-term presidents” (though Klein does acknowledge other factors). The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait pins the blame on “structural factors” and “external factors” that have nothing to do with Obama’s policies.
Then there are those who see the pernicious vast right-wing conspiracy at work. Frank Rich alerts us to the fact that the problem lies with “the brothers David and Charles Koch,” the “sugar daddies” who are bankrolling the “white Tea Party America.” Newsweek’s Michael Cohen has written that, “Perhaps the greatest hindrance to good governance today is the Republican Party, which has adopted an agenda of pure nihilism for naked political gain.” And Mr. Krugman offers this analysis: “What we learned from the Clinton years is that a significant number of Americans just don’t consider government by liberals — even very moderate liberals — legitimate. Mr. Obama’s election would have enraged those people even if he were white. Of course, the fact that he isn’t, and has an alien-sounding name, adds to the rage.” Krugman goes on to warn that “powerful forces are promoting and exploiting this rage” — including the “right-wing media.” And if they come to gain power, “It will be an ugly scene, and it will be dangerous, too.”
What most of these commentators are missing, I think, are two essential points. First, the public is turning against Obama and the Democratic Party because the economy is sick and, despite his assurances and projections, the president hasn’t been able to make it well. And in some important respects, especially on fiscal matters, the president and the 111th Congress have made things considerably worse. Second, an increasing number of Americans believe Obama’s policies are unwise, ineffective, and much too liberal. They connect the bad results we are seeing in America to what Obama is doing to America.
But there’s something else, and something deeper, going on here. All of us who embrace a particular religious or philosophical worldview should be prepared to judge them in light of empirical facts and reality. What if our theories seem to be failing in the real world?
The truth is that it’s rather rare to find people willing to reexamine or reinterpret their most deeply held beliefs when the mounting evidence calls those beliefs into question. That is something most of us (myself included) battle with: How to be a person of principled convictions while being intellectually honest enough to acknowledge when certain propositions (and, in some instances, foundational policies) seem to be failing or falling short.
It’s quite possible, of course, that one’s basic convictions can remain true even when events go badly. Self-government is still the best form of government even if it might fail in one nation or another. And sometimes it is simply a matter of weathering storms until certain first principles are reaffirmed. At the same time, sometimes we hold to theories that are simply wrong, that are contrary to human nature and the way the world works, but we simply can’t let go of them. We have too much invested in a particular philosophy.
President Obama’s liberal supporters understand that he is in serious trouble right now; what they are doing is scrambling to find some way to explain his problems without calling into question their underlying political philosophy (modern liberalism). If what is happening cannot be a fundamental failure of liberalism, then it must be something else — from a “communications problem” to “structural factors” to a political conspiracy. And you can bet that if things continue on their present course, ideologues on the left will increasingly argue that Obama’s failures stem from his being (a) not liberal enough or (b) incompetent.
If the Obama presidency is seen as damaging the larger liberal project, they will abandon Obama in order to try to protect liberalism. They would rather do that than face an existential crisis.
-
Julie Griffin, who voted for Obama in '08, sat down at the room's edge, well dressed and discouraged. After 23 years as a payroll administrator at a local RV plant, she got laid off 18 months ago. "Really, what has he been doing?" she said when I asked about Obama's efforts to help people like her. "I guess I don't know what he is doing."
I have no sympathy whatsover. If you vote Hitler into power, expect to have a bomb thrown over your head, whether your'e an innocent civilian or not.
-
I have no sympathy whatsover. If you vote Hitler into power, expect to have a bomb thrown over your head, whether your'e an innocent civilian or not.
I did not like McCain, but I knew a dem govt was going to be a catastrophe.
-
I did not like McCain, but I knew a dem govt was going to be a catastrophe.
THomas Sowell said it best. McCain would have been a disaster, but Obama was always going to be a catastrophe.
-
This is what I like to hear!!!
-
Obama became unpopular when the "independents" realized they were played for fools by voting in the most left wing, inexperienced, radical, incompetent, ideologically driven, Admn of anyones' lifetime.
-
This is what I like to hear!!!
Good Video!
-
This is what I like to hear!!!
great, first we had drunk guy in front of concrete wall, now we have prison guy in bathroom
-
Yeah imagine that, obama is unifying the country, in utter hatred of him and his policies.
-
Fearing for image, First Lady's aides warned against Spain vacation
The New York Times reports First Lady Michelle Obama's aides cautioned against her going on the early August European vacation in which she stayed at a 5-star resort in Spain and mingled with royalty. The lavish trip, the aides reportedly argued, could result in harm to her image. "Aides say privately that they warned her there would be a cost to the trip, but she overruled them, insisting it was a rare chance to spend time with Sasha and with a friend whose father had died," the paper reports. "But the intensity of the uproar -- including accusations that she was a 'modern-day Marie Antoinette' -- caught the White House and Mrs. Obama off guard."
The trip resulted in the first extended negative press of the First Lady's time in the White House. Critics questioned why Mrs. Obama chose to go to a glitzy, high-priced resort at a time when unemployment is high and many Americans are suffering economically.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll taken during the trip showed that just 50 percent of those surveyed had a positive impression of Mrs. Obama -- down from 64 percent in April 2009 and 55 percent earlier this year. Nevertheless, she remains marginally more popular than her husband, whose personal approval rating was at 46 percent in the Journal poll.
Despite the first lady's falling approval numbers, the White House maintains that Mrs. Obama is in high demand among Democrats who want her to campaign for them. When asked by CNN shortly after the Spain vacation whether the first lady would be "out on the campaign trail between now and November 2," top Obama aide David Axelrod answered, "I'm sure that she will."
Now, in the Times report, Axelrod is a little more measured. "I think she’s happy to go out and support folks who have stood up for things that she thinks are important," Axelrod told the paper. "But I don't think she's eager to jump into the fray in a very political way, and I don't think she will."
(http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e194/arkie2/firstlady.jpg)
-
Damn - mobacaa would give george foreman a run for his money.
-
View from Mideast: Obama's a problem
By: Ben Smith
November 22, 2010 04:32 AM EST
________________________ ________________________ _________________
JERUSALEM — Vowing to change a region that has resisted the best efforts of presidents and prime ministers past, Barack Obama dove head first into the Middle East peace process on his second day in office.
He was supposed to be different. His personal identity, his momentum, his charisma and his promise of a fresh start would fundamentally alter America’s relations with the Muslim world and settle one of its bitterest grievances.
Two years later, he has managed to forge surprising unanimity on at least one topic: Barack Obama. A visit here finds both Israelis and Palestinians blame him forthe current stalemate – just as they blame one another.
Instead of becoming a heady triumph of his diplomatic skill and special insight, Obama’s peace process is viewed almost universally in Israel as a mistake-riddled fantasy. And far from becoming the transcendent figure in a centuries-old drama, Obama has become just another frustrated player on a hardened Mideast landscape.
The current state of play sums up the problem. Obama’s demand that the Israelis stop building settlements on the West Bank was met, at long last, by a temporary and partial freeze, but its brief renewal is now the subject of intensive negotiations.
Meanwhile, Palestinian leaders have refused American demands to hold peace talks with the Israelis before the freeze is extended. Talks with Arab states over gestures intended to build Israeli confidence – a key part of Obama’s early plan — have long since been scrapped.
The political peace process to which Obama committed so much energy is considered a failure so far. And in the world’s most pro-American state, the public and its leaders have lost any faith in Obama and – increasingly — even in the notion of a politically negotiated peace.
Even those who still believe in the process that Obama has championed view his conduct as a deeply unfunny comedy of errors.
“He’s like rain,” said a top Israeli official involved in diplomacy with the U.S., speaking of Obama’s role in negotiations. “You can do all kinds of things to cope with it.”
Some fret that not only has Obama failed to move the process forward, but that he and his Israeli and Palestinian counterparts may have dealt it a setback that will leave it worse off than when they began.
“Each of them has exacerbated the mistakes of the other,” said Michael Herzog, a retired general who still plays an informal role advising Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s negotiators. He worries that the result of the bumbling could be “disastrous: people will lose hope in the possibility of a two-state solution.”
The White House declined to comment for this story. But in general, the Americans point fingers back at the region. They’re unsure whether Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, has the will to make peace. They’ve been surprised and disappointed by Arab leaders’ unwillingness to bolster Israel’s confidence in the process with diplomatic concessions or financial support for the Palestinian Authority. And they are dissatisfied with the domestic political excuses of an Israeli Prime Minister they see as having chosen his own intractable coalition, and who is now – in the view of one American official – “running out the clock.”
Peel back any corner of the current negotiations, and the problems quickly become evident.
In August, the Obama administration announced that it would sell 84 F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, part of the largest arms deal in American history.
The plan drew some grumbles from pro-Israel members of the Congress, who worried that the sale would tip the balance of power in the region. But Israel’s government remained publicly silent. Privately, in August – a top Israeli official told POLITICO -- they asked the Obama administration to match the Saudi sale with 20 F-35 jets for the Israeli Air Force, a move that would maintain the “qualitative military advantage” that has long been a principle of American policy toward Israel.
Those F-35s are now at the heart of a proposed deal between the U.S. and Israel over the renewed 90-day freeze.
The notion that Israel would get $2 billion worth of military hardware for a three-month delay in the construction of a few houses appears incomprehensible, and has drawn criticism for two reasons: Netanyahu’s conservative coalition partners worry that the Americans are selling them yesterday’s carpet, making a condition of something that was already in the works. His American critics, meanwhile, expressed astonishment that Obama would pay so much for so little.
The reality is more complicated, and emblematic of the stilted relationship between the United States and its ally, and of the Israeli angst over American support, its mistrust of Obama, and its assumption that peace talks will fail. The Israelis are using the talks – viewed by most of the government as a fantasy – as a bridge to their more immediate security needs.
“It’s not connected to the 90 days – it’s connected to the Saudi deal,” said a senior aide to Netanyahu. “It’s not something [Netanyahu] had in his pocket.”
Still, a visitor finds no shortage of good news on the ground. Israel’s tech sector is booming, Tel Aviv’s cafes bustle and Israel has enjoyed a period largely free of suicide bombings and rocket attacks. In the Palestinian territories, there is also a positive tale to tell: The robust economic growth in West Bank cities patrolled by a functioning Palestinian police force.
But the American president has been diminished, even in an era without active hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians. His demands on the parties appear to shrink each month, with the path to a grand peace settlement narrowing to the vanishing point. The lack of Israeli faith in him and his process has them using the talks to extract more tangible security assurances – the jets. And though America remains beloved, Obama is about as popular here as he is in Oklahoma. A Jerusalem Post poll in May found 9 percent of Israelis consider Obama “pro-Israel,” while 48 percent say he’s “pro-Palestinian.”
Other polling in Israel shows a growing gap between aspirations for peace and the faith that it can happen. One survey last month found that 72 percent of Israelis favor negotiations, while only 33 percent think they can bear fruit. (Palestinians show a smaller gap, primarily because a smaller majority favors negotiations.)
Obama has resisted advisers’ suggestions that he travel to Israel or speak directly to Israelis as he has to Muslims in Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia.
“Israelis really hate Obama’s guts,” said Shmuel Rosner, a columnist for two leading Israeli newspapers. “We used to trust Americans to act like Americans, and this guy is like a European leader.”
Many senior Israeli leaders have concluded that Hillary Clinton and John McCain were right about Obama’s naivete and inexperience.
“The naďve liberals who are at the heart of the administration really believe in all the misconceptions the Palestinians and all their friends all over the world are trying to place,” said Yossi Kuperwasser, a former high-ranking military intelligence officer who is now deputy director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs.
Kuperwasser, like other Israelis, bridled at the suggestion that the country’s dislike of Obama draws from the Muslim influences of his heritage – or even his name.
“It drives me crazy. Who cares that his middle name is Hussein? It’s the last thing we care about. [To suggest that] is just anti-Semitism,” he said. “There is one reason why we are hesitant about this guy: he doesn’t understand us.”
The deal on 90 more days of freeze currently hangs in the balance. Netanyahu is also trying to sell his coalition partners on an administration promise that there won’t be a demand for a third freeze, and on another promise – which has provoked the same claims that it’s too much, or too little – to veto a threatened attempt to advance Palestinian statehood through the United Nations.
The demand for a 90-day freeze in new construction has, all sides agree, a real internal logic: American leaders have said they hope the Israelis and Palestinians will resolve the question of the border of a Palestinian state. And once that’s resolved, the issue of settlements – which Obama raised at his Cairo speech last June, and which has emerged as a prime impediment to talks -- will, the theory goes, be resolved with it. The scenario: Most of the “settlements” will be put within mutually agreed borders of Israel, the rest will be clearly out of bounds, and the residents of far-flung Jewish communities on West Bank hilltops will be on notice that Israeli soldiers will soon be knocking on their doors to drag them out of the state of Palestine.
The problem is that virtually nobody in Israel who isn’t required by the logic of politics to express public faith in the political process of peace talks has much faith that the talks will lead anywhere. Netanyahu’s coalition is dominated by people with a profound skepticism about not just these talks, but of any negotiated peace.
“The only positive policy is to operate under the realistic assumption that as long as the PLO do not change fundamentally their thinking, no government of Israel can sign an agreement with them,” said Beni Begin, a cabinet minister from Netanyahu’s own Likud party and – like most of the Israeli government – a firm skeptic of the prospects for a Palestinian state any time soon.
The extremist group Hamas’s control of the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, “is not a ‘real problem’,” Begin says, mocking the diplomatic conversation on the topic. “It’s an insurmountable problem. Everyone knows it.”
Netanyahu’s close staff and his government share some of that skepticism.
“It might be that the reason you haven't had peace with the Palestinians is not because you haven’t had changes in policies, not because you haven’t had changes with the American approach, but because the Palestinians haven’t brought themselves to real reconciliation with Israel,” Netanyahu’s closest adviser, Ron Dermer, told POLITICO.
Netanyahu, oddly enough, given his perception around the world (and particularly in Washington) as an unyielding hawk, sounds like a virtual peacenik compared with many of his advisers. Almost alone on the right, the prime minister “thinks (Palestinian president) Abu Mazen may rise to the occasion,” Dermer said.
“The prime minister is not only more optimistic than his staff. The prime minister is more optimistic than his ministers,” he said, adding that unlike Begin, Netanyahu “does not believe that the status quo is sustainable.”
Netanyahu is almost alone in his party in suggesting that the peace process could go somewhere; one of the few others in Israeli public life who insists on that point is his chief rival and critic, opposition leader Tzipi Livni. Peace talks really could advance, she argues, if Israel had a leader whom the Americans and Palestinians could trust, as they did when she served as Foreign Minister when her party, Kadima, ran the government before the rightward correction that occurred just weeks after Obama’s own election.
“I believe it’s feasible, but I don’t have a 100 percent guarantee. What I don’t do is try to undermine the willingness of the other side,” Livni told POLITICO. “When we negotiated there was trust – there’s no trust now.... It depends on the way you negotiate.”
Livni scrupulously avoids criticizing Obama’s conduct of the peace talks, but those around her are blunter.
“If Obama wanted to be a transformational figure, he would never have led with the settlements,” said Eyal Arad, the architect of Livni’s campaign for prime minister. He argues – like most Israelis – that Obama inadvertently got talks hung up on a matter of irrelevant principle, rather than engaging the reality that some settlements can stay while others must go.
“The settlements were pushed by a bunch of left-wingers who were out of sync with the realities and were out of government too long,” he said. “The irony is that Obama went directly back to the place where George Bush the father left off.”
Another of Livni’s top lieutenants, her former party chairman and Knesset ally Yohanan Plessner, is among a surprising spectrum of Israeli leaders who have begun to imagine radically different alternatives to the negotiated, political peace that American and Palestinian officials insist must be the main road to a settlement.
“The whole focus on final status isn’t compatible with the political reality on the Israel side and the Palestinian side,” he said, arguing that a better option is a regime under which Israeli and Palestinian leaders would build the Palestinian economy, remove far-flung settlements and strengthen a de facto Palestinian state “as a tunnel to final status.”
To him, the endless talks about talks are a distraction. As for Obama, he said, “You have to create a crisis that serves an end. This crisis today – I don’t know what it’s serving.”
Palestinian leaders say they, too – for different reasons -- are losing faith in the political talks.
“[Netanyahu] has a chance and he’s wasting it,” said the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erakat. “Given the chance between settlements and peace he’s always chosen settlements.”
The advocacy director of the American Task Force on Palestine, Ghaith al-Omari, said the frustration in Ramallah isn’t only with Netanyahu.
Abbas and other Palestinian leaders are “personally fed up with the whole thing,” he said, and “losing faith in the process, both with the Israeli willingness to deliver and the Americans’ ability to deliver the Israelis.”
But Plessner’s suggestion of an interim process reflects Israeli disillusion with the notion of a negotiated peace process, one that some of its veterans fear is already on its last legs. It’s echoed by a surprising range of voices: Former Israeli U.N Ambassador Dore Gold, a hawkish Netanyahu ally, has cited the skepticism about the political process outlined by the left-leaning Rob Malley and Hussein Agha in the New York Review of Books.
Livni dismisses this alternative.
“For any deal you need two sides. The Palestinians are not going to accept that. It’s not going to happen, and it doesn't serve the Israeli interest to end the conflict,” she said.
She also says Obama’s unpopularity – now a fact of life – doesn’t matter.
“It’s not important: People in Israel can love him, admire him, hate him, dislike him – people can oppose everything he says – he is the United States ... we have the umbilical cord with the United States. We cannot cut this.”
Others aren’t so sure. If Netanyahu comes close to a deal, they expect Obama will have to play a key role in closing it.
“In the money time, the popularity of the president will matter a great deal,” said the senior official with a key role between the countries.
George Mitchell, Obama’s special envoy, often compares the stalled peace process here to his famous role in settling Northern Ireland’s Troubles, where he had “700 days of failure and one day of success.”
The 700th day since Mitchell began work will pass next month without, it appears safe to say, anything resembling political progress toward a Palestinian state. In Israel, indeed, the debate focuses largely on whether the American-led process has left negotiations at a standstill – or pushed them backwards.
“What will happen after 90 days if we haven’t decided the border?” asks Kuperwasser. “And we won’t settle the borders.”
Meanwhile the president who hoped to dramatically remake the regional landscape has, in the end, simply become part of it.
“Obama’s biggest problem is that we don’t buy what he’s selling, and that is hope,” said one Israeli veteran of past negotiations. “There’s this sincerity about the American approach that is heartbreaking to watch.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the number and value of F-35 fighter jets a top Israeli official said were requested by Israel. The official said 20 F-35 jets, worth $2 billion, were requested from the Obama administration.
© 2010 Capitol News Company, LLC
www,politico.com
-
Political commentary from Andrew Malcolm
« Previous Post | Top of the Ticket Home
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/04/obama-deficit-speech.html#more
Why Obama was forced to give today's deficit speech
Comments (0) (27)(22)April 13, 2011 | 2:22 am
________________________ ________________________ ___________
If President Obama is in political trouble, just wait a minute. He'll give a speech. He thinks speech-making is his best skill and clearly prefers campaigning over presidenting at a desk.
Oh, look! Obama's giving another speech this afternoon.
It's at George Washington University, the administration's new favorite homefield speech-giving place where Obama had Hillary Clinton talk about foreign policy a few weeks ago.
Obama has looked distracted in recent weeks. He launched a war in Libya while taking his family around South America. For more than a week Obama had Clinton do the public explaining and take the "Say What, a Third War?" heat for the guy who beat her in the 2008 Democratic primaries by arguing against such irrelevant foreign conflicts.
Nine days after the first Tomahawks blew something up in Tripoli, a besieged....
...Obama finally talked about how it was suddenly in America's interest to end the 42-year reign of a notorious bad guy. Obama said he was worried that Kadafi would kill innocent civilians, although worse threats to civilians go on every day in countless lands without U.S. military intervention.
This includes Syria, where scores have died to government bullets in recent weeks and Obama only sent out his press secretary Jay Carney to strike fear into the heart of President Bashar al-Assad by issuing two stern warnings.
Last week when the United States government faced an historic shutdown, Capt. Quixote was off in Philadelphia talking of windmills before speaking at an Al Sharpton gala in New York.
When Democratic Sen. Harry Reid and Republican House Speaker John Boehner worked out a last-minute budget deal, Obama himself made the late-night announcement to try to take ownership.
The next day he made a brief but weird visit to the Lincoln Memorial to explain to some startled tourists who hadn't asked that the place would have been closed down but for his budget brokering.
Here's Obama 's problem: Once again, he's lost control of the capitol's political narrative.
The bully pulpit is a powerful presidential tool -- if the chief executive is talking of relevant things. But Obama keeps sidetracking himself into all these areas of society that he so wants to fix, even though there are worse problems elsewhere.
For a long time Obama talked of little but healthcare and financial reforms, while polls showed Americans wanted jobs. He got his healthcare bill, but dozens of Democrats got unemployed from Congress.
When Americans wanted an explanation for a war over Libya's sand, Obama was urging Brazil to drill off its shores and toasting every presidente within sight.
As Americans realized the Democrat majorities had not written a budget for the current fiscal year when in control throughout 2010, Obama was denouncing schoolyard bullies and calling for more college educations, something even Rep. Ron Paul might endorse.
Whenever the president acknowledges the budget deficit and the $14+ trillion national debt, he says yes, yes, of course, we have to cut waste. He then proceeds to provide a long list of things we need to "invest" more in like education, bridges, green energy and protecting "the most vulnerable" in our society.
Obama doesn't realize how many millions of Americans consider themselves vulnerable today, even with jobs and a home for now. In Philadelphia when one man dared to ask about the rising price of gas for his commute, the president suggested he trade-in for a new car. This from the green president who took a 17-vehicle motorcade of limos and SUVs to admire clean cars last month. Not even one symbolic electric job.
The result of such disconnection is that last week there was no-nada-zip talk about his investing. The parade had moved on without its presidential drum major.
Every word of Washington's political discussion was about cuts in the budget, exactly and only what Republicans wanted to debate. In a town where all-powerful presidents have set the political agenda, the speaker from Ohio, who gets mocked for his emotions and tan, was driving the discussions with well-mannered aplomb.
Hence, again the perceived need for another Obama speech today. He'll try to recapture control by adjusting the subject: Yes, yes the deficit is bad, though not as bad as you-know-which party makes it out to be. We do need to trim it with some cuts over time. But what we really need is more money to get stuff done.
You know, those rich people with the money to create new jobs? Let's take some more from them in taxes and Social Security assessments. Not from you! From them. Who's gonna oppose somebody else paying more taxes?
Obama's recent speeches have been lo-cal on substance, heavy on swell-sounding calls for someone to do something -- such as increase domestic oil production. The media reports. The people listen. They nod. And very few point out that, wait a minute, the guy talking is the one who can make that happen. So, why isn't he doing instead of talking all the time?
Obama now hopes to redirect the debate off budget cutting onto what he thinks is safer political ground for him, end tax breaks for the wealthy few. Even though, starting tomorrow, he'll be hitting up that same crowd of Richie Riches for the $1 billion he wants to buy a second term for four more years of this.
-- Andrew Malcolm
Speaking of money, you need none to follow The Ticket via Twitter alerts of each new Ticket item. Or click this: @latimestot. Our Facebook Like page is over here. We're also available on Kindle. Use the ReTweet buttons above to share any item with family and friends.
Photos: Bradley C. Bower / Bloomberg (Obama campaigns in Philadelphia, April 6); Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg (Boehner and Reid, April 6); Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press (Obama at Lincoln Memorial, April 9).
________________________ ___________-
ha ha ha ha ha - even the libs at the LAT see this jerkoff for the disaster he is.
-
Jack explains why:
[/youtube]
What an open administration...They won't even show the presidents birth certificate.
-
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/30/world/middleeast/mounting-crises-raise-questions-on-capacity-of-obamas-team.html