The Obama downgrade

[Fury]

The Obama Downgrade
The real reason the U.S. could lose its AAA rating.

So the credit-rating agencies that helped to create the financial crisis that led to a deep recession are now warning that the U.S. could lose the AAA rating it has had since 1917. As painfully ironic as this is, there's no benefit in shooting the messengers. The real culprit is the U.S. political class, especially the President who has presided over this historic collapse of fiscal credibility.

Moody's and the boys are citing the risk of a default on August 2 as the proximate reason for their warning. But Americans should understand that the debt ceiling is merely the trigger. The gun is the spending boom of the last three years and the prospect that Washington lacks the political will to reduce it in the years to come.

On spending, it is important to recall how extraordinary the blowout of the last three years has been. We've seen nothing like it since World War II. Nothing close. The nearby chart tracks federal outlays as a share of GDP since 1960. The early peaks coincide with the rise of the Great Society, the recession of 1974-75, and then a high of 23.5% with the recession of 1982 and the Reagan defense buildup.

From there, spending declines, most rapidly during the 1990s as defense outlays fell to 3% of GDP in 2000 from its Reagan peak of 6.2% in 1986. The early George W. Bush years saw spending bounce up to a plateau of roughly 20% of GDP, but no more than 20.7% as recently as 2008.

Then came the Obama blowout, in league with Nancy Pelosi's Congress. With the recession as a rationale, Democrats consciously blew up the national balance sheet, lifting federal outlays to 25% in 2009, the highest level since 1945. (Even in 1946, with millions still in the military, spending was only 24.8% of GDP. In 1947 it fell to 14.8%.) Though the recession ended in June 2009, spending in 2010 stayed high at nearly 24%, and this year it is heading back toward 25%.

This is the main reason that federal debt held by the public as a share of GDP has climbed from 40.3% in 2008, to 53.5% in 2009, 62.2% in 2010 and an estimated 72% this year, and is expected to keep rising in the future. These are heights not seen since the Korean War, and many analysts think U.S. debt will soon hit 90% or 100% of GDP.

Congress is responsible for the way so much of this spending was wasted, resulting in little job creation and the slowest economic recovery since the 1930s. But in the U.S. political system, Presidents are supposed to be the fiscal adults. When they abdicate, the teenagers invite over their special interest friends and blow the inheritance.

The President is now claiming to have found fiscal virtue, but notice how hard he has fought House Republicans as they've sought to abate the spending boom. First he used the threat of a government shutdown to whittle the fiscal 2011 spending cuts down to very little. Then he invited Paul Ryan to sit in the front row for a speech while he called his House budget un-American.

Now Mr. Obama is using the debt-ceiling debate as a battering ram not to control spending but to command a tax increase. We're told the White House list of immediate budget savings, the ones that matter most because they are enforceable by the current Congress, are negligible. His offer for immediate domestic nondefense discretionary cuts: $2 billion.

As for Mr. Obama's proposed entitlement cuts, they are all nibbling around the edges of programs that are growing far faster than inflation. He's offering few reforms that would make a difference in the long run. Oh, and ObamaCare is untouchable, despite its $1 trillion in new spending over the next several years, growing even faster after that.

So now we have the inevitable showdown over the debt limit, which must be raised to pay for all of this spending. And Mr. Obama is blaming Republicans for being irresponsible because they won't raise taxes in return for promises of modest future spending restraint. And some people even fall for it.

We've said we think it would be foolish of Republicans to walk into Mr. Obama's debt-limit trap and let him blame them for the financial fallout, including a possible credit downgrade. But this is not because we think they will deserve the blame. Even if this debt-ceiling crisis passes, the threat of a credit downgrade will continue and grow until Mr. Obama changes his policies, or Americans change Presidents.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304203304576446332084493902.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop



Disgusting.

[Soul Crusher]

Again

Obama ignored Simpson Bowles almost a year ago.   

Obama panned ryans plan six months ago and sat on his commie ass. 


Now at the final hour Obama is complaining?   

Fuck him.    He needs to be treated like a spendthrift teen who just blew out his credit card.   Deal with the mess, but cut up the credit card and stop Obama from spending any more.   

He has long lost deserving the benefit of the doubt any longer. 

[Fury]

240 and other liberals are now masquerading as fiscal hawks while they log 1 post about the economy for every 800 about Bachmann. Shameful.

[Soul Crusher]

BUMP

[dario73]

Did you guys hear the new metaphor being used by the democrats? They are calling it the "tea party downgrade".  Man, were the democrats, at a time when they controlled both houses, concerned with the nation's credit rating when they were pushing for billions of dollars to be spent in entitlement programs and a failed stim bill?

[Soul Crusher]

Did you guys hear the new metaphor being used by the democrats? They are calling it the "tea party downgrade".  Man, were the democrats, at a time when they controlled both houses, concerned with the nation's credit rating when they were pushing for billions of dollars to be spent in entitlement programs and a failed stim bill?

No one is buying it.    Its pure nonsense. 

AGAIN - NOT ONE TRAITOR COMMIE OBAMA GAG BALL DIRTBAG ON THIS SITE CAN REFUTE THE FOLLOWING: 


1.  OBAMA SPENT THE FIRST TWO YEARS RECKLESSLY SPENDING LIKE A LUNATIC AND ADDED AN ENTITLEMENT. 

2.  OBAMA IGNORED SIMPSON BOWLES RECS.

3.  OBAMA DEMONIZED THE RYAN PLAN WHICH WOULD HAVE KEPT THE TRIPLE A RATING. 

4.  OBAMA DEMONIZED CUT CAP AND BALANCE WHICH WOULD HAVE KEPT THE TRIPLE A RATING 

5.  OBAMA VETOES THE BOEHNER/REID DEAL THAT HAD 800 BILLION IN REVENUES. 

6.  OBAMA IS STILL TALKING ABOUT MORE SPENDING 

7.  OBAMA AND THE COMMIE LEFT HAVE NOT PASSED A BUDGET IN OVER TWO YEARS 

8.  OBAMA EXPANDED THE WARS, AND STARTED NEW ONES. 






So anyone blaming the Tea Party is doing so out of pure bogus crap trying to shift blame away from their reckless gag ball Obama. 
 

[dario73]

Not to mention that the Tea Party stated that they did not agree with the approved debt deal because it did not cut enough expenses. The very same thing that S&P was looking for in order to not downgrade USA.

[Soul Crusher]

The Obama Hockey Stick


http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/08/obama-hockey-stick.html




Last night for the first time in history U.S debt was downgraded. The Left still denies that President Obama has a lot of responsibility for this situation, instead laying blame on Republican refusal to raise taxes on the rich.

As I have written previously, it is dishonest to give voters the impression that tax increases on the rich is a solution to the deficit. In the latest projection by the Congressional Budget Office, the ten year deficit is estimated at 13 trillion dollars. By contrast, Obama’s various tax increases on the rich will only bring in 1 trillion in the same period.

The 13 trillion dollar deficit which the President helped create and long terms entitlement deficits are the main reason why S&P downgraded U.S debt, not the 1 trillion in tax increases which Republicans prevented.

As a response to the economic crises and based on ideological conviction, President Obama decided to expand federal non-defense spending more than any President in recent history. This unprecedented expansion of government can perhaps be justified by orthodox Keynesianism. But we should not allow the left to deny the magnitude of expansion itself, which they are trying to do.

Let me illustrate how much of a departure from history the Obama Presidency represents in terms of spending. I will graph non-defense federal spending as a share of GDP since 1975.


What emerges is what I refer to as the Obama Hockey Stick, parallel to the IPCC global warming Hockey Stick. While federal Non-defense spending was quite constant previous to Obama, it has risen rapidly under his administration.

The 2008 crisis was used to justify the expansion of government. But if the expansion was merely temporary, it would not have caused the U.S debt to be downgraded. As the Presidents chief of staff said: "Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before." Using the crises as a pretext, the plan was to expand the size and score of government permanently.

Thus according to the latest CBO long term budget outlook, and using the Whitehouse own estimate for defense spending, non-defense federal spending is projected to be 19.6% in 2016, when the recession is projected to be long over. Spending in 2016 is projected to be 4 percentage points higher than the historic average, with deficits of 6% of GDP.

Bruce Bartlett, a former libertarian Reagan advisor who in recent years converted to hard core liberalism, has described President Obama as a “moderate conservative”. Most of Bruce Bartlett’s recent writing is about promoting Social Democratic European policies as a role model for the U.S. He writes:

“an honest examination of his [Obama’s] presidency must conclude that he has in fact been moderately conservative”

Paul Krugman makes the same argument here. (Unlike Bartlett, Krugman is at least honest enough to call himself a liberal, though he doesn’t consider the President one.)

Bruce Bartlett innumerate argument ignores actual spending data. Instead his hilarious evidence for conservatism is that just like famously conservative Massachusetts Democrats and Mitt Romney, Obama-care was enacted instead of fully socializing health (not a joke, Bartlett actually writes this). Bartlett’s other equally hilarious evidence is that Obama’s advisors wanted a stimulus twice as large, i.e. 2 trillion dollars.

Taking over the U.S health care industry and the biggest fiscal stimulus in human history is the evidence for Obama being a “moderate conservative”. Bartlett incidentally also does not appear to understand that Obama did not have the votes and popular support to go much further in either case. This reminds me of an old communist joke (just a joke, don’t interpret it otherwise):

“Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, is telling a group of young Pioneers:
-Lenin was so kind to children! One morning, he was shaving near an open window. And then a little boy walked past. And Vladimir Ilyich looked at him as he was passing by… and then the boy went away.
-So where is the kindness here, Nadezhda Konstantinovna?” one of the kids asked.
-Don’t you see!? With his razor, he could easily slit the boy’s throat! But he didn’t! That’s how kind Lenin was”

Well Bruce, perhaps in today’s’ Cuba or 1968 Paris President Obama would be considered a “moderate conservative” and you as a “libertarian”. But in America expanding government by more than a quarter and doubling the long term deficit deficits is rarely what we mean by fiscal conservatives.

Why don’t you guys on the left stop pretending to be “conservatives” and “libertarians”, and just defend the left-wing policies you are advocating and the deficits your policies are causing?

UPDATE

Interestingly, some readers do not accept my uncontroversial claim that President Obama raised spending. Instead, they seem to accept the excuse that everything is due to the 2008 crises and therefore temporary.

Let me expand by showing you some data from the 2011 Congressional Budget Office Long-Term Budget outlook. (GDP numbers are not identical, in part since the BEA recently updated historic GDP). I also added a proper inflation adjustment to defense spending. 2016 projected Non-Defense expenditure is even higher than I first wrote.

The CBO anticipates that the economy will have recovered by 2016, with unemployment at 5.3%. If the expansion of government we observe is only because of the crises, surely Non-Defense spending will go back to its historic rates of about 16%. Right?
Wrong. Non-Defense spending is projected to be 20.0% in 2016.

I added the projected years to a new graph.


What makes this a Hockey Stick is not only the fact that spending goes up in 2009, it's that spending stays at those elevated levels.

In 2008, the CBO projection for Non-Defense spending in 2016 was 16.3% of GDP.

In 2011, after the crises and President Obama’s policy changes, the CBO projection of Non-Defense spending in 2016, when they predicts the economy has fully recovered, is 20.0% of GDP.

A small part of this is the crises itself; depressing GDP, though it appears the CBO projection of real GDP in 2016 (still assumed to be a recovered economy) has not changed much from 2008. I don’t know if they have re-estimated the cost of entitlements.

A significant component of the increase represents active policy choices by the President, such as expansion of education and social programs in his budgets, the Stimulus, the Health Care plan, and interest for the deficits that are financing current spending.

[Soul Crusher]

No Statement or Comment from Obama on U.S. Credit Rating Downgrade
CNS News ^ | Monday, August 08, 2011 | Susan Jones


(CNSNews.com) - More than 48 hours after Standard & Poors lowered its triple-A credit rating for the United States, President Obama has not said a thing about it, although one of his advisers is blaming tea party conservatives.

The president's Saturday morning radio address had been taped in advance of his weekend trip to Camp David, but if he chooses to, the president can always do a live broadcast to reflect changing events. S&P's downgrade was announced Friday after the stock markets closed.

According to the White House Web site, Obama has "no public schedule" on Monday.

The president's adviser David Axelrod told CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday that the S&P's downgrade from AAA to AA+ for the first time in U.S. history was a "tea party downgrade."

"I think first of all, people are less concerned about that than where we go moving forward," Axelrod said. "But let's look at the history of this: The fact of the matter is that this is essentially a tea party downgrade. The tea party brought us to the brink of a default," Axelrod said.

Sen. John Kerry, speaking Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," also blamed the downgrade on the tea party: "I believe this is without question the tea party downgrade. This is the tea party downgrade because a minority of people in the House of Representatives countered even the will of many REps in the United States Senate, who were prepared to do a bigger deal..."

Responding to Kerry, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he agrees "that there is dysfunction in our system and a lot of it has to do with the failure of the president of the United States to lead.

"I would remind you that Republicans control one-third of the government," McCain said. "The Senate and the presidency are controlled by the Democrats. And the fact is that the president never came forward with a (deficit reduction) plan. Now, I was gratified to hear that he had plans, but there was never a specific plan. There was always the so-called 'leading from behind.'

"Now, look, we could have reached an agreement (on raising the debt ceiling) a lot earlier," McCain admitted, but he said members of the House of Representatives received a "mandate" from voters last November on jobs, the economy, and spending. For them to agree to tax and spending increases would have repudiated that mandate, McCain said.

[dario73]

By FAR, the worst president ever. And the scary thing is, his term is not over yet. It CAN GET WORSE.

[Soul Crusher]

Obama Makes History (of Our AAA Credit)
National Review ^ | 8/8/11




The Obama administration and congressional Democrats are betting their political futures on the hope that the American electorate is ignorant and forgetful, and hence the memo has gone out to functionaries hither and yon, from David Axelrod to John Kerry: This is to be called the “tea-party downgrade.” That this is said with straight faces bespeaks either an unshakable contempt for the mind of the American voter or an as-yet unplumbed capacity for Democratic self-delusion.


Let us revisit the facts. The original debt-ceiling deal put forward by the Democrats totaled $0.00 in debt reduction. This would have fallen approximately $4 trillion short of the $4 trillion in debt reduction the credit-rating agencies suggested would constitute a “credible” step toward maintaining our AAA rating and avoiding a downgrade. This $0.00 program was the so-called “clean” debt-ceiling bill — the one that contained not a farthing of debt reduction. Bad as it was, Republicans agreed to give Democrats a vote on it. Some 82 Democrats and every Republican voted against it, and for good reason: Doing nothing at all is hardly a “credible” program.


The Democrats have suggested that Republicans’ refusal to accede to tax hikes is the main reason Standard & Poor’s felt it necessary to issue a downgrade, the first in American history, last Friday evening. In their assessment of Standard & Poor’s reasoning, the Democrats are acutely at odds with Standard & Poor’s. The credit-rating agency did not call for tax hikes in its assessment: “Standard & Poor’s takes no position on the mix of spending and revenue measures that Congress and the Administration might conclude is appropriate for putting the U.S.’s finances on a sustainable footing.” No position on tax hikes. But S&P, along with the other credit-rating agencies, has long taken a position on one aspect of our fiscal troubles: entitlement reform. From S&P again: “The plan envisions only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability.”


As anybody who has looked at our long-term deficit projections knows, entitlement spending is the major driver of our future deficits. With unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare already running into trillions of dollars — many multiples of our GDP — it is implausible that taxes would be raised sufficiently to meet those obligations. Sustaining present spending levels over coming decades while maintaining current levels of debt would mean nearly doubling every federal tax: income, payroll, inheritance, excises, etc. To repeat: That’s to maintain current debt levels, not to reduce them. Even if the political will existed to inflict such tax increases on the American people, doing so would prove economically ruinous. Entitlement reform, then — not taxes, not President Obama’s fictitious “balanced approach” — is rightly understood, as S&P argues, as the “key to long-term fiscal sustainability.” Tea-party leaders, far from being a barrier to entitlement reform, have demanded it.


The main obstacle to reform is the gentleman who lives at at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and his legislative enablers down the street. Recall: Though Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives from 2008–10, and therefore could have forced through any budget they saw fit, they left the nation with no budget at all — much less a reformed or balanced one — never bothering to pass one in the year before they lost their House majority. Though congressional Democrats could not be bothered, President Obama did submit a 2011 budget. It contained $0.00 toward entitlement reform. He soon disavowed his own budget proposal. The president later gave a speech in which he said he’d like to see $4 trillion in deficit-reduction, but submitted no budget or other legislation to accompany that rhetoric. The head of the Congressional Budget Office, a Democrat, was moved to observe dryly that his agency “does not score speeches.”


But the CBO does score legislative proposals, and gave good marks to a bipartisan proposal offered by the president’s own hand-picked deficit-reduction panel. The presidential commission offered a credible plan, one that even included the tax increases so beloved of this administration. Naturally, the president disavowed his own commission’s proposal, just as he would disavow his own budget proposal. Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi declared it “dead on arrival” in the House. The plan was angrily rejected by congressional Democrats precisely and specifically because it contained modest entitlement-reform proposals. Likewise, Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, which would have brought health-care entitlement spending down to sustainable levels while making key reforms to improve the performance of those programs, passed the House only to be rejected out of hand by Sen. Harry Reid and his Democratic colleagues, precisely because it contained entitlement reforms. It would have cut some $4.4 trillion off of the deficits over a decade, well beyond the $4 trillion mark suggested by the credit-rating agencies. But Democrats would have none of it.

The deal that finally did pass would have contained significantly more in deficit-reduction, except for the fact that Democrats categorically refused to consider — is this sounding familiar? — entitlement reform, the most important issue.

Content to offer blind opposition, the Obama administration never put forward a detailed plan of its own, though it insisted it had one, a fact that resulted in a moment of unintentional comedy when White House press secretary Jay Carney irritatedly asked unconvinced reporters: “You need it written down?” When it comes to the Obama administration and spending restraint, the American people have every reason to demand that the president put it in writing.

And so we are led to this sorry pass. We are sympathetic to protests that S&P may have reacted more strongly to the political drama surrounding the debt-ceiling debate than was justified by the underlying economics: Despite the troubles in the eurozone, which are quite severe, Germany and France currently boast of higher credit ratings than that of the United States, a nation that accounts for nearly a quarter of the world’s economic output. But even those who believe S&P has overreacted must concede that the finances of the United States have been considerably weakened since 2008. Obama’s deficits have been unprecedented in peacetime, and this downgrade is unprecedented for our nation, at war or at peace. Its effects remain unknown at this time, but its causes do not: S&P spelled out its reasoning quite clearly.

Entitlement reform is the “key issue.” The Tea Party is not standing in the way of entitlement reform. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid are. Democrats believe that they have discovered a cartoon villain in the Tea Party, and they are hoping that American voters are gullible enough to be distracted by the political theatrics. Come November 2012, Americans should keep in mind both the insult and the injury — to the nation and its credit. President Obama has indeed “made history,” as he promised, but not the sort that we might have hoped for


________________________ ________________________ ____


NOTHING ELSE NEEDS TO BE SAID 



OBAMA = LYING PIECE OF TRASH 

[Soul Crusher]

Obama: It's My Economy? Fine. Give It To Me.(2009)
TCM ^ | 7-14-2009 | Rachel Slajda



In a speech at Macomb Community College in Warren, Mich., today, President Obama veered off his prepared remarks to take this shot at some of the "it's Obama's economy" critics:


I love those folks who helped get us in this mess, and suddenly they say, "This is Obama's economy." That's fine. Give it to me. My job is to solve problems, not stand on the sidelines and carp and gripe.


(Excerpt) Read more at tpmlivewire.talkingpoint smemo.com ...

[Option D]

Obama: It's My Economy? Fine. Give It To Me.(2009)
TCM ^ | 7-14-2009 | Rachel Slajda



In a speech at Macomb Community College in Warren, Mich., today, President Obama veered off his prepared remarks to take this shot at some of the "it's Obama's economy" critics:


I love those folks who helped get us in this mess, and suddenly they say, "This is Obama's economy." That's fine. Give it to me. My job is to solve problems, not stand on the sidelines and carp and gripe.


(Excerpt) Read more at tpmlivewire.talkingpoint smemo.com ...

hahahahaha funny picture.. hahahaha too bad its not remotely true... hahahahaha.. what a dunce.. too easy drill sergeant..this assclown really believes this sensational ass politics.. hahahah what a preteen.. 

[Soul Crusher]

The main obstacle to reform is the gentleman who lives at at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and his legislative enablers down the street. Recall: Though Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives from 2008–10, and therefore could have forced through any budget they saw fit, they left the nation with no budget at all — much less a reformed or balanced one — never bothering to pass one in the year before they lost their House majority. Though congressional Democrats could not be bothered, President Obama did submit a 2011 budget. It contained $0.00 toward entitlement reform. He soon disavowed his own budget proposal. The president later gave a speech in which he said he’d like to see $4 trillion in deficit-reduction, but submitted no budget or other legislation to accompany that rhetoric. The head of the Congressional Budget Office, a Democrat, was moved to observe dryly that his agency “does not score speeches.”

[Soul Crusher]

 

[Soul Crusher]

Nile Gardiner

Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR. The stunning decline of Barack Obama 2011 edition: 10 key reasons why the Obama presidency continues to melt down

By Nile Gardiner World Last updated: August 8th, 2011

109 Comments Comment on this article


http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100099871/the-stunning-decline-of-barack-obama-2011-edition-10-key-reasons-why-the-obama-presidency-continues-to-meltdown


President Obama: has lost control (Photo: Reuters)
In August last year I published a list of ten key reasons why the Obama presidency was in serious decline. This is a sequel to that post, which was one of the most read pieces on The Telegraph website in 2010. Twelve months on, the outlook continues to look exceedingly bleak for President Obama, with no sign of a recovery.

July was the worst month for the Obama presidency since the November mid-terms which saw his party emphatically drubbed in Congressional elections across the country. The president hit an all-time low with a Gallup poll at the end of the month giving him just 40 percent approval, with his rating among independents plummeting to just 34 percent. The outlook became even worse at the start of August, with dramatic falls in the stock market, and the historic decision by credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s to downgrade America’s debt.

As the latest RealClear Politics average of polls shows, less than a quarter of Americans believe the country is moving in the “right direction,” a damning indictment of the first 30 months of the Obama presidency. According to Rasmussen, that figure is as low as 14 percent, the lowest level of public confidence since November 2008.

I’ve outlined below ten key reasons why the Obama presidency continues to flounder, after a very short-lived bounce in the spring.

1. Obama isn’t trusted on the economy

A series of recent polls have demonstrated significant public discontent with President Obama on the economy, the number one issue for US voters. A Washington Post/ABC News survey in late July reported that 57 percent of Americans disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy, 60 percent disapprove of his handling of the federal budget deficit, and 52 percent are unhappy with the president on job creation. A July 21 poll for Gallup showed US economic confidence plunging to its lowest level since March 2009, with just 26 percent of Americans saying the economy is “getting better.” According to Gallup, more than two thirds of Americans now say the economy is “getting worse.” The latest Rasmussen survey shows  consumer confidence “just one point above the lowest levels of the last two years” with investor confidence “down nine points from a week ago, down 12 points from a month ago, and down 29 points from three months ago. Investor confidence has not been lower since March 13, 2009.”

2. Obama isn’t serious about the budget deficit

That’s certainly the opinion of credit agency Standard and Poor’s, which downgraded America’s AAA credit rating for the first time in 70 years, in early August. As the Congressional Budget Office revealed in a January report, the deficits generated by the Obama administration are the largest since the end of World War Two, after two years of unchecked and out of control federal spending. And as I noted in a piece on the S&P decision last week:

Since President Obama took office in January 2009, the United States has embarked on the most ambitious failed experiment in Washington meddling in US history. Huge increases in government spending, massive federal bailouts, growing regulations on businesses, thinly veiled protectionism, and the launch of a vastly expensive and deeply unpopular health care reform plan, have all combined to instill fear and uncertainty in the markets.

3. Obama’s foreign policy remains a weak-kneed and confusing mess

US foreign policy under President Obama remains a staggering mess. With a policy of “leading from behind”, Washington’s approach towards the war in Libya has been a sea of dithering and contradiction, with no discernible end goal in sight. The Obama administration has acted like a deer in the headlights in the face of momentous changes in the Middle East, and was caught napping by developments in both Egypt and Syria. In the face of the Iranian nuclear threat, the United States has been largely passive, content to pursue a foolhardy policy of engagement while Tehran edges closer to building a nuclear weapon. Over in Europe, the Russian reset has emboldened Moscow, while undermining key allies in eastern and central Europe. Obama has paid scant attention to the transatlantic alliance, weakening the Special Relationship with Britain, and sleepwalking while NATO declines. It is difficult to think of a US foreign policy that could be more ineffective that the one pursued by this administration, with the hardly surprising result that confidence in US leadership has dramatically fallen across the world since Obama took office.

4. Independents are deserting the president

In contrast to Bill Clinton, who moved to the centre after the emphatic Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994, Barack Obama has shown little inclination to do so. This is a rigidly ideological presidency with a distinctly left-wing vision and agenda. Unsurprisingly, independents have been deserting Obama in droves, a huge cause for concern for the White House as it looks to November 2012.

A Gallup survey at the end of July found just 37 percent of independents backing Obama, his lowest level of support from this group since he took office, a fall of ten points since the end of May, and down from 62 percent at the start of his presidency. A Pew Research Center survey, conducted in late July, also showed a dramatic drop in support for the president among registered independent voters, with significant implications for the presidential elections. As Pew noted in its report:

The sizeable lead Barack Obama held over a generic Republican opponent in polls conducted earlier this year has vanished as his support among independent voters has fallen off. Currently, 41% of registered voters say they would like to see Barack Obama reelected, while 40% say they would prefer to see a Republican candidate win in 2012. In May, Obama held an 11-point lead.

This shift is driven by a steep drop-off in support for Obama among independents… just 31% of independent voters want to see Obama reelected, down from 42% in May and 40% in March. Where Obama held a slim 7-point edge among independent registered voters two months ago, a generic Republican holds an 8-point edge today.

5. A majority of Americans still reject Obamacare

President Obama has stubbornly refused to back down over his hugely costly health care reform plans, commonly dubbed “Obamacare”, despite significant public opposition to them. In many ways, Obamacare is a political albatross around Obama’s neck as he heads towards 2012. The RealClear Politics average for May to July has 50.8 percent of Americans opposed to Obamacare, with just 38.6 percent in favour. Rasmussen, which tracks the issue closely, has the level of opposition to Obama’s health reforms running currently at 55 percent. CNN’s most recent polling in June placed public opposition at 56 percent. Strikingly, out of 50 polls conducted on Obamacare since the start of 2011 and listed by RealClear Politics, only two (Rasmussen in January and Gallup in March), show more support than opposition for the president’s plan.

6. The Obama presidency looks increasingly out of touch with the American people

There is a disturbing let them eat cake mentality projected by the Obama White House, whether the president is advocating higher taxes in the face of a possible double dip recession, or hosting elaborate parties while 45 million Americans depend on food stamps. No US presidency in modern times has been more elitist or out of touch than the present one, which exudes the kind of condescending left-wing snobbery that is normally the preserve of an ivory tower common room. President Obama looks increasingly aloof and out of sync with the American people, three quarters of whom now believe the country is heading down the wrong track – including a staggering 58 percent of Democrats, according to Rasmussen.

7. Conservatism is growing stronger in America

While President Obama remains determined to shift the country to the Left, the American public is increasingly conservative in terms of ideology. There is a fundamental disconnect between the most ideologically driven liberal president in US history, and a large percentage of the American people. As Gallup’s latest survey on political views shows, conservatism is by far the leading ideology in the United States. According to Gallup, nearly twice as many Americans (41 percent) call themselves conservative, compared to those who describe themselves as liberal (21 percent). Conservatives also outnumber moderates (36 percent) by a five point margin. And among Republicans, 71 percent describe themselves as “very conservative” or “conservative”, compared to just 38 percent of Democrats who call themselves “very liberal” or “liberal”.

8. The Tea Party has been a stunning success

No article on Barack Obama’s stunning decline would be complete without mention of the Tea Party, which has been undoubtedly the most influential US political movement of the decade. The Tea Party’s relentless rise played a key role in sparking the conservative revolution that swept Capitol Hill last November, and has played a major role in setting the agenda when it came to the heated debates over government spending this summer. Were it not for the Tea Party, it is likely that the budget deficit would not be the central issue it is today, and federal spending would have remained a largely inside the beltway debate instead of the talk of dinner tables across America. A truly grassroots movement has succeeded in a short period of time in humbling a presidency, and challenging the status quo on Capitol Hill.

9. The Obama presidency comes across as bitter, nasty and divisive

Vice President Joe Biden’s recent attack on the Tea Party, supporting the charge by Democrat Congressman Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania that Tea Party Republicans had “acted like terrorists” over the debt issue, was symbolic of an emphatically partisan White House, that is increasingly lashing out aggressively at anyone who questions its policies. As I noted at the time:

There is something deeply sad and disconcerting when the vice president decides to compare opposition legislators in Congress with terrorists simply because he disagrees with their views and principles. This is the kind of ugly, threatening rhetoric that has no place at the heart of the US presidency… Joe Biden has clearly overstepped the line with his comments, and brought the office of the vice president into disrepute. His actions today are symbolic of a White House that increasingly looks bitter, crass and petty in its behaviour as public opinion moves firmly against it. Biden’s outburst is a sign of the Left’s growing desperation 30 months into the Obama administration, and only further reinforces the image of decline and decay sinking in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

10. The liberal elites are turning on the president

One only has to read the pages of The New York Times, the flagship of America’s liberal elites, to see how some of the president’s most ardent left-wing supporters have begun to turn against him. Even Maureen Dowd despairs that her beloved president has been forced to make concessions to the Tea Party on the debt issue, quoting a Democrat Senator as saying: “we are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.” And as for uber liberal Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman, Obama has supposedly “surrendered” to the Right. There is every sign of a vicious civil war breaking out on the Left, as disillusionment mounts with Obama. This will make it increasingly difficult for the president to present a united front as he campaigns for re-election, and he will have to contend with heavy sniping from powerful liberal voices, most of whom gave him unequivocal backing in 2008.

A presidency in decline

The omens are certainly not looking good for President Obama, as he approaches the final 16 months of his presidency. Public opinion has turned firmly against him in recent weeks, as it did in the months ahead of the November 2010 midterms. On the economy, undoubtedly the dominant issue for voters in 2012, he is on distinctly shaky ground, with his Big Government agenda increasingly distrusted by the American electorate, scorned by the financial markets, and given a vote of no confidence by credit agency Standard and Poor’s. By almost any measure, this is a presidency in steep decline and in serious trouble. This is looking like another ‘annus horribilis’ for Barack Obama, the ‘hope and change’ president who, on current trajectory, seems destined for failure, with a legacy of declining prosperity at home and dispiriting American weakness abroad.

Tags: 2012 elections, Barack Obama, conservatism, Gallup, Joe Biden, Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Paul Krugman, Pew Research Center, rasmussen, RealClearPolitics, Standard and Poor's, Washingtin Post/ ABC News