Please Excuse Barack
The dog ate his job growth.Eleven-year-old Tyler Sullivan "skipped school for the first time in his life" Friday, ABC News reports. But Tyler is no delinquent: "He's a good kid: he finishes his work after playing quarterback, his computer is well maintained, and his dog doesn't like paper."
Tyler's father, Ryan, took the youngster to work at the Golden Valley, Minn., Honeywell plant, where President Obama was giving a campaign speech and Sullivan père was introducing him. "Hi, Mr. President," Tyler said to Obama after the speech.
"Hi Tyler, you must be out of school then," the president replied. "Do you want me to write an excuse note? What's your teacher's name?"
"And I say, 'Mr. Ackerman,' " Tyler recalls. "And he writes, 'Please excuse Tyler. He was with me. Barack Obama, the president.' "
The same day, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released data for May. The nationwide unemployment rate stood at 8.2%. As we noted Friday, that's 2½ percentage points higher than the 5.7% Obama's economists had promised back in 2009 in making the case for the so-called stimulus. The Democrats who controlled Congress were persuaded, as were the Maine Ladies and Arlen Specter, and that was enough. The bill for the stimulus has been estimated at $1.2 trillion, including interest. To say the least, it does not seem to have been worth it.
Please excuse Barack, urged his supporters and operatives, offering one excuse after another. "I hate to ruin your weekend, but let's be honest: Mitt Romney now has a good chance of being the next President," wrote The New Yorker's John Cassidy. "Obama's policies helped prevent a Great Depression," he claimed. "If the do-nothing Republicans in Congress had passed the Administration's American Jobs Act"--that is, Stimulus Jr., which would have cost some $450 billion more, plus interest--"many more Americans would be working."
In short, Obama's economic policies are just too good for this lousy economy.
The night before the jobs report came out, Timothy Egan of the New York Times wrote that "the verdict is still out" on the president's economic record. "Because he got hit with the Bush hangover, his overall job numbers show a net loss of about 850,000, from January 2009 to the present," Egan writes. "But if you start a year into his presidency, Obama has added almost four million jobs."
The verdict is also still out on the 2012 Chicago Cubs. Sure, if you count the whole season, they have one of the worst records in the Major Leagues. But if you ignore their losses, they're an impressive 18-0.
In a news story by Jackie Calmes and Nicholas Kulish, the Times "reports" that Obama "is at the mercy of actors in Europe, China and Congress whose political interests often conflict with his own."
In his weekly radio address, recorded at the Honeywell plant, "Mr. Obama said Congress had not passed measures he had proposed to get jobless construction workers rebuilding roads, bridges and runways; to give small businesses a tax break for new hires; and to help states pay teachers, firefighters and police officers." Even Calmes and Kulish acknowledge that such carping "telegraphs a message of powerlessness that no leader likes to convey."
But what Obama is urging is more of the same policies that failed the first time around. If $800 billion in borrowed money failed to produce the promised decline in unemployment, why should anyone believe another $400 billion would do the trick now?
The New Republic's Noam Scheiber claims that in 2009 "the administration's top economists knew the amount of stimulus they were proposing was much too small to solve the unemployment problem within a few years." How much would it have taken? Two trillion dollars? It sounds like a joke, but that's exactly what Scheiber retrospectively proposes. Maybe the taxpayer got off easy after all.
The Chicago Tribune reports that Obama campaign operatives are attributing GOP parsimony to malice. "They need to get off their hands and stop rooting for failure," deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter said on ABC yesterday. Mustachioed political adviser David Axelrod said on CBS that Republicans "should put down their political hats and join us and help solve these problems."
About the only excuse no one seems to have thought of is the one from an io9.com headline: "How Do We Know Time Travelers Aren't Constantly Changing the Past?" That might even explain that literary agent's blurb.
The New Yorker's George Packer, meanwhile, claims Republicans are simply "nuts." The president himself warmed to this theme, saying on Friday: "I believe that If we're successful in this election, when we're successful in this election, that the [Republican] fever may break."
Perhaps that "if . . . when" was telling. Blogger Jeryl Bier notes that Linus committed a similar gaffe one Halloween. After realizing his mistake, the Peanuts character said: "I'm doomed. One little slip like that can cause the Great Pumpkin to pass you by." Perhaps not coincidentally, this year's election is less than a week after Halloween.
Associated Press reports that "Obama and his re-election advisers are waxing nostalgic" for John McCain:
To hear Obama tell it now, the McCain who ran against him in 2008 was an example of a principled Republican who knew how to reach across the aisle. The implication from Obama is that those qualities simply don't apply to Romney.
"John McCain believed in climate change," Obama told supporters at a fundraiser in Minneapolis Friday. "John believed in campaign finance reform. He believed in immigration reform. I mean, there were some areas where you saw some overlap. In this election, the Republican Party has moved in a fundamentally different direction."
As the McCain direction was down to defeat, you can imagine similar headlines from previous re-election years: "Bush Nostalgic for Dukakis." "Carter Nostalgic for Ford." "Johnson Nostalgic for Goldwater." "Hoover Nostalgic for Smith." "Taft Nostalgic for Bryan."
If Obama really thought he could persuade voters that Romney is "extreme," he'd be overjoyed, not nostalgic. The real reason for the nostalgia is that Romney is more combative than McCain and, because the beleaguered incumbent is now Obama rather than a Republican, he's better positioned to win than McCain was.
One final quote from the president's Honeywell speech: If Congress were to enact legislation making it easier to refinance a mortgage, he said, "maybe somebody will be replacing some thingamajig for their furnace." Obama is starting to sound as hopeless as Thingamabob Dole.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303918204577446450220105454.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinionTaranto has a way with words. Really drives home his point. Barack Obama drones in full on meltdown mode and the election isn't for 5 months.
