(Article first published as “The Curious Choice of Bill Clinton” on Blogcritics.) Barack Obama desperately wants American voters to believe that he’s Bill Clinton. After all, Clinton is still among the most popular democratic icons in the country – much more popular than, for example, Obama himself. Clinton is the only democratic president since WWII to win a second term. Thanks to a big shove to the right by the 1994 electorate, which installed a Republican Congress, Clinton gets away with…
President Obama has made several appearances on comedy shows since his election to the nation’s highest office. So, last week, he tried a little stand up of his own. He claimed that during his Presidency federal spending has risen at the lowest rate since the Eisenhower Administration. The punch line is that Obama is, therefore, a fiscal conservative. Given our increasing national debt, the gag was not that funny, but the guy is, after all, a novice…
(Article first published as “Where’s a Presidential Apology When You Need One?” on Blogcritics.) President Obama was excoriated for last month’s apology to Afghan President Karzai after several copies of the Koran were inadvertently burned. This type of criticism is nothing knew. Obama has been disparaged for years for apologizing for America. His speech in Berlin during the 2008 presidential campaign earned him one of the earliest censures. It was followed by the much-maligned 2009 “apology tour” of several…
(Article first published as “Democrats to Obama: Stay Out of Town” on Blogcritics.) As the clock ticks down to zero hour for the Congressional Super Committee, President Obama is on a nine-day relationship-building junket to Asia. Leaving town when Congress is struggling with issues crucial to the American economy has become Obama’s stock-in-trade. Prior to the Asia tour, he spent weeks on the campaign trail, ducking the difficult job of developing a meaningful resolution of the debt crisis. He did, however,…
(Article first published as “Obama Roasted by Nuclear Option Fallout?” on Blogcritics.) With his poll numbers falling at least as fast as our economic outlook, a desperate Barack Obama exercised the nuclear option in his re-election bid. On September 19, Dan Pfeiffer, the President’s communications director, told the New York Times that the period of political compromise is “behind us”. This week, nine months into the current Congress and fourteen before the election, Obama went on a scorched earth…
(First published as “Why Obama’s Jobs Speech Will Be a Nonstarter” on Blogcritics.) President Obama will give yet another major speech this Thursday night. He’ll speak in broad platitudes and intone about the seriousness of our predicament. He will emphasize the necessity of working together. He will, of course, offer way too little in the way of specifics, but whatever it is will have a huge price tag. And his speech will come a cropper, die aborning, stumble out of…
